1 Property and Ascetics in Northern India

By 1800, both Vaishnava and Shaivite gosains were prominent merchants, bankers, and soldiers, closely connected to political power, and state formation.Footnote ²⁸ Armed ascetic bands were linked to a network of maths scattered throughout north India that operated both as religious establishments and branches of commercial and banking houses facilitating the transmission of money and goods.Footnote ²⁹ In Banaras, Company records attest to the strong presence of a wealthy religious group called Sunnassees (the Dasnami orders of Banaras and Mirzapur), bankers, and moneylenders involved in long-distance trading from Bengal to the Deccan.Footnote ³⁰ In 1811, when the Company assessed the house tax in the newly acquired pilgrimage centre of Banaras, it was estimated that there were about 50,000 houses in the city, a large proportion of which were maths and shrines belonging to various sampradayas.Footnote ³¹ Their presence was also conspicuous outside pilgrimage centres, for Company officials and surveyors (including Francis Buchanan) found an extraordinary proportion of revenue-free land in northern India gifted to various temples, and ascetic orders. While many gosains lived on the proceeds of rent-free land unattached to maths, the latter remained part of widespread networks, such as the localised Dasnami orders in Gorukhpur, who maintained close connections with their akharas in Ayodhya, Banaras and Bodh Gaya.Footnote ³²

In British India, after the East India Company ‘domesticated’ the ascetic warriors who had been the mainstay of many eighteenth century armies, maths increasingly favoured a sedentary life based on devotion.Footnote ³³ While the overall political and economic significance of ascetic sampradayas may have declined in British India, their prosperity continued unabated.Footnote ³⁴ Local court records attest to the continued presence of Dasnamis in trade and commerce in various towns.Footnote ³⁵ Furthermore, the growing popularity of pilgrimages and dana by the late nineteenth century added to the wealth of ascetic orders. For example, the Madhavi Gosains of Brindavan and Agra, a Vaishnava order, prospered considerably during British rule as lay disciples, and sewaks (especially rich bankers and elites from Lucknow) came in larger numbers to their temples as pilgrims and donors.Footnote ³⁶ In a period in which property and financial assets were their main sources of authority and power, gosain sampradayas diversified their financial portfolios by investing in money-lending and property.Footnote ³⁷ The assets of rich maths included land, moveables and cash proceeds of investments, and commercial enterprise. The power of gosains and maths was also periodically reinforced by gifts of land from local landholders seeking to build their symbolic capital and assert power. Although colonial civil and revenue courts outlawed such transactions, wajib-ul-arzs (record of rights) drawn up by zamindars (landholders) show that land was systematically gifted to gosains and their heirs well into the twentieth century.Footnote ³⁸

Mahants managed a large proportion of the wealth belonging to maths. According to Francis Buchanan, in the early nineteenth century, Dasnami mahants in Bihar controlled the dispersed wealth of the maths with the help of chelas appointed as managers. These efforts at management were not conflict-free. Buchanan pointed out that as a consequence of disputes, many chelas left the maths concerned to ‘set up convents of their own.’Footnote ³⁹ Disputes over wealth managed by mahants and their chelas began to move towards colonial courts in the colonial period after internal conflict resolution failed and the stock of Anglo-Hindu law rose. This was the case when quarrels arose between the Madhavi Gosains of Brindavan between 1830 and 1880 over the allocation of wealth. Within this gosain order, both the male and female descendents of the founder were allowed to inherit its property and access the bhandar (reserve, store or fund of wealth). Disputes were especially intense between gosains whose access to richer lay disciples meant that they had higher incomes than the rest of the family.Footnote ⁴⁰ By 1880, due to constant litigation, the Madhavi gosains felt the need to collate the contents of the bhandar and regulate its management under the auspices of a panchayat (arbitration committee) to prevent future disputes.Footnote ⁴¹ The panchayat's deliberations resulted in an agreement dated 16 March 1880 by which the gosains stated that no man or woman from their family had rights to adopt, or transfer land by sale, mortgage or gift. Furthermore, they decided to regulate the rights of individual gosains to the bhandar with the help of a bhandari (manager).Footnote ⁴² The best efforts of the bhandari notwithstanding, the Madhavi gosains filed a case against him in the courts in 1885.Footnote ⁴³ Likewise, in 1907, the twelve sub-divisions of the Gorakhnathi jogis took their bhandari to court after internal conflict resolution failed, accusing him of appropriating shops and houses owned collectively by them in Haridwar.Footnote ⁴⁴ The high volume of court cases filed by ascetic orders by the twentieth century over the misappropriation and theft of funds bears testimony as much to their wealth as to the growing popularity of the colonial judicial system.

To what extent such property belonged to the mahants as chiefs of maths was a moot point, shrouded in ambiguity, debated endlessly by the courts. Agreements signed by specific orders asserted their joint claims over sampradayik property that was theoretically inalienable.Footnote ⁴⁵ Between 1813 and 1814, Francis Buchanan, while on tour in the Gorakhpur and Patna districts, pointed out that the numerous maths belonging to localised ascetic orders were often at the absolute disposal of mahants ‘to do with as they pleased’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Trust deeds, agreements and wills all indicate that mahants mortgaged, bought and sold moveable and immoveable property, asserting absolute and personal rights of ownership in their capacity as landholders, moneylenders, and holy men. Such rights were often questioned by their chelas. After 1867, disputes over large maths and revenue-free land belonging to smaller gosain orders occurred in a legal context in which the Charitable and Religious Endowments Acts treated ascetic properties as private religious endowments. Few ascetic orders designated themselves as public charitable trusts before the twentieth century, in deed or in spirit, until they realized that such moves could aid their cause in battles with their mahants over the ‘immoral’ use of funds.Footnote ⁴⁷Maths that remained private endowments often represented themselves as public charities of a religious nature, such as the Athith Dasnamis of the Nasirpur math in Ghazipur, who filed a case in 1929 against Mahant Mahadeo Bharti for using the charitable endowment as personal property.Footnote ⁴⁸ Mahadeo Bharti's defence was that he was entitled to utilize the math and its property as he chose, for after his guru's death he had inherited the property as his chela, heir and ‘lawful successor’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Ultimately, the judges of the High Court in Allahabad ruled against the mahant on the grounds that although the revenue-free math was not legally a public charitable endowment, or trust, it was one in spirit, making the mahants owners of property with extremely limited rights.Footnote ⁵⁰ It is no coincidence that such judgements occurred against the broader backdrop of a public outcry by social reform organizations over the misuse of the wealth of religious orders.

