Discovering the Reformation in India

Grierson expressed his evolving views on the religious history that made Europe and India comparable in several studies, but the most widely read of these was almost certainly an essay ‘Bhakti-Mārga’ (i.e. ‘The Way of Devotional Faith’) which he contributed to the widely read 1910 edition of James Hastings’ Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics. In it he sketched a history of Indian theism (or, as he more properly called it, Bhāgavatism) that owed its origins to three classic texts—the Bhagavad Gītā, the Nārāyaṇīya section of the Mahābhārata, and the Bhāgavata Purāṇa. This ancient Bhāgavatism, he explained, was later fundamentally reshaped in North India by two signal writings: the Rāmcaritmānas of Tulsīdās, to which we have already referred (begun in 1574), and a contemporary text by Nābhādās (circa 1600) called the Bhaktamāl, or ‘Garland of God-Lovers (bhaktas)’, which Grierson analogized to the Acta Sanctorum of medieval Roman Catholicism.Footnote ⁵

In different ways, both of these writings attested to the importance of the four sectarian groups into which the bhakti-mārga had been divided in ‘the 12^th and following centuries’, as Grierson said. These he called ‘the four churches of the reformation’, and the most important of them was clearly the sect or sampradāy that coalesced around the figure of Ramanand, whom Nābhādās held to be the founder of his own monastic order.Footnote ⁶ By Grierson's time Rāmānand had come to be understood as Tulsīdās's guru, too, even if not in direct succession.Footnote ⁷ Grierson explains Rāmānand's pivotal importance in the following way:

Obviously, the boundary between the Middle Ages and the Reformation was not unbridgeable in Grierson's thinking about India's religious history, any more than the masters of the European Reformation disowned all their medieval forebears. But he insisted that the change that ushered in ‘the early years of the reformation’ in its Indian form was dramatic. In the passage at hand he cited text and verse to prove this point for another 30 lines before finally asking how such a remarkable change had become possible. To answer that question he considered indigenous Hindu sources alongside the external influences brought to bear by Christianity and Islam. Islam, obviously, had been very important for the religious formation of North India since the twelfth century—consider the name ‘Kabīr’, one of the 99 appropriate to Allah—but it was only Christianity, Grierson felt, that could have had a major impact on South India, where the roots of the ‘four churches’ were to be found.Footnote ⁹ He searched uneasily for the historical juncture at which this Christian leaven might have begun to be felt, and remained unable to explain how it might have come to have such a deep effect on Kabīr and Tulsīdās. These he viewed as the two principal figures who inherited Rāmānand's inspiration, probably even more important than their guru. It was Kabīr more than any other whose voice echoed through the new anthologies of spoken and sung vernacular bhakti poetry produced in Punjab and Rajasthan, a thousand kilometres west of Kabīr's native Banaras, during the closing decades of the sixteenth century. Followers tracing themselves to the poet-saints Nānak and Dādū solidified their communal identities in newly ‘global’ terms by situating them within a broad and broadly performed network of bhakti poet-singers. As for Tulsīdās, his vernacular Rāmāyaṇa, which adopted the Avadhi diction of the Sufi poets who had preceded him, quickly established itself as what Grierson called ‘the Bible of a hundred millions of people, and is looked upon by them as much inspired as the Bible is considered inspired by the English clergyman’.Footnote ¹⁰

Grierson was actually quite persuaded that the force of causality cannot have been unidirectional, from west to east, Christian to Hindu. Tuning in to a scholarly debate that raged as he wrote ‘Bhakti-Mārga’, he accepted the idea that ‘classic’ Indian bhakti, as expressed in the Bhagavad Gītā, was older than Jesus. But the more fundamental point was that the bhakti connection between Bhāgavatism and Christianity was deep, and Grierson was eager to display it to his Christian co-religionists in terms they could accept and appreciate. This connection might go back to almost the beginnings of Christianity, he explained—he found it hard to shake the notion that the Nestorians provided the specific point of connectionFootnote ¹¹—but the form this took in the ‘reformation’ period was quite special.Footnote ¹² Here Grierson the linguist pointed out that the crucial element was indeed linguistic. As he wrote in 1893,

These were the views of a colonial intellectual, and in Europe, doubtless, they gained some of their communicative power from that fact. Yet Grierson was hardly the only person of his time to see a close connection between the religious changes that were perceived to have swept through central Europe in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and those that transpired in India. In 1883 the Sanskritist Monier Williams, for instance, observed that ‘just about the time when Luther was agitating the minds of men in Europe, Ćaitanya was stirring the hearts of the people of Bengal’.Footnote ¹⁴ But far more importantly, Grierson was joined in his comparative ruminations by no less a figure than Mahadeo Govind Ranade, justice in the Bombay High Court. Ranade, of course, was Indian. He emphasized both the religious and political sides of the ‘upheaval’ as it was experienced in his own region, Maharashtra, and pointed out that it had been chronicled in a text (the Bhaktavijaya of Mahīpatī, written in Marathi) that paralleled and drew on Nābhādās's Bhaktamāl. This, he emphasized, was ‘long before British influence was felt in these parts as a factor of any importance’. It was an interregional Indian reality: Mahīpatī’s partial reliance on Nābhādās reflected the fact that ‘a similar movement’ to the Maharashtrian one had transformed northern and eastern India at ‘about the same time’.Footnote ¹⁵ But equally important, it was a historical transformation that could hardly be interpreted as being derivative of a European one. The Hindu reformation stood parallel to the Christian one, not in its shadow.

Ranade, like Grierson, stressed the vernacularizing aspect of this reformist upheaval, but he went on to stress other features as well. As in Europe, he said, the leading features of this Indian reform movement were its social inclusiveness, its protest ‘against self-mortification and fasts, and meaningless penances and endless pilgrimages’, and its rejection of ‘polytheistic worship’ in favour of monotheistic belief and practice.Footnote ¹⁶ Yet there were differences of tone that made the Indian version preferable. Among ‘the saints and prophets of Maharashtra’ and elsewhere in India,

Listen up, Mr Calvin! The bench of Bombay has rendered its judgment.

The four churches and the four sampradāys

But that was then—well over a hundred years ago. Today if you google ‘global reformation’, you are likely to come across a YouTube clip in which the well-known Warwick historian Peter Marshall restricts himself specifically to Christianity as he explains ‘how the Reformation became a global phenomenon’.Footnote ¹⁸ This is perhaps a helpful self-limiting tactic. Yet if we were to ignore Marshall's implicit advice and ‘go global’ more broadly, once again risking Christian universalism by using the word ‘reformation’ to refer to the great transformations of early modernity, we would doubtless find ourselves displaying predilections quite different from those that guided Grierson and Ranade. A century after they wrote, matters of statehood, trade, technology, and, of course, discourse—ever discourse—figure far more prominently in the ways we tend to think about the global history of religion.

None of that can be gainsaid. But let me propose that one way to draw away from the teleological force of ‘reformation’ and ‘modernity’ (in the bad, old Europe-posing-as-universalist sense) may be to return to the scene of this Euro- and Christocentric crime and focus more closely on the crucial historiographical idea that fascinated Grierson— the idea that he translates with the phrase ‘four churches of the reformation’.

The work of translation, especially when it reflects power imbalances, can have its dark side, forcing the thing translated into interpretive straightjackets it may never again be able to shed. But in Grierson's hands, I believe, translation was a noble work. With the notion of the ‘four churches’ he was trying to remove what barriers he could from the minds of his English-speaking and largely Christian readership. Grierson wanted his co-religionists to see India's part of the religious history of the world as consonant with theirs, not dissonant—and thereby to see themselves as part of a larger history that they did not own.Footnote ¹⁹ Certainly his position was not disinterested. In thinking about the Nestorian-Indian connection, of which he was so convinced (1907), and then later as he worked intensively on the Bhaktamāl (1909–1910), Grierson repeatedly adduced Christian parallels. Even when his tone was scholarly, and he clearly expected his readership to react in similar terms, he would freely cite parallels from the New Testament in his references to the Bhaktamāl. Footnote ²⁰ Words such as ‘Archangels’ and ‘the Twelve Mighty of the Faith’ abound, and in his very first essay on the Bhaktamāl as such he was already comfortable using the term ‘church’ as a way to translate sampradāy.Footnote ²¹ But his pairing of Christian and Hindu history attains a new crispness when ‘The Four Churches of the Reformation’ was used as a major heading in his essay for the Hastings Encyclopaedia. By providing this clear structural comparison he was at pains to dignify his Indian and Hindu (or, as he preferred to say, Bhāgavatist) subjects in the eyes of his Christian readers. It was not just that the history of Bhāgavatism contained numerous incidental parallels to the history of Christianity, some owing to explicit historical contacts, but that the very momentum of the religious history of both faiths was similar. Nothing displayed this better than the notion of Reformation, which signified a major moment of clarification on both sides of the Christian-Hindu ledger.

This generosity of spirit, if I am right in interpreting it so, in the end betrayed him. For it was not European or American Christians who proved to be the most pivotal readers of his essay in the Hastings Ency-clopaedia but Indian Hindus: the Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics was to be found on the bookshelves of libraries throughout the British empire. Unsurprisingly, some of the most important of these Hindu readers did not appreciate the Christian framing, especially when Grierson went beyond comparison and proposed that there had been hidden—but formative—Christian contributions to India's bhakti past.Footnote ²²

By zeroing in on the motif of ‘the four churches of the reformation’ my purpose is neither to defend nor to condemn Grierson for what we might call the ‘liberal imperial’ style of his historiography. Rather, I want to suggest that the principal rubric he employed—these four ‘churches’—tells us a good deal more about the sort of project in which he and others were engaged than he himself was aware of. When we understand more about the work that the idea of the four sampradāys was doing in Nābhā’s own intellectual frame, when we consider its somewhat later effects, and, I suspect, when we compare all of that to what happened around the notion of ‘reformation’ in Europe, historiographically speaking, we find that there are indeed some uncanny parallels. Not only does a certain distinctive early modernity hide in the wings behind the idea of these ‘four churches’, providing the reformist power that Nābhādās broadly claimed for them, but the idea itself turns out to be an aspect of the very ‘reformation’ that Grierson was eager to promote. It made its debut at the end of the sixteenth century itself.