On the whole, however, mahants largely claimed absolute rights over the wealth of ascetic orders in their capacity as occupants of the gaddi (seat) of the math concerned. The wills of mahants are especially revelatory, not merely because they openly stated that math property was theirs to dispose of, but because they made personal gifts and bequests blurring the legal distinctions between private and public property. The bequests additionally attested to the existence of attachments straddling both sacred and secular worlds. In 1895, for example, Saraswati Gir, the Dasnami mahant of the Surajkund math in Banaras asserted that as ‘executant and the principal disciple’ of Gosain Gurbuksh Gir he was ‘by right of succession in exclusive possession and enjoyment of the moveable and immoveable properties left by the deceased guru’.Footnote ⁵¹ Saraswati Gir's will gives us a glimpse of the attachments and responsibilities within the ascetic world that remained unmentioned in official genealogies—those pertaining to women in various capacities. Thus, he left his zamindari, buildings, cash and ornaments to his chosen successor and chief disciple, Narain Gir, with one exception: the wealth inherited by one Mussumat Sitla Gir who, as the companion of his guru, had raised Saraswati Gir.Footnote ⁵² After his death, he gave Sitla Gir a life interest in his personal investments and property, the zamindari estates bought in her name and the goods belonging to the math.Footnote ⁵³ Saraswati Gir announced the significant position of Sitla Gir in his life, given that ‘she is the place of my mother and connected with me and the gaddi of my guruji, and I always attended upon and obeyed her’.Footnote ⁵⁴ To further protect her, he made the following statement:

Saraswati Gir was not uncommon in outlining his absolute rights over his property, and in making personal bequests.Footnote ⁵⁶Mahants making oral and written wills as late as 1940 outlined their children as successors to their gaddis and left math property to their female companions, giving them rights to manage math affairs.Footnote ⁵⁷ The provisions in such wills opened the door to a complex social universe sculpted by manifold ties of belonging.

2 Women, Children and the ‘Making’ of Spiritual Genealogies

The men and women of ascetic orders were of diverse origins. In 1830, the Political Agent of Bharatpur noted that the Vaishnava sampradaya of Nimawats admitted ‘disciples of every class and description, Brahmins, Rajpoots, Chemars, barbers, etc who by becoming byragee, may all rise to the office of gooro or mahant, and being tied down by few rules or observances. . .are designated avadhuta, or the liberated’.Footnote ⁵⁸ In court records, ascetics of all sampradayas referred to themselves as bairagis, gosains, jogis, sanyasis or sadhus, pointing to the numerous identities subsumed within.Footnote ⁵⁹ While many children were ‘given’ by their parents to gurus to be ordained, late nineteenth century police reports of the United Provinces indicate that kidnapped minors were often sold to ascetic orders.Footnote ⁶⁰ Some gosains like Jagatanand Brahmachari revealed in 1936 that they ran away from home to escape punitive parents, and became ascetics thereafter.Footnote ⁶¹ Yet other members of sampradayas were the natural children of mahants or their chelas.

Asceticism, therefore, accommodated a wide variety of typologies of belonging. When members of gosain orders referred to themselves as descendants of a ‘common ancestor’ they often used the legal language of family and kinship in ways that embraced different personal and sexual relationships and bonds. Not all ascetic orders were antithetical to domestic life.Footnote ⁶² Around 1812, Francis Buchanan observed that the office of guru or mahant amongst the Vaishnava Radhavallabhis of Patna and Shahabad was often hereditary, passing to the male descendants of the family or order concerned.Footnote ⁶³ The evidence given by chelas in later court cases also suggests that in many Vaishnava orders it was optional for the mahants to be bachelors or ‘enter the matrimonial state’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Specific sampradayas, such as the Vallabhacharyas, openly abjured celibacy and all their gosains were men of business and family.Footnote ⁶⁵ The Gosain Maharajs, controlling the principal temples of the sampradaya openly took wives from among the Bhats, a Brahmin sub-caste, to whom they also married their daughters.Footnote ⁶⁶ Although most Dasnami orders defined themselves as nihang (celibate), the sexual histories of their members likewise varied.Footnote ⁶⁷ Some members formally joined these renunciatory orders temporarily or late in life. Initiates joining the Dasnami orders in Mirzapur in 1890 were often men of about forty or fifty years old, who had abandoned their wives and families. Footnote ⁶⁸ Even within these orders, celibacy was a personal choice, often observed in the breach. Some of the most fraught property feuds occurred between women, children and the male members of Dasnami orders.

Gosain women, as they were often called, continued to play a major role in ascetic orders in the late nineteenth century and beyond, although few, if any, were formally ordained as chelas. According to the census figures of 1891, there were approximately 55,347 male and 47,973 female gosains (those attached to Vaishnava orders were often also called bairagins and vaishnavis) in the United Provinces. Their numbers were especially large in pilgrimage centres like Banaras and Mathura.Footnote ⁶⁹ While subsequent censuses did not give such details, property disputes suggest that women made their presence felt in sampradayas throughout the early twentieth century.Footnote ⁷⁰ Police reports from 1893 suggest that many women who were categorized as mistresses, concubines and paramours in legal records included widows, women abandoned by husbands or lovers, young women cast outside the social pale for various reasons and tawaifs (courtesans), kidnapped from the surrounding districts and sold in markets.Footnote ⁷¹ The inmates of maths also had liaisons with local women who crossed lines of caste, community and religion.Footnote ⁷²

Women lived with ascetics as companions, managers of households and as servants. In some Vaishnava orders, they were allowed to worship the idols within temples, although they could not participate in the rites of worship.Footnote ⁷³ Their inheritance rights varied, depending on the power equations within localised ascetic orders. Amongst the Vaishnava Radhavallabhis, Vallabhacharyas, and Madhavi Gosains, for example, women could claim property and temples in their capacity as wives and daughters, while the sons of gosain daughters could become mahants.Footnote ⁷⁴ While many nihang Dasnami orders did not officially acknowledge their families in spiritual genealogies, they were often agreeable to wives and companions of influential mahants and chelas managing math property, mentoring chelas and future mahants.Footnote ⁷⁵ However, most of these women remained vulnerable to patriarchal strains within sampradayas, facing an uncertain future once their patrons or lovers died.

The children of companions were referred to as gosains in court records. Their status within the sampradayas varied. Amongst some Dasnami Athiths, their male offspring (although not formally part of the localised ascetic order) served it in various capacities.Footnote ⁷⁶ In other cases, as jurists discovered, the natural sons of renouncers were initiated as chelas, and became mahants. In 1915, the will of the deceased bairagi, Mahant Ram Ratan Das of the Bharatji Mandir in Rishikesh, acknowledged his companion, the widow of one of his relatives, as his wife, and her son, Paras Ram, as his heir.Footnote ⁷⁷ In Dasnami orders, sons of ascetics also became mahants, but had to fight harder in courts to assert their claims, given the legal emphasis laid upon celibacy. The rights of girl children varied. As noted above, while they had recognised rights to inheritance within some orders, other little girls grew up within maths, only to define themselves through the relationships they had with its male members. As the position of gosain children could be fragile, we often find that women fought bitter legal battles over property to establish their rights and those of their male offspring within the sampradaya concerned. Few cases fore-grounded the rights of gosain daughters in the colonial period.