Grierson draws his ‘four churches’ explicitly from Nābhādās's Bhaktamāl. He made an independent study of this work which appeared in the pages of the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1909–1910.Footnote ²³ In Nābhā’s own language, these ‘four churches’ are the catuḥ sampradāy: four guru-to-pupil lineages or teaching traditions, four sects, four orders. In Nābhā’s usage, indeed, they are not just four but the four. They constitute a complete set, which in India is one of the primary meanings of the number four and is entailed by the theological formulation vyūha, which Nābhā redeploys from earlier Vaishnava writing to make his point.Footnote ²⁴ Vyūhas, in this sense, are battle formations associated with the god Vishnu (read Bhagavān), oriented towards the four directions. By extension, we are to understand that these four teaching communities, each given shape and substance by a monastic order, are the Lord's self-defence in the present world-age (yuga) and that of his devotees, as well.

We are dealing here with an ideal construct, not something that emerged naturally from the rough-and-tumble of history as expressed in the events of Nābhā’s own time. But that does not mean that this intellectual rubric cannot also be an early modern invention itself, whether Nābhā’s own or something first fashioned by other members of the Rāmānandī monastic community to which he belonged.Footnote ²⁵ If this is so, then the ‘four churches of the reformation’ are modern not primarily because they anticipate our modernity, as the use of the term ‘reformation’—a universally shared reformist identity that is the mark of civilizational progress—may seem to imply but because as a construct these ‘churches’ are modern with respect to their own time and place. True, they represent Nābhā’s ideal of institutional continuity, something he saw being acted out over the span of four or five hundred years (not that I think he was counting) and the space of a subcontinent (or, for him, a continent). Yet that very effort to impose order on past and place is the mark of a certain ‘modern’ vigour—something distinctively new in Nābhā’s own time, at the turn of the seventeenth century. Even the medium in which Nābhā writes, suggests the newness of the idea. He composes the stanzas (chappay) and couplets (dohā) that comprise his Bhaktamāl in common speech (bhāṣā), a language that later would be called Brajbhāṣā—crucially, not in Sanskrit. Most of the poet-saints he features in descriptions of the bhakti denizens of his own time do the same, although some more philosophical acharyas (leaders) wrote in Sanskrit. In Nābhā’s mind Sanskrit was no longer the exclusive guardian of religious truth, nor its necessary vessel.

There is a paradoxical element here. The major point of the four-sampradāy idea is to demonstrate continuity between the past and the present, a continuity that is expressed in the lineages that Nābhā describes as tying the (ex hypothesi) founders of the four sampradāys to the communities of Nābhā’s own day which, he says, venerate these founding gurus. Yet this particular notion of continuity is precisely new in the period of which we are speaking. And for a reason. It gives to a quite freshly formed community—the monastic community to which Nābhā belongs—the illusion of being rooted in an ancient past. The assertion of such a past requires the presence of other communities as well—perhaps imagined ones, but in any case a network of associations sufficiently general that it would allay suspicion that what was being asserted here was merely the fantasy of one particular group.Footnote ²⁶ As to that group, Nābhā adumbrates a specific past whose identity is marked by the important Vaishnava administrator and theologian Rāmānuja, whose major realm of operations (though Nābhā does not specifically recall this) was at Srirangam in the Tamil-speaking south. Although Nābhādās writes from the north, there is also a southern group that traces its origins to this major theologian—the Śrī Vaishnava community. It is deeply revealing that they seem to have known nothing of Rāmānand until well after Nābhādās wrote his magnum opus. Thus it is likely that the antiquity Nābhā claims for the order to which he belongs is in fact evidence of its modernity, its origins in recent times.

This is one of the classic ways in which modernity asserts itself—not as a formation but as a reformation—and an element of social and religious progressiveness is indeed embedded in the tale, as befits this ‘modernist’ theme. Once reformed, as Nābhādās explains, the doors of Rāmānuja's community were thrown open to members of non-elite classes, people just like himself (or so it would seem, if the memory of Nābhā’s humble origins that are described in Priyādās's influential Bhaktirasabodhinī commentary on the Bhaktamāl, written in 1712, can be trusted). In the person of Rāmānuja, as founder, and probably in the composition and reputation of the Śrī Vaishnava community that followed him, Nābhā found the means to project the patina of Brahmanhood on his own Śrī (or, as would later be said, Rāmānandī) community. That Brahmanical identity, however, comes across much more as a feature of the seminal past than of the lived present. For the present it survives as a shimmering cloak—some of the conventions of an ancient Pāñcarātra ritual were practised by the Rāmānandīs—but those who wore the cloak were not necessarily of Brahman background. Much more important, in fact, were the ties the Rāmānandīs managed to establish between their own sect and the Kachvāhā rulers of nearby Amer—and, through their family, political, and military involvements, throughout the Mughal empire, which these Kachvāhās had so much to do with securing and expanding.

There is hardly scope here to prove my point that Nābhā’s four sampradāys comprise a theologoumenon, rather than a matter of historical record.Footnote ²⁷ Let me offer just a few snippets to support the plausibility of my claim.

Consider, for instance, the fact that another of the founding southern acharyas (which Nābhā claims alongside Rāmānuja), a philosopher/theologian named Viṣṇusvāmī, appears not to have any independent southern community associated with him at all. An indication of this fact is that the writings attributed to him have not been preserved as they would have been in an institution that bore his name. No such community is known to have formed in the south around 1100, let us say, when Rāmānuja lived. What happened instead was that in the north, in the early seventeenth century, followers and progeny of the sixteenth-century theologian Vallabha came forward and claimed a link between Vallabha and Viṣṇusvāmī, very likely because Nābhādās had suggested that Viṣṇusvāmī’s was a legacy that was open to being claimed. Any historical connection between Viṣṇusvāmī and Vallabha comes across as being contrary to fact. A fanciful account of Vallabha's travels throughout South India does make this claim, but Vallabha himself only mentions Viṣṇusvāmī once in the course of his own writing—and then rather disparagingly. If the Vallabhites are part of the reformation that Grierson accepted as historical fact, then, it was to claim for themselves a role in the rubric that Nābhā had established. As they did so, they fashioned a text that I believe to have been purposefully backdated so that it appeared to precede Nābhā’s own articulation of the four-sampradāy idea.Footnote ²⁸

Here we have reformation with a vengeance, whereby the thing reformed is invented at the same time as the reformation itself. Or, to put it more accurately in this case, there was no reformation at all, only the claiming of a lineage that was asserted as part of the four-sampradāy idea. I believe that this move was a deliberate conceptual ‘reformation’ of a community that already existed, namely the family and followers of Vallabha, but that community did indeed owe its origins to the very ‘Reformation’ period of which we are speaking. Vallabha lived in the early sixteenth century; his institution-building son Viṭṭhalnāth articulated the notion of a Vallabhite lineage in the next generation; and the idea took on greater weight in the generation that followed, in the early seventeenth century. But it was not apparently until the late seventeenth century that Vallabhites bought into the idea of the four sampradāys, aligning the man they had come to accept as their founder with the much earlier Viṣṇusvāmī. Conceptually, at that point, they made themselves heirs to his supposedly venerable teaching line. In reality they comprised a new and important religious formation all their own, trumpeting an elaborately ritualized vernacular Krishna religiosity that they claimed was based in the oldest sacred place to be found in the Braj country, where Krishna himself was remembered as having spent his early life. That same Braj was now at the centre of the Mughal empire.

Or consider another of these acharyas of the four sampradāys, Madhva. This time there certainly is a southern order that bears his name. They seem to have been very active as missionaries from the thirteenth century onwards, but it turns out that their presence in North India is quite hard to establish. This suits Nābhādās quite well, since he does not have to work out any potential kinks between southern and northern branches of the lineage. Once again, I believe I can show that it is only in the seventeenth century—again, in the second half—that the Madhvite quarter of the four-sampradāy idea was claimed by a latter-day religious formation. These are the followers of the charismatic early sixteenth-century ecstatic Chaitanya, a contemporary of Vallabha's. I believe these Chaitanyites took up the Madhva idea only when it was in the process of being adopted as the basis for a state policy towards religion by Rājā Jai Singh II of Amer and later Jaipur, the elaborately planned city he built in the early decades of the eighteenth century. Earlier the idea of a connection between Chaitanya and the Madhvite order would have sounded quite improbable and actively resisted. The meeting between Chaitanya and the southern followers of Madhva, which is reported in the communally authoritative Caitanyacaritāmṛta of Kṛṣnadās Kavirāj (circa 1615), is anything but cordial.Footnote ²⁹ Here again, then, we see that there are huge cracks in the ‘four churches’ system if we regard it as anything approaching a historical actuality. Unbeknown to Grierson and many other writers, it was ideal before it was real.

The most obvious of these cracks, perhaps, relates to Nābhā’s own group, the Rāmānandīs. As we remember, Nābhā calls them by the name Śrī, which they would share with southern members of Rāmānuja's sampradāy, but he also hints at the fact that there is a problem here. He tells us that Rāmānuja's guru Rāghavānand initiated members of all four caste groups, thereby indicating an awareness that this was not general practice in other parts of the Śrī sampradāy. He clearly implies that Rāmānand followed his teacher in this practice.Footnote ³⁰ Thus we have a group, perhaps personally represented by Nābhā himself, that is significantly low-caste in its composition; it would not be surprising to find them in pursuit of Brahman respectability. At the same time, however, major currents in their own theology draw back from the restrictive implications of Brahman rule in the name of bhakti. Beautifully, Nābhā’s own articulation of what bhakti entails is far more egalitarian—so egalitarian, in fact, that it places bhaktas (devotees, lovers of God) on the same plane as the Lord they serve, Bhagavān. Hence the classic formulation with which Nābhā launches his text:

Grierson certainly knew about this formulation, and of its revolutionary claim that devotees form a part of the same field as and are not absolutely dissociable from the deity they worship. Here was the Reformation in one of its most critical aspects. Grierson was also aware that this very claim and the way Nābhā worked it out had made the Bhaktamāl one of the most popular and influential texts in all of North India. The glory of the text is not just its compelling four-‘church’ formulation but also in the way Nābhā leaves it behind after a while, once it has done the work it needs to do for his own community. At that point he goes on to offer a vast number of short verse portraits of bhaktas living all over northern India, from sea to sea, in his own time or within recent memory. The bhaktas he does not seem to know about, in contrast to the logic of his own four-sampradāy claim and with only the rarest exceptions, are those who live in the south. Here again the element of paradox shines its light on the truth.