A court case of 1862, dealing with the rights of succession to a Vaishnava bairagi temple and land in Moradabad, bears testimony to women's assertive presence in ascetic orders tolerant of sexuality.Footnote ⁷⁸ The bairagi panchayat and local elites had removed Mahant Salig Ram the successor of one Mahant Janki Das from the gaddi on the grounds of ‘impropriety’. Gopal Das, who was also widely believed to be the son of the deceased mahant, replaced Salig Ram. As the new mahant was a minor, he was placed under the guardianship of his mother, Raman Bai, the ‘widow’ of Janki Das and Mussumat Bibia, his aunt.Footnote ⁷⁹ The witness depositions demonstrate that such bairagi panchayats did not question the fact that chelas were the sons of mahants or for that matter, other chelas. Tulsi Das, a bairagi and a member of the panchayat that deliberated on Gopal Das' candidature, stated that Janki Das, a Brahmin, had lived with Raman Bai, a woman of unknown caste/community, for many years.Footnote ⁸⁰ While it was known that Gopal Das was her son, some witnesses hinted that his parentage was somewhat unclear, given that Raman Bai's first husband, who was also a bairagi, was still alive.Footnote ⁸¹ Despite these ambiguities, Gopal Das was accepted as Janki Das' son and his mother was recognised as the manager of the math in Moradabad.Footnote ⁸² In a petition of 1874 submitted to the civil court in Moradabad, Raman Bai asserted that her position as the ‘lawful wife’ of Janki Das entitled her to become the guardian of the minor mahant.Footnote ⁸³ Significantly, Raman Bai did not claim rights to property on the basis of the Hindu law of inheritance, but of bairagi custom. She was successfully able to prove that her position had been legitimised by a panchayat consisting of members of the order, other mahants and notables of Moradabad.Footnote ⁸⁴

Evidence suggests that women were equally important in maths belonging to self-defined nihang orders acknowledging obligations and responsibilities arising out of personal relationships. One such case, mentioned throughout this paper, is that of the Surajkund Math in Banaras belonging to the Giri sub-division of the Digambari Dasnami sampradaya. As noted in the previous section, women played an important role in the life of Mahant Saraswati Gir, and his successor and nephew, Mahant Narain Gir. Saraswati Gir died at the age of 52 in 1893, and in his will designated one Sitla Gir, his adoptive mother, as the guardian of the minor Mahant Narain Gir.Footnote ⁸⁵ Sitla Gir, a gosain daughter, grew up in the math. In a deed of gift drafted by Sitla Gir at the age of 70 in 1893, she spoke of herself as the daughter of one Dhyan Gir (a gosain of Suraj Kund math), and the companion of Saraswati Gir's guru, Gurbaksh Gir Gosain ‘in whose life-time I was treated with respect and consideration’.Footnote ⁸⁶ Sitla Gir mentioned Saraswati Gir with affection, for she had been a maternal figure for him for most of his life. She reminisced with pride over the role she had played in the lives of both mahants, contending that ‘since I took especial interest in domestic affairs and took proper care of household property, therefore these men treated me with respect and dignity and had made me mistress of the household’.Footnote ⁸⁷ It appears that she was in charge of many matters at the math while the mahants were alive.

Life changed for Sitla Gir after the death of Saraswati Gir. She recounted how she fought court cases directed against her and Narain Gir by one Jagannath Gir, Saraswati Gir's estranged chief disciple (khas chela), who Sitla Gir angrily described as beginning ‘a series of strifes’ in 1899 to gain the property of the deceased. Jagannath Gir alleged that Saraswati Gir's will was a forgery, and that he, not Narain Gir was the legitimate heir of the deceased mahant.Footnote ⁸⁸ She bitterly recounted how ‘a large number of avaricious people sided with him in his endeavour to acquire the property’, and few came forward to help her.Footnote ⁸⁹ Beleaguered and alone, her main source of support was Maharaj Kashi Gir, the chief mahant of the sampradaya of the Digambari Dasnamis in Banaras to which the Surajkund math belonged. Mahant Kashi Gir fought court cases on Sitla Gir's behalf against Jagannath Gir, aided Narain Gir with Saraswati Gir's funeral and conducted the necessary ceremonies of installation that legitimised the position of the minor mahant.Footnote ⁹⁰ Sitla Gir managed the math on behalf of Narain Gir from 1899 until he was 11 years old, when she was subsequently forced to retire by an uncomfortable Court of Wards in return for an annual maintenance.Footnote ⁹¹

That many women remained far more vulnerable than Raman Bai and Sitla Gir is evident from the case of Ram Dulari Gir, the companion of Narain Gir. Evidence suggests that Ram Dulari came from the liminal world in which young girls and women were kidnapped and forced into prostitution.Footnote ⁹² According to the evidence of one Manohar Lal of Banaras City, Ram Dulari was a tawaif working for one Dhankuari, a procurer, who bought and sold girls to brothels in Banaras. All that the witness depositions reveal about Mussumat Dulari is that Dhankuari may have discovered her in Kanpur city in the United Provinces and persuaded her to return with her to Banaras. We can only guess at Ram Dulari's plight, or what prompted her to leave Kanpur, before she began to live with and work for Dhankuari. At some point, Dhankuari married her to one Sita Ram, who removed Dhankuari and Ram Dulari from his residence when he discovered his wife's antecedents.Footnote ⁹³ It is clear that Ram Dulari and Narain Gir crossed paths soon afterwards. Witness depositions suggest that one Cheddi Barhar, who supplied the mahant with ‘prostitutes and unfortunates’, introduced Ram Dulari to Mahant Narain Gir.Footnote ⁹⁴ Thereafter she became Narain Gir's companion and gave birth to Biswanath Gir.

Ram Dulari's position declined soon thereafter, for Narain Gir died of cholera at the age of 20 in 1910 and was survived by his companion and year-old son Biswanath Gir. Ram Dulari Gir, as she now preferred to call herself, together with Dhankuari and some of the servants of the Court of Wards, made an unsuccessful bid to put Biswanath Gir on the gaddi. In 1913, after the Dasnamis successfully marginalized her claims, she disappears from the records, together with Biswanath Gir. We briefly hear Ram Dulari Gir's voice in her petition to the Collector of Banaras and the Court of Wards in her capacity as the widow of Mahant Narain Gir. Therein, she beseeched the state to subsidise the annual rathyatra (chariot) festival at the temple attached to the math, which she had been financing hereto, and to feed the Brahmins and ascetics who gathered there.Footnote ⁹⁵ Unlike the other women mentioned above, Ram Dulari did not fight her case vociferously and disappeared into the shadows, a victim of sexual exploitation and power struggles.

Colonial courts were hardening their stance towards gosain women by the twentieth century, so that when women asserted a degree of authority within ascetic orders it was only with the consent of their members. When the co-operation of the localised sampradayas concerned changed to hostility, they used the courts to question the power of gosain women to choose chelas and mahants and manage religious property. Here, it is pertinent to note that by 1930, court judgments largely ruled in favour of gosain women when they proved that their male companions led ‘secular’ lifestyles and had few ties to ascetic orders.Footnote ⁹⁶ Clearly, the rights of women and children in court increasingly depended on whether the men to whom they were attached were legally defined as ascetics. The approach of courts to the legal definition of a mode of life embracing asceticism was also of significance to litigants. This legal project, articulated through court cases relating to inheritance (demonstrated in the next section), remained fraught with tensions, and was one of the most important mechanisms through which ascetic genealogies were rewritten.