Grierson ignores this aspect of things, however, and takes the text at its word, just as the British scholar H. H. Wilson and—perhaps more importantly—the Rāmānandī scholar and Bhaktamāl expositor Sitaramsharan Bhagavanprasad Rupkala, a friend and associate, had done before him.Footnote ³² By means of the Christian analogies he supplies, Grierson gives Hinduism—at least in its Vaishnava form—a true and valid history, one that is marked by a Reformation, and that at just the right sixteenth-century moment. But what is actually happening, and with no less synchronicity, is more dramatic than that. Nābhādās's privileging of the status of the bhakta and his building of a text that displays that down-to-earth exaltation, enables the Bhaktamāl in broad terms to authorize ‘the priesthood of all believers’. We are told that Francis Xavier, when he reached Japan in 1549 and was introduced to the teachings of Shinran, was so taken aback that he exclaimed that ‘the accursed Lutheran heresy’ had preceded him there.Footnote ³³ Had he hoped to leave it behind in India?

Comparing the Reformations

Undoubtedly there are some thought-provoking parallels between North India in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and what we see in the European Reformation—Luther's determined vernacularity or the Anabaptists with their lower-class appeal and sectarian profligacy. Merchants were attracted to the new communities of faith and recitation in both places, and their networks helped them expand. New monastic communities were formed and the lines between celibates and non-celibates were variously drawn and redrawn. Millennial expectations were in the air, not just among peasants and their newfound leaders but in the likes of a man like Luther and even up the social scale, in a ruler such as Akbar.Footnote ³⁴ Calvin's doctrine of the divinely chosen elect had analogues in the thinking of Vallabha that are hard to perceive in earlier Vaishnava theologians.Footnote ³⁵ Even the palpable mutual presence of Islamic societies and institutions provides a general point of comparison between Europe and North India although, of course, there were very major differences. In early modern Europe, Protestants and Catholics alike might have compared their foes to the Turks—Ottomans to the east made this seem more than mere rhetoric—while in India ‘Turks’ were present in an even more palpable way.Footnote ³⁶

Of course, there are other major differences between the religious habits of mind in early modern Europe and its early modern Indian counterpart, and for India a great question—for me, at least—hovers around the issue of whether we are able to see the seemingly novel features of these times in India because they were genuinely new or merely because we have relatively elaborate records of them for the first time. In any case, however, why do the first great anthologies of Brajbhāṣā and sant religious poetry get made in precisely this period—the period for which Nābhā, also writing in Brajbhāṣā, gives us such wide-ranging information about the lives of the poet-saints involved? But these two do not make a perfect match. Why does Nābhā’s own community, unlike some very nearby others, seem to produce no anthology of its own? The sects that are most deeply involved in a veritable melee of new vernacular anthologizing are not necessarily the ones to which the rubric of the four sampradāys might direct us—the Sikhs and Dādūpanthīs in particular. They are absent from the original Bhaktamāl and are only introduced into the framework it provided by a Dādūpanthī named Rāghavdās, probably writing in 1660, roughly half a century later. Obviously, there are local contours that we cannot expect to see replicated in Europe or any other place, but in both places the religious vigour of the times is hard to deny.

North Indian vernacular bhakti poetry seems to have flowed at the beginning of this period particularly and to have been captured on the page. Was it the new availability of paper that made this possible?Footnote ³⁷ Extensive new patterns of vernacular circulation appeared, at least partially owing to the fact that Surīs and Mughals were dedicated to providing a new degree of safety for long-distance travel on roads, many of which were newly constructed. New sorts of religious activities sometimes seem to have had freer scope for flourishing in areas that had only recently been brought under cultivation, as against more settled pre-existing ritual communities. The Mughals and the Kachvāhā allies with whom they crucially intermarried offered patronage to bhakti itself, starting with the Chaitanyites and the Rāmānandīs in the sixteenth century itself. Merchant groups, Jains among them, established salons and discussion groups in places like Agra and Banaras which anchored the trade routes; some of these, gathering under the ādhyātmik banner, were openly ‘spiritualist’, free-thinking, and thus, in a certain way, ‘Protestant’. Certainly they spoke the language of bhakti.Footnote ³⁸ Several such developments take us closer to Ranade's themes than Grierson's, but Grierson's approach raises a particular sort of question. Was the assertion of a new historiography, as in the motif of the four sampradāys, something that also happened in the articulation of a ‘doctrine’ of the Reformation in northern Europe?

It is perhaps not so clear that Luther and Calvin and Zwingli—or, for that matter, Erasmus—were marking out their own originality when they appealed to the scriptures in a new way. Rather, it was a return to the source that they trumpeted—the life and times of Jesus—yet with the notable confidence that they could do it themselves. These Reformers’ desire to move past the devastations of intervening history is not something we find in the Bhaktamāl, but a new sense of history does matter to Nābhā, as we have seen. The lessening of distance between the devotee and the Divine, between bhakta and bhagavān, is the name of his game, a sense of being surrounded by different forms of bhakti everywhere. It is not quite the monotheism Grierson trumpeted on his behalf and not quite the priesthood of all believers, but the sense of excitement surrounding the flourishing of vernacular religious—as well as of cataloguing it and singing its praises—is hard to miss.

Nābhādās was certainly not the only man to have taken an interest in the new religious developments that surrounded him at the close of the sixteenth century, even though his framing of these was undoubtedly the most capacious vernacular formulation of all. It has been suggested, for example, that a knowledge of the emergent Sikh canon of bhakti poetry, as displayed and performed at Amritsar in the form of a single book (the Kartārpur Bīr) in 1604, may have had a potent effect on the Dādūpanthīs’ decision to install a book of their own guru's poetry, the Dādūvāṇī (‘Dādū’s Word’), in their sanctuary at Naraina the very same year—along with the fact that Dādū had died the year before. That collection was apparently made by Dādū’s amanuensis Mohandās Daftārī, who also produced a broader bhakti anthology called the Santguṇsāgar (‘Ocean of Virtues of the Good’), which is likewise said to have been performed publicly for the first time in 1604.Footnote ³⁹

It would be too much to expect that exact parallels to this moment of mimesis between the Sikh and Dādū Panths could be found in Germany and Switzerland around the time that Luther posted his theses on the chapel door of Wittenberg castle. Yet it cannot be doubted that in Europe too there was a vivid mutual awareness on the part of both Reformers and their flocks, and that there quickly developed a desire to record what was happening. In broad terms, indeed, the historiography of the European Reformation can be said to have begun already with the Reformers themselves, although the term ‘reformatio’, as used by them and others, did not always designate the public events that occurred in rapid succession from 1516 onwards. Relatively systematic efforts to shape a history of the Reformation (or Reformations) emerged surprisingly early—in the course of the very sixteenth century in which the three great Reformers made their mark. There is no reason to discount these efforts just because they were invariably driven by a desire to discern—or perhaps assert—‘the controlling hand of God’, as Scott Dixon puts it.Footnote ⁴⁰ More to the point is the fact that such a historiographical motive would hardly have seemed outlandish to Nābhādās. True, he was less concerned to establish the designs of a single Lord (bhagavān) than to characterize, or even celebrate, the much more pluriform record established by bhakti itself, but we certainly find ourselves in the same ballpark.

A Hindu tazkirā?

Taking into account parallels such as these, one can see that it made sense that writers like Grierson and Ranade perceived strong similarities between what was happening in Europe's early modern period, religiously speaking, and what transpired in India. And we must also keep in mind the historiographical comparison, registering as it did a sense common in both places that what was happening demanded to be recorded and made known. But simply to feel that urge is not to command the language in which it might be expressed: history does not write itself. What happened in the Indian case? How did Nābhā get the idea to craft his long and beautiful garland? There would have been resources in the South Indian past he was eager to claim, but given his general ignorance of that milieu, I think it highly unlikely that twelfth- and thirteenth-century Tamil hagiographies such as Cēkkiḻār's Periya Purāṇa or its Vaishnava analogue, the Guruparamparāprabhāvam, could have been the source of his inspiration. Rather—and without the slightest intent to deny Nābhā a high degree of personal inventiveness—I think we should look much closer to home.

I wonder whether Nābhādās or his teacher Agradās, who bade him write, got the Bhaktamāl idea from the historiographical writings of Muslims. Was Nābhādās's Bhaktamāl meant to be something like a biographical dictionary for Hindus—or to be precise, Vaishnavas? Was the Bhaktamāl intended to be ‘our tazkirā’ even though—and perhaps precisely because—not a single Muslim is mentioned there? Kabīr would be the exception, of course, but Nābhā does nothing to draw attention to the Muslimness of his name. Rather, he paints his portrait of Kabīr against a background of indigenously Indic formulations such as varṇāśrama dharma (the obligations conferred by one's caste and stage of life) and ṣaddarśaṇa (the six ‘perspectives’ that classically comprise the extent of Indian philosophy). Even so, I want to suggest that, formally speaking, at least, the proper term of comparison for what our author is doing may well lie with practices of memorialization that were Islamic. This—and not anything that was going on in Europe—must be our first point of reference when we think about Nābhādās in comparative terms. The rest of the globe is relevant, as we have seen, but charity begins at home.