3 Defining Ascetics and Asceticism: The Sacred, the Secular and the Domestic in Anglo-Hindu Law

In British territories, the varied financial portfolios and the wealth of the large maths and orders brought them to the notice of revenue officials. Not surprisingly, the British sought to comprehend the rights of ownership and laws of inheritance governing ascetic sampradayas, given that the colonial ‘rule of property’ recognised as contractual landlords and revenue payers those possessing titles of absolute ownership to land, whether by inheritance, gift or purchase.Footnote ⁹⁷ More generally, Anglo-Hindu law remained prey to contradictions when regulating on inheritance as it sought to subsume all local hierarchies and differences within a discourse aimed at a ‘universal legal subject’, while simultaneously accommodating various normative codes, and customs.Footnote ⁹⁸ This was never more so than with asceticism. Colonial courts became major public arenas within which battles over sampradayik property and the position of the mahant exposed deep cleavages between chelas, mahants and women. In all these cases the story is one of mistrust and claims and counterclaims of belonging and marginality.

Company officials made equations between law, scripture and social and religious identities from the eighteenth century. By the 1830s, officials assumed that personal laws enshrined in scriptural texts governed each religious community.Footnote ⁹⁹ British intervention to codify, texualise and transform tradition, together with landholding elites and religious intermediaries in concordance with conservative and patriarchal scriptural models of religious ‘tradition’ and family (viz., Hindu and Muslim law) through the nineteenth century, have been well documented by historians.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Highlighted here is the singular legal importance attached to vamshavalis and wajib-ul-azs as indelible records of obligation and attachment to property. By the 1830s in northern India, the mahalwari settlement was premised on the idea that the village community was ‘an organised patriarchal society and an assemblage of co-proprietors of antique origin on the basis of descent’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ In revenue papers and the records of shares, land tenures were legally standardized according to rigid patrilineal laws of descent born out of the official need for definition and classification of property rights and the fixing of boundaries. Simultaneously, Anglo-Hindu law, basing itself on the Mitakshara (a text relating to property and inheritance), upheld the joint agnatic landholding family lauded in scriptural texts. This ideal type of kin group and its development cycles and modes of devolution were viewed as untouched by time and space.Footnote ¹⁰² All other forms of family were perceived as deviations from this ‘norm’.

Anglo-Hindu models of normative kinship units held that all families held land jointly unless proved to the contrary.Footnote ¹⁰³ As already mentioned, legal discourses re-read inheritance law and vamshavalis in ways that sharpened the boundaries between insiders and outsiders.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ So, Anglo-Hindu law recognised the right to shares in land for all legitimate male heirs in the line of direct descent from a common ancestor according to their position in the genealogy.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The hierarchy of courts gave the right to deviate from this model to members who had legally separated themselves from the joint kinship group and lineages, which could prove the existence of unique family customs.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Increasingly, as Rachel Sturman has shown, the tendency of the courts was to devalue and de-legitimise a number of personal sentiments alongside their attendant symbolic debts, values and responsibilities previously expressed through gifts and other bequests. Consequently, the attachments between persons and properties were slowly transformed so that a number of family members became excluded from inheriting property.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Furthermore, Anglo-Hindu law created tensions between the rights of individuals and the corporate units to which they claimed they belonged.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Thus, if courts emphasised the collective rights of corporate groups, individual members of kin groups were encouraged to separate or sell property—a tendency exacerbating tensions within age, gender, and economic hierarchies and encouraging the partition of shares.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

By far the greatest losers in court battles were women, to whom Anglo-Hindu law conceded few rights if the estate was designated a joint estate. Women as wives, widows and daughters excluded male relatives from succession with many caveats only if male co-sharers separated land in joint ancestral property before their death.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Additionally, colonial law differentiated between those of legitimate and illegitimate birth creating divisions that may not have been that sharp in pre-British north India. In most cases, Anglo-Hindu law ignored customary practices, and the companions and children of dominant castes were rendered legally kinless on the grounds that upper caste norms did not recognise ‘irregular’ unions.Footnote ¹¹¹ By the twentieth century, courts made an exception in favour of women and children of those groups defined as shudras, on the basis that they had rights to be included in genealogies and inheritance rights according to the customary practices of these communities.Footnote ¹¹² Not that the problems created by such legal sleights of hand went unrecognised. In 1934, in an extremely rare moment of candour, Chief Justice Sulaiman of the High Court in Allahabad confessed that given the various varieties of marriages and of sons mentioned in scriptural texts dealing with various castes—the ‘adopted’ son, the ‘purchased’ son, the ‘self given’ son, the son ‘accepted while still in the womb’ and ‘received with the bride’, and the ‘deserted’ son—it was difficult to devise rules on legitimacy.Footnote ¹¹³ In most cases, however, to avoid these ‘complexities’, Anglo-Hindu law defined legitimacy very strictly. This had serious implications for gosain women and their children.

Ascetic orders were especially troubling for jurists for they did not fit into the normative framework provided by the conservative, patriarchal and upper caste codified law. Members of sampradayas were the main informants of the special religious usages that legitimised their lack of conformity with the Anglo-Hindu ideal of the family and inheritance. The moot points for all courts were the legal definition of an ascetic and a chela. The situation was complex, as chelas included relatives, adopted and natural sons.Footnote ¹¹⁴ The legal fixity given to the categories ascetic, guru and chela by the beginning of the twentieth century was undertaken in tandem with powerful members of sampradayas eager to simplify genealogies by stripping inheritance rights of their complexity. From the 1830s, court decisions became precedents on the basis of which jurists came to conclusions about the ‘rules’ of ownership and succession to property within ascetic orders. These precedents glossed over the evidence highlighting the multifarious choices exercised by mahants and their chelas in matters of devolution and sexuality. They also ignored the prominent place of gosain women within ascetic orders.

As far as colonial courts were concerned, with some exceptions, ascetic genealogies were constituted through a direct line of descent created between renouncer gurus and their chelas. In this regard, they drew upon the idea of sampradaya celebrated in hagiographies in which spiritual kinship was represented as dependent upon a shared, if mythic, past lined with charismatic preceptors and their disciples. Such notions were fast gaining hold after encountering the warrior ascetics studied by William Pinch.Footnote ¹¹⁵ By 1849 the sadar diwani adalats (civil courts) were articulating the new orthodoxy: that amongst ascetics, ‘a goroo or spiritual teacher, who being restricted from marriage, can have no legitimate children, must be succeeded in his rights and possession by his khas chela, or chief disciple’.Footnote ¹¹⁶ By 1906, the Allahabad High Court scrupulously enforced the sharp distinction made by Anglo-Hindu law between ascetics, and ascetics who had become householders (grihastha gosains) after adopting a lifestyle of luxury and worldliness.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Jurists ruled that within nihang orders, grihastha gosains could not succeed to property or become chelas. This category also included the children of ascetics. Over the years, Anglo-Hindu law made a few exceptions to this rule in cases in which sampradayas could prove that sustained local customs allowed marriages (as with Vaishnava orders such as the Vallabhacharyas). In all other cases, although acts of incorporation within the ascetic world drew upon a variety of variables, personal law on property simplified their vamshavalis. For courts these ties were legitimised by the drama of ritual and ceremonies.

Implicitly, then, through this process Anglo-Hindu law stated that asceticism had no connections with kinship and sexuality. Thus by 1927, when adjudicating on whether math property could be sold by the ‘secular’ kin of a nihang Dasmani order in Haridwar, the judges of the High Court of Allahabad reiterated ‘that once a person is taken into this order, a number of ceremonies are performed which indicate that his connection with the natural family and the secular life is altogether severed and he belongs altogether to this order’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Anglo-Hindu law gave rituals and rites of consecration great importance in marking the transition from householder to renouncer. In 1939, the High Court re-asserted the increasingly commonplace declaration that for a person to announce that he had become a sanyasi (religious mendicant), or wear clothes ordinarily worn by sanyasis, would not suffice to qualify him as an ascetic, as would the ritual required to ‘make’ an ascetic of a person.Footnote ¹¹⁹ In this case, the judges pointed out that aspiring novices wishing to enter the Puri subdivision of the Dasnami order had to pass through a period of probation, running into months, if not years. For jurists, from the moment of the biraja homa, when the mul mantras were recited to the chela, the aspirant was irrevocably attached to the sect and completely severed from his family.Footnote ¹²⁰ Courts assumed that all orders had similar rites of passage, or initiation.

In this regard, Anglo-Hindu law emphasised that the position of a chela bore no resemblance to that of an adopted son. In 1939 a Privy Council judge, M. R. Jayakar, restated that to be an adopted son, ‘it is imperative that one of his genitive parents must give, and one of his adoptive parents must receive him in adoption’.Footnote ¹²¹ Jayakar emphasised that rituals formally completing the transaction of adoption obligated the new son to perform rites of passage, in particular the shraddh (death) ceremonies for parents and relatives.Footnote ¹²² He argued that these obligations of kinship was what separated chelas from sons, and adopted sons, for the purpose of the chela's existence was:

The insistence placed by High Courts and the Privy Council on standardising the position and meaning of the terms ‘ascetic’, ‘guru’ and ‘chela’ suggests these categories continually cropped up during property feuds.

Additionally, courts were interested in clarifying the rituals necessary for identifying which chela was chosen as khas chela, and successor to the gaddi of a deceased mahant. The key issue for many jurists was twofold: whether the chela had been chosen by his guru; and the legal evidence of installation ceremonies. By 1876 sadar diwani adalats reiterated another legal orthodoxy that, amongst ascetics, the right of succession to their mahant depended ‘on the nomination of one of his disciples by the deceased guru in the presence of mahants of the neighbourhood.’Footnote ¹²⁴ The significance placed by courts on evidence of succession (they excluded oral wills made by the mahants) alongside rituals of consecration resulted in the legal marginalisation of alternative modes of election within localised orders.Footnote ¹²⁵ By the early twentieth century sampradayas aware of the vagaries of colonial law were responsive to its efforts to standardise the process of succession, often evolving rules and rituals for elections bound to find favour with the courts. However, the confrontation between factions within ascetic orders threw up unforeseen problems, with each party seeking to prove the authenticity of its evidence. This occurred with the dispute that began in 1905 between two chelas, both of whom claimed to be the successor of Jandu Nath, the deceased mahant of a Dasnami temple and math of Akhara Baba Sarwan Nath in Hardwar.Footnote ¹²⁶ Confronted by a mountain of conflicting evidence, the Privy Council overthrew the decisions of the lower courts in 1915 by supporting Puran Nath's claim to the mahant's position, on the grounds that Jandu Nath's will together with the rituals of consecration proved Puran Nath's position as khas chela.Footnote ¹²⁷ Such decisions remained unpredictable and inconsistent, often exacerbating conflicts within sampradayas.

Anglo-Hindu law simplified relationships within ascetic orders in a context in which revenue documents and colonial courts were intent upon fixing the rules of devolution and genealogies. Vamshavalis by their very nature were inherently unstable, given that they historically reflected the contested notions of power, belonging, and rejection through which ‘official’ discourses on kinship were produced.Footnote ¹²⁸ That much is clear from a testimony of 1894, when Bharon Lal Jaga in Agra, a jaga (bard) of the Rajput Jadon thakurs of Karauli, acknowledged that he recorded genealogies according to the instructions of the head of the family, adding and deleting individuals from the record in return for gifts from his patron.Footnote ¹²⁹ By the late nineteenth century, the legal reliability of vamshavalis generated by bards, the records of family priests in Haridwar, Banaras and Allahabad and those committed to memory were questioned.Footnote ¹³⁰ While such vamshavalis were not free from bias, the privileging by the hierarchy of courts of genealogies validated by colonial land records was equally problematic. Elites with easy access to the legal system, including powerful chelas and mahants well versed in the arts of litigation, often fabricated genealogies with the help of revenue officials and faction-ridden gosain orders. Courts appeared aware of the weaknesses of legally ‘reliable’ genealogies. In 1936, the Judges of the Allahabad High Court echoed Bharon Lal Jaga's statement when they wryly observed that wajib-ul arzs and vamshavalis recorded ‘rather what the members of family wished to be the rule of inheritance, than what was an already established custom.’Footnote ¹³¹ Yet, jurists depended in the main on vamshavalis legitimised by the state.

In conclusion, ascetic families created dilemmas for Anglo-Hindu law on succession that were partially resolved through the reification of spiritual genealogies and the differentiation of genuine ascetics from householders. In an effort to accommodate kinship and desire within sampradayas, the legal category of the grihastha gosain was used for ascetics who had allegedly returned to secular modes of life. However, these terms did not have the reflexivity to accommodate the fluidity and shifts in ascetic masculinities and the ties of belonging within ascetic orders. Some jurists were responsive to the personal attachments shaping sampradayas. Thus, J. P. Sarvadhikari suggested in 1922 that asceticism did not imply the sundering of all biological ties, and that becoming a bairagi did not deprive an individual of proprietary rights in his family. Given that the bairagi had not cut himself off from worldly interests, Sarvadhikari contended that, upon his demise, ‘succession of this property devolves on his natural heirs and the rules determining the right of succession to the property of ascetics and hermit will not apply’.Footnote ¹³² Despite his understanding of this caveat, Sarvadhikari, like the colonial courts, eluded the contentious question of succession to property and position by natural sons and companions within nihang orders. Ascetic orders deliberately played with such legal ambiguities while redefining their boundaries.

4 Restructuring Spiritual Genealogies: Gurus, Chelas and Children

Through Anglo-Hindu law, gosain sampradayas variously utilized the legal discomfort exhibited towards ascetic sexuality to marginalise members who had female companions, as well as gosain women and their children. Given the predictable decisions of the courts on nihang orders, cases were filed by chelas seeking to prove that rival chelas or their gurus were amongst those who broke rigid rules of celibacy. Gosain women and their children were as enthusiastic as litigants as their male counterparts throughout the period of study and appear on the archival screen repeatedly questioning the privileging of celibacy and claiming rights within sampradayas. Unsurprisingly, spiritual and sexual ties of belonging competed time and again in property feuds within maths and individual families, a trend that peaked by the early twentieth century. Once chelas were rid of women and children, they often turned on one another in bitter factional feuds rooted in power and authority as the case of the Surajkund math held by Dasnamis in Banaras demonstrates.