This ‘home’, however, is not so easy to see. In the Sanskrit intellectual world, there is a long history of principled ostrichism—xenology, as Wilhelm Halbfass has called it—with regard to anything that might exceed its own purview, especially anything that originated outside India, as the writing of tazkirās did.Footnote ⁴¹ So if it was part of the explicit purpose of the Bhaktamāl to construct a sense of its own subcontinental logic, especially through the rubric of the four sampradāys, then silence about a religious and intellectual tradition that reached beyond India every time a Muslim prayed facing Mecca may not seem surprising. By the same token, perhaps, one should not necessarily expect to find a string of close resemblances between the two genres—tazkirā and bhaktamāl—even if they were somehow connected. We would probably be thinking about the sheer fact of Nābhā being aware of a hagiographical habit among Muslims, not its specific conventions. It would be ‘assimilation from a distance’, in Muzaffar Alam's memorable phrase, and indeed a good bit more distant than the examples Alam puts forth to make his case.Footnote ⁴²

Nonetheless, we must keep in mind that the trove of Persian saints’ and poets’ biographies circulating in Nābhādās's time was quite vast, and that it displayed an impressive variety.Footnote ⁴³ Hence, despite the almost complete absence of Persian-derived words in the Bhaktamāl and its total silence about Muslim bhaktas, it may not be unreasonable to think that Nābhādās was in some way influenced by Islamic hagiographical practices that were current in his day and region. I cannot read these tazkirās myself, alas, and therefore depend on translations and secondary sources, but here is the sort of thing I have in mind.

Consider, for example, ‘Attar and his enduringly influential Tazkirāt al-Awliyā (‘Memorial of God's Friends’). ‘Attar begins each of his biographical entries with a pithy headnote, a summary of sorts, before proceeding to a true narrative and then, usually, some of the saint's verse or teachings. These latter two elements—a genuine life-narrative and a digest of teachings—are absent in Nābhā, but I am not the first to wonder whether he expected his listeners to have command of them, since otherwise what he had to say in each of his short stanzas (chappay) might have been quite incomprehensible. I am wondering whether that stanza bears some analogy to the headnotes of ‘Attar and other tazkirā writers.Footnote ⁴⁴

A second consideration is this: in some tazkirās, at least, the lineage or order of the author is adumbrated before they turn to a broader range of ‘friends of God’. This is clearly the case with Nābhādās's treatment of the Rāmānandīs (sections 29–40), who are also given pride of place when he introduces the four-sampradāy scheme (sections 27–28). Notably, however, as I have hinted, that formula has only limited control over the remainder of the text—other organizational rubrics intervene—and what really concerns him, as in some tazkirās, is giving a list of the bhaktas themselves, singly or as a group. He does not usually mention their affiliation by lineage.Footnote ⁴⁵

Third, tazkirās notably concern poets or Sufis or both. Nābhādās sometimes calls attention to the strictly poetic abilities of the bhaktas he lists—the kavis among them—but sometimes he does not. Even in the other cases, however, poetry and singing tend to be emphasized. These provide the primary mode by which bhakti spreads, a theme whose importance Nābhā liked to emphasize.Footnote ⁴⁶ Implicit and explicit connections to royal power are also a familiar feature of tazkirā writing, and the same is true for Nābhādās's Bhaktamāl, with a number of kings qualifying as bhaktas.Footnote ⁴⁷

Finally, it may be worth taking note of Carl Ernst's observation that ‘Hagiographies produced in the post-Akbar period reflect [a] pan-Indian vision of Sufi sainthood, which might be said to carry with it an implicit acknowledgment of Mughal sovereignty.’Footnote ⁴⁸ I wonder whether Nābhā’s Bhaktamāl, spawned in the rapidly expanding Kachvāhā-Mughal domain, may achieve some of the same ends by means of the range of geographic locations it features and especially by adopting the broad south-north span embedded in the idea of the four sampradāys. It has to be conceded that, unlike the Dādūpanthī and Vallabhite hagiographical collections that emerged in the first half of the seventeenth century, the Mughal emperor himself never appears as a figure in Nābhādās's Bhaktamāl. Was it Akbar's Islamic beliefs that disqualified him, or could it have been that Nābhā felt his own focus on the Kachvāhās as exemplary bhaktas relieved him of any need to muddy the waters by mentioning the Great Mughal as well? Such political fealty may seem less likely in view of Allison Busch's observation that documents written to praise Kachvāhā kings and intended to be performed directly in their court at Amer do not ask their audiences to forget about or think ill of the Kachvāhās's Mughal counterparts. Yet with the Bhaktamāl we have a more specifically religious document than those on which Busch has focused. It is therefore worth asking whether the specifically religious effects of living in an Islamicate environment may be reflected elsewhere than in the figures who are featured in Nābhā's collective hagiography—in the idea of the four sampradāys itself.

This question ushers us into complex, and perhaps necessarily indefinite, terrain. As we have seen, Nābhā offers us the old Vaishnava idea of the four vyūhas as a way of answering the question of how, conceptually, he understood the background of his idea of these four religious orders. But was that the only formative influence? We should raise the possibility that, without saying so, he may also have been parrying developments in the Shaivite world, particularly the growing sense that monastic institutions devoted to Śaṃkara's teaching should be established at the four directional points of the Indian subcontinent.Footnote ⁴⁹ And we should not dismiss out of hand the possibility that he was also hoping to provide a Vaishnava ‘answer’ to something quite different yet, if anything, more proximate: the Sufi practice of tracing individual orders (silsilās) to one of the four caliphs or one of the four sages (pīr). The latter include Muhammad, Ali, Husain, and Hasan al-Basri. Other Islamic quartets may also be relevant: four schools of law according to the Sunnis, and four categories of scripture, sequentially arranged—toret (Torah), zabur (Psalms), injil (New Testament), and the Qur’ān. If the conventions of the tazkirā were Nābhā’s primary point of reference, however, then it would be the matter of silsilā which would have been likely to be uppermost in his thinking—which is exactly what we get in his proposal about the existence of these four sampradāys. To be sure, Nābhā’s response to the presence of Muslims in North India is not openly integrative. Unless Kabīr counts, we do not find Muslims among his bhaktas; in that way, to repeat, it would have to be ‘accommodation at a distance’. But that does not necessarily make it any less real.Footnote ⁵⁰