One of the main protagonists of the narrative, Mahant Narain Gir, whose name we have already encountered in this paper, took charge of the math once he came of age. Unfortunately, he died soon thereafter as a ward of the state when he was 20. At this point, the math came under the supervision of the Court of Wards.Footnote ¹³³ The case is significant. At the time of Narain Gir's demise in 1910, the Surajkund math owned moveable and immoveable property worth three lakh rupees in the districts of Banaras and Mirzapur.Footnote ¹³⁴ Narain Gir was a nihang ascetic of the Digambar order of Dasnamis.Footnote ¹³⁵ He inherited his position and the math property from his guru and maternal uncle Saraswati Gir. Narain Gir had been adopted in 1893, when he was about three years old, after Saraswati Gir repudiated his khas chela, Jagannath Gir. In his will, Saraswati Gir accorded Narain Gir the right to appoint his own successor, as long as he followed ‘the religious usage of the math-dhari gosains to perpetuate the names of the elders and to manage and protect the property’[author's emphasis].Footnote ¹³⁶ Before Narain Gir was able to exercise this right, he died. After his demise, one of the four claimants to the gaddi was his son Biswanath Gir. At this point his widow, Ram Dulari Gir, another protagonist who reappears in the narrative, insisted that the estate had been left to Narain Gir's son. The members of the Dasnami order contested this claim on the grounds that the math belonged to nihang Dasnami Sanyasis amongst whom marriage was forbidden.Footnote ¹³⁷ During the conflict over Narain Gir's property, various members of the Dasnami order vilified the character of Ram Dulari, denouncing Biswanath Gir as her bastard or illegitimate son, making it legally impossible for the latter to become part of the order.

Witnesses gave conflicting perspectives on the lineage of Biswanath Gir. The testimony of one Manoharlal who, though not a part of the math but was involved in its affairs, asserted that Biswanath was the son of one Narain Misra, with whom Ram Dulari Gir had been involved before she met Narain Gir. He alleged that after Narain Gir's death, Dhaunkuari, Ram Dulari's mentor and Dhamkuari's lover, Ram Ugrah Singh, conspired with the servants of the Court of Wards to stake claims to the math property. According to such witness statements, this was achieved by luring Ram Dulari into proclaiming that Biswanath was Narain Gir's son.Footnote ¹³⁸ However, an examination of other evidence and witness statements suggests otherwise. Biswanath Gir's father was named in the municipal birth register as Narain Mishra and in the vaccination register as Narain Brahmin, possibly pseudonyms for Narain Gir. Three additional depositions, including a petition of Trinunanand Gir, one of the rival claimants to the gaddi, all admitted that Biswanath Gir indeed was Narain Gir's ‘bastard’ son.Footnote ¹³⁹ Furthermore, it seems that Narain Gir acknowledged Biswanath Gir, for he met the District Officer of Banaras shortly before his demise to discuss his son's financial prospects, and spoke of making provisions for Biswanath from the estate revenues.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Finally, when Narain Gir first fell ill in 1910, he decided to adopt Biswanath Gir as a chela in case his illness proved fatal. Although he was in great pain, Narain Gir sat on his gaddi, and calling a barber, performed the tonsure ceremony on Biswanath. Swararth Gir, his uncle, Chedi Barhar, the procurer who had brought Ram Dulari to the math and other servants of Narain Gir witnessed the hurried ceremony. Subsequently, all these witnesses, except Swararth Gir denied attending the ritual. The District Officer averred that no further public rites and rituals were to take place thereafter, possibly due to Narain Gir's deteriorating health and subsequent death.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Narain Gir had not entered Biswanath's name in the vamshavali of the math for the same reasons. These omissions weakened Ram Dulari's efforts to establish Biswanath Gir's status as a chela in the eyes of the courts. Ultimately, jurists and officials denied Ram Dulari's claims on behalf of her son on the grounds that Narain Gir was not a grihastha gosain and Biswanath Gir was not his chela.Footnote ¹⁴²

Once the chelas ousted the family of Narain Gir, the two main factions of the Giri and Puri subdivisions of the Dasnami sampradaya turned upon each other. Each faction supported candidates claiming to be the khas chela of Narain Gir, or of Saraswati Gir.Footnote ¹⁴³ One of the important claimants was Jagannath Gir, the former khas chela of Saraswati Gir, who had been repudiated by his guru after both parties fell out over a property dispute. In Saraswati Gir's new will dated 6 December 1895 he declared that ‘I had only one disciple named Jagannath. But as he become a man of loose character he was turned out and his connection with me and my gaddi was severed’.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ After Sitla Gir, Saraswati Gir's adoptive mother took over the management of the estate, Jagannath Gir unsuccessfully challenged Saraswati Gir's will in Banaras' civil courts. His efforts to dislodge Narain Gir ended when the High Court in Allahabad upheld Sitla Gir's claims against the former khas chela in 1899.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ In 1910, Jagannath Gir returned to petition the Court of Wards to plead his position as the original khas chela of Saraswati Gir and guru bhai (spiritual brother), of Narain Gir. In order to sway the tide in his favour he banked on legal opinions such as those signed by various lawyers in Banaras and Allahabad averring that:

Jagannath Gir's pleas cut like a swathe through the distinctions that Anglo-Hindu law was seeking to make between chelas and sons. Unfortunately, the force of his claims was considerably weakened when it was discovered that he had made a pact with Gosain Ramcharan Puri the mahant of a neighbouring Dasnami math (and the local leader of the Puri faction) to relinquish the gaddi of Surajkund for an annual income in favour of Ramcharan Puri's protégé, if he won his case.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ In 1913, the Court of Wards decided that Jagannath Gir's repudiation by his guru revoked his rights to the Surajkund math.Footnote ¹⁴⁸

Upon Jagannath Gir's retreat from the fray, the Giris, led by the Mahant of Bodh Gaya (one of the most influential Giri maths in the region), supported one Trigunanand Gir after they discovered that the Puris were trying to appropriate the math. By this time, Swararth Gir, an uncle of Narain Gir, and another contender for the mahant's position, had dropped out of the competition because neither faction was interested in him.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Trigunanand Gir contended that he was ‘the sole and only chela’ of Narain Gir, and had been recognised by him as such on 11 May 1910, ‘with the performance of all necessary ceremonies’ and with the consent and approval of all the mahants concerned.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ To support his case, he submitted a document to this effect, signed by 42 mahants, gosains and others, including Narain Gir's servants, at the instigation of the Mahant of Bodh Gaya. However, the Deputy Collector was not satisfied that Trigunanand Gir had been initiated as a chela by Narain Gir or invested as mahant, for no Court of Wards officer had been informed of the ceremony. Nor was Trigunanand Gir's name in the monastery's vamshavali. Ultimately, because of the multiplicity of claims to the math the state took control of the property in 1912. All claimants thereupon filed objections in the civil court of Banaras.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Upon appeal the Subordinate Judge of Banaras decided that the Court of Wards could not take over the property as it was a religious endowment, and ruled that the mahants of the neighbouring Dasnami maths should elect a successor.Footnote ¹⁵² After seven years of prolonged litigation between the Puri and Giri factions, Triguanand Gir was recognised as the mahant of the Surajkund math. Ironically, his claims were thereafter questioned on the grounds that he was a married man, had children and was ineligible to become mahant.Footnote ¹⁵³ At this point we lose sight of the Surajkund math.

If celibate orders were riven by feuds over claims of belonging, so were Vaishnava sampradayas, whose right to marry was recognised. A legal dispute occurring in 1910 amongst the Vallabhacharya Gosains over the rights to a temple in Brindavan, demonstrates how such sampradayas manipulated legal discourses to deny daughters and their children rights of succession. Gordhan Lalji, the chief gosain of one of the principal Vallabhacharyas shrines (the Tikait temples controlled by Vallabha's chief male descendants), claimed the shrine in question. Apparently, the great-grandfather of Tikait Gordhan Lalji had presented his relative Goswami Muttuji Maharaj with the idol of Madan Mohanji which graced the temple under dispute, on the understanding that it would be returned to his temple were Muttuji to die without male heirs. The temple built by Muttuji, like all Vallabhacharya shrines, owned considerable wealth drawn from the offerings of votaries and devotees, including merchants and bankers from Gujarat, Bengal and Rajasthan.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Muttuji and his ancestors were recorded as the zamindars of the temple and its lands and he remained in possession of the shrine until his death in 1883. Thereafter, his widow Satbinda Bahuji controlled the temple until her death, whereupon her daughters Ganga Betiji and Gordhana Betiji inherited the shrine. According to Vallabhacharya custom both daughters were married to Bhat Brahmins.Footnote ¹⁵⁵

The Vallabhacharyas followed inheritance practices based on lineal primogeniture, failing which, daughter's sons were allowed to inherit gaddis and temple proceeds. Quoting this custom, Muttuji's grandsons claimed succession rights over the shrine and its property.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Tikait Gordhan Lalji, the grandson of Damodarlalji opposed their efforts, arguing that the sons of gosain daughters were not part of the Vallabhacharya Gosain kul (family). While he admitted that daughters married to Bhat husbands continued to live in their father's houses and inherited property, he insisted their sons remained outsiders.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ He maintained that his opponents could not perform the rites for the deity worshipped by the Vallabhas, or touch the offerings placed before the idols, and were debarred from inheriting property.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Given the wealth of the temple, the local branch of the Vallabhacharya sampradaya gathered around Gordhan Lalji to assert that the special custom of appointing Bhats to temples was no longer practised.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ They also supported Gordhan Lalji's contention that as the nearest descendant in the patrilineage and the Tikait, he was entitled to succeed Muttuji as manager of what was essentially a private religious endowment. Ultimately, their efforts to expunge the children of gosain women was successful, for the High Court in Allahabad ruled that Muttuji Maharaj's grandchildren did not belong to the family unit.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ The Privy Council upheld this judicial decision in 1913.Footnote ¹⁶¹

Interestingly, sampradayas readily manipulated the ambiguities inherent in colonial discourses in innovative directions with the help of women, if it served their cause. This is especially apparent when maths sought to claim the ‘secular’ property of grihastha gosains. In 1906, in one such case involving the Dasnamis of Haridwar, the High Court of Allahabad debated the issue of whether grihastha gosains were ruled by the laws of inheritance of nihang orders. Here, three brothers belonging to the Giri order of Dasnamis, who had overlapping claims to some property in Haridwar eventually passed away. One sibling died without any issue and his share of the land was divided amongst both his brothers. Thereafter, Ganpath Gir died in January 1902. His successors included his wife Mussumat Ram Rakhi and their son, one Chhajju Gir. Dalpat Gir, the third sibling, died in May 1902 and was survived by his widow, Mussumat Baldevi.Footnote ¹⁶² After Dalpat Gir's death, the nihang Dasnami gosains contested the right of the family to the property, enlisting the aid of Mussumat Baldevi, Dalpat Gir's widow, to strengthen their case against Chhajju Gir and his mother.Footnote ¹⁶³ This is not surprising in itself, for over the previous 20 years, the wives/companions of deceased grihastha gosains had nominated chelas after the demise of their partners in moves that were instigated, encouraged and legitimized by the Dasnamis to add to their property.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ In most cases, the grihastha gosains in question, although involved in varying degrees with the math, had no chelas, and had full rights over their property. In this case, Mussumat Baldevi contended that Dalpat Gir's will had authorized his widow to ‘make’ a disciple in his name with the help of the Dasnam bhek, or the ten orders of ascetics belonging to this sampradaya. Consequently, one Diwan Gir was posthumously recognised as his khas chela by various Dasnami mahants, other prominent gosains and local elites of Haridwar on 6 June 1902 at a bhandara, the special feast held to mark the occasion.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ As Dalpat Gir's khas chela, Diwan Gir claimed rights over the property of the Giri family.

Chhajju Gir challenged Mussumat Baldevi's right to elect a chela, disrupted the bhandara and subsequently legally opposed Diwan Gir's efforts to assert rights over the property belonging to himself and his mother. He pleaded that as a secular family of grihastha gosains his family was governed by Anglo-Hindu law.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ The Dasnami sampradaya manipulated the ambiguity attached to the porous legal boundaries between grihastha gosains and ascetic orders by claiming the Gir family as one of their own. In contrast, Chajju Gir emphasised the differences between his secular family and the sampradaya with whom he probably had dealings in other circumstances. Ultimately, the Allahabad High Court ruled in Chajju Gir's favour, arguing that his ancestors were not ascetics in the strict sense of the term, but a secular Hindu joint-family whose heirs could inherit ‘semi-religious’ property. Moreover the High Court judges also contended that the property under discussion was not endowed property attached to a math, but was governed by secular law, an ironical statement given that Anglo-Hindu law drew upon scriptural texts.Footnote ¹⁶⁷

On the whole, then, gosain women's chances of claiming property rose if courts were convinced that members of ascetic orders had made the transition to secular life, or had not been completely initiated into renunciatory orders. This is evident from a case of 1934 in which Jagarnath Gir, the Dasnami mahant of the Shankarjoth math in Basti district challenged the right of Mussumat Lakhiraj to inherit property allegedly belonging to the math.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ The Mussumat enjoyed the property in her capacity as the mother of gosain Onkar Bharati, and the companion of Onkar Bharati's father and guru, one Awadh Bharati. The Shankarjoth math had unsuccessfully fought cases in the civil courts against Awadh Bharati and his son to claim the land in question. Jagarnath Gir now claimed that Onkar Bharati, a nihang Dasnami ascetic had illegally given away inalienable religious land.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Sher Bahadur Singh, to whom Mussumat Lakhiraj had sold her land, argued that Awadh Bharati had entered the land as private property in a wajib-ul arz of 1860.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ To strengthen his case, he threw doubts upon the categorisation of Awadh Bharati and his son as Dasnami ascetics.

It is possible that Awadh Bharati, who initiated his son as his chela in 1901, had been attached to the Shankarjoth math until he left voluntarily or under duress.Footnote ¹⁷¹ While the lower court had ruled in favour of Mahant Jagarnath Gir, treating Awadh Bharati as an errant member of the math, the High Court reversed this decision in 1934 on the grounds that Onkar Bharati was a grihastha gosain. Additionally, as Awadh Bharati had died before completing the rites of initiation, Onkar Bharati was not legally classified as a nihang ascetic.Footnote ¹⁷² As far as the judges were concerned, Onkar Bharati's grihastha status was buttressed by his lifestyle of ‘a worldly man possessed of property’.Footnote ¹⁷³ Consequently, his mother's rights to inherit and sell the property were upheld by Anglo-Hindu law, for gosain women like herself involved with grihastha gosains were treated on par with lower castes, whose lenient social mores allegedly allowed women and children from all sexual relationships to inherit property.Footnote ¹⁷⁴

As argued above, asceticism was part of a continuum of changing states that could not be contained within colonial law, predicated as it was on neat legal understandings of sacred and secular life and desires. Consequently, ascetic families at the fault-lines of caste, class, gender and religiosity challenged the assumptions of descent, kinship and devolution built into Anglo-Hindu law. Not surprisingly, the position of gosain women, given their shared history of social ostracism, unconventional lives, and varied social origins was weakened by the disapproval expressed towards them by legal discourses. At the same time they remained assertive as prominent players in maths and court cases, claiming rights of belonging and property within ascetic orders. By the early twentieth century, many Hindu socio-religious reformers in northern India were also loudly expressing the view that gosain women were symbols of the larger malaise destroying ascetic sampradayas and Hinduism.

5 Broadening Horizons: Ascetic Sexualities and Religious Nationalism

It is pertinent that property feuds within ascetic orders occurred in a climate of outspoken disapproval of licentious gosains and their ‘fallen’ women by officials, missionaries, and socio-religious reformers, albeit from different approaches. Of particular interest is the ambivalent engagement of Hindu socio-religious reformers with asceticism in the early twentieth century. On the whole, nationalists and the proponents of socio-religious reform in the region valorised a certain ideal type of ascetic masculinity. While spirited debates took place between various socio-religious organisations about the place of renunciation in devotion, faith and practice, all parties agreed that asceticism was emblematic of a spiritual masculinity that would facilitate nationalism through its virility, discipline and physical strength.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ However, they had divergent approaches towards the relationship between renunciation, celibacy and nationalism.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ For instance, the Ramakrishna Mission and Math emphasised that ascetics or monks who were social, spiritual and political activists were central to the achievement of a deeply spiritual nationalism. The specificity of their contribution was the manner in which such monastic orders fused an austere form of celibate masculinity with a commitment to service.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ Others consciously integrated the ascetic ideal with more secular concerns. If the Radhasoamis stressed the importance of balancing a stringent moral existence with worldly life, the Arya Samaj maintained that celibacy for young men, and a disciplined sexual life for householders were necessary components of a virile militant masculinity that would effect social and political transformation and the regeneration of Hinduism.Footnote ¹⁷⁸

At another level, these conversations coexisted with the anger expressed about the flamboyant behaviour and lifestyle of members of sampradayas and maths. Such opinions drew upon societal critiques of asceticism that went beyond the disapproval voiced by Anglo-Hindu law.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ From the late nineteenth century, ascetic orders attracted sustained negative attention for their sexual ‘profligacy’ from socio-religious reformers of all ideological hues, disturbed by incidents in which the Vallabhacharya Gosains and the Dasnami Mahants of Tarakeshwar assaulted female pilgrims.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ In addition to these dramatic examples, the property feuds waged by ascetic families brought gosain women into public view. In 1909, in one such diatribe espousing the Arya Samaji perspective, one Shyam Krishna Dhar castigated gosains as men belonging to a class that was numerous and wealthy, but ignorant, superstitious, and intensely worldly.Footnote ¹⁸¹ Dhar painted a gloomy picture of the atypical mahant as a ‘sleek, ignorant man, brutal in his habits, sensual and extremely pleasure loving’.Footnote ¹⁸² His vitriolic prose went further and represented mahants as slaves to indolence, rich food, liquor, and women, whom they helped with their charms and blessings.Footnote ¹⁸³ Dhar's sarcastic words published in the Vedic Magazine and the Gurukula Samachar were repeated in Arya Samaj pamphlets throughout the period. While the Arya Samaj's withering scorn was not unexpected, given its vituperative attacks on the rituals and idol worship which it perceived as corrupting Hinduism, the growing disapproval of a variety of Hindu orthodox (or Sanatani) organisations of the ‘addiction’ of mahants to women is especially noteworthy.

Interestingly, by 1920, the common discomfort with regard to gosain women united Hindu social reformers of otherwise disparate persuasions such as the Sanatan Dharma Sabhas and the Arya Samaj. In other contexts, the Sanatan Dharma Sabhas was in complete disagreement with the Arya Samaj on the place of rituals and sacred spaces in popular worship. Sanatanis of various hues were also far more flexible in their acceptance of different variants of asceticism, engaging the Arya Samaj in a spirited defence of orders like the Vallabhacharyas.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ Now, many reformist Sanatanis perceived the female companions of ascetics and priests as emblematic of the corruption seeping into Hindu holy places, spaces and rituals. For upper caste Hindu men, gosain women were outcasts, dangerous, and representative of the threatening sexual morals and gender codes that had to be stemmed.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ From 1915, when Sanatani organisations such as the Dharma Rakshini Sabha filed civil lawsuits against maths in northern India, they argued that the ‘misconduct and immorality’ of the mahants and their chelas had resulted in the desuetude of Hindu endowments.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ Such critiques also engaged with broader early twentieth century debates on the use and misuse of dana.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ As the stories of property feuds within maths made the rounds of the popular press, even newsmagazines, such as the Marwari Sudharak, well known for their Sanatani stance, bemoaned the quickness of rich Marwari merchants to waste the fruits of dana on wastrels and vagrants passing themselves off as sadhus.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ Some mahants, alive to such criticisms of licentious behaviour within their orders, sought to regulate ascetic sexualities, behaviour and lifestyles. Thus Shankaranand Gir, mahant of a Dasnami math in Saharanpur district declared in his will in 1924 that any successors who married, used intoxicants or became immoral, would be removed from the gaddi, and another chela be appointed in his stead.Footnote ¹⁸⁹ However, such injunctions had little effect and the sexual ‘excesses’ of ascetic orders remained a source of growing concern for Sanatani organizations such as the Bharat Dharma Mahamandal and local chapters of the Sanatan Dharma Sabha, which spearheaded popular agitations concerned with the reform of religious spaces.

For Sanatani Hindus, cleansing sacred spaces of gosain women and their children was the central focus of initiatives to reform Hinduism. Matters came to a head in 1927 when the Hindu Religious Endowments Committee was set up under the aegis of the government of the United Provinces. The Committee, dominated by reformist Sanatani opinion, proclaimed its intention of purging Hindu sacred institutions of sexual license and wayward behaviour.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ After collating information on ascetic orders, the Committee emphasised that the ‘purification’ of maths was dependent on educating mahants on how to best perform their duties. The Endowments Committee vociferously argued for the necessity to repair the damage wrought by British rule, which, on the one hand, resulted in ‘the weakening of the effective traditional control and supervision exercised by the sampradaya concerned or by the public and, on the other, the withdrawal of control by the Government without the substitution of any other authority’.Footnote ¹⁹¹ In their opinion, the grave situation would be reversed if localised sampradayik district boards regulated endowments. But in keeping with the concerns of the period, most of this invective and self-righteous anger focused on the supposed crisis in ascetic masculinities, not in the least pausing to consider the sorry plight of the gosain women discussed above. To learn more about these women, far more research is required on the subject of gender relations and sexuality within ascetic sampradayas. Until then, persons such as Sitla Gir, Raman Bai and Ram Dulari will perforce remain in the shadows. This paper is but a small step in this direction.