Does this seem far-fetched? Perhaps we do not have to look over the fence into Islam—was it, in fact, a fence?—to discover models that may have been in Nābhādās's mind after all. Allison Busch has wondered about the possible impact of the broad genre of praśasti poetry—praise poems for kings and deities—that is so richly represented in Sanskrit and found in other Indic languages as well. Both she and Dalpat Rajpurohit have pointed out that the chappay metre chosen by Nābhādās as his main medium of expression was also broadly in use in his time for carits, that is, poems that present an idealized biography of a king or other person. It appears, for instance, as a dominant form in the contemporary Māncarit of Narottamkavi, composed for use in the Kachvāhā court itself; and somewhat to the west, in Marwari, it was a frequent metrical choice for performers such as cārans and bhāts and also for Jains.Footnote ⁵¹ There could also be bhakti carits, as in the case of Narottamdās's widely circulated sixteenth-century Sudāmācarit. That version of Sudāmā’s story is composed in the kavitt, savaiyā, and dohā metres, but Haldhar's version, apparently coming from the eastern reaches of the Hindi-writing world and possibly also dating to the late sixteenth century, is exclusively in chappay.Footnote ⁵² So Nābhādās's preference for the chappay does resonate with the narrative poetry that was used in the wider world of Hindu courts and bazaars in his time. Yet as far as I am aware, none of these works is anything like the composite biography that Nābhā designs—with its short, individual entries consisting of a single chappay each, except in three cases where the subject seems to justify two. In contrast to these Hindu carits, the tazkirā form easily permits the ‘garlanding’ effect that Nābhādās achieves in his Bhaktamāl. It clearly sets great numbers of Sufis or poets alongside one another, although the brevity for which Nābhādās aims may seem even more redolent of the tabaqāt genre.Footnote ⁵³

Obviously, we are far from having the degree of open integration between Sufis and Vaishnavas that can be observed in the early eighteenth century. By that time one can point to examples from Mughal India in which Vaishnavas—or at least murīds with Vaishnava names—are accorded biographical entries that place them alongside their ‘purer’ Muslim brethren in works that belong openly to the tazkirā genre.Footnote ⁵⁴ A man with the name Brindāvandās, dubbed ‘Khwushgū’, who lived in the Mughal capital at Delhi, was so deeply involved in the production of tazkirās that the collection of biographical notices he produced would become the standard work for the school in which he participated, which was devoted to his Muslim poet-guru Bīdar.Footnote ⁵⁵ We have nothing of that sort in the Bhaktamāl. Nonetheless, what it gives us is a biographical dictionary whose genesis would have been much harder to imagine had it not been for the well-known literary practice of tazkirās that were present in the world in which Nābhādās must have lived. And it is not at all hard to imagine that Nābhā would have been well acquainted with the existence of these writings. Aside from the fact that Sufis travelled rather freely, they also had some very visible institutional bases. Surely Nābhā would have travelled from Galta to Pushkar on one or more occasions—so many pilgrims did—and along the way he would have passed the great Chishti shrine at Ajmer.

If this is true—that Nābhā owed a silent but very significant debt to Indian Sufi culture—then it is sad to have to acknowledge a bitter aftermath. In the course of time his Bhaktamāl played a key role in actions that helped build high conceptual walls between Hindus and Muslims. Consider its impact on H. H. Wilson's Religious Sects of the Hindus, first published in 1828 and 1832. In the Vaishnava section of Religious Sects with which he began, Wilson made extensive use of the Bhaktamāl, building outwards from its personal portraits to descriptions of religious communities associated with the bhakta in question. Thus saints became sects and, on some occasions, Wilson allowed his sociological interest to suggest a group or order that actually did not exist, as in the case of his ‘Mirabais’. Wilson also made use of sources other than the Bhaktamāl, especially two Persian-language studies that had been commissioned by British authorities from prominent Hindus living in Banaras, but these were primarily ethnographic studies oriented to the present day. When it came to asserting a link between present-day realities and the past that had produced them, Nābhā’s text was his principal resource. Grierson followed Wilson's lead.

Indigenous early modernity

As many readers of this journal are aware, there is a movement abroad in Hindi-language scholarship these days to claim for India a distinctive and indigenous form of modernity that had its origins in just the period of which we have been speaking—the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—thereby provincializing Europe, to use Dipesh Chakrabarty's memorable phrase.Footnote ⁵⁶ No figure is more central to making the case for such a national or locally based modernity (deśaja or ārambhik ādhuniktā) than Kabīr, our familiar lodestone, and no one presses his case more eloquently than Purushottam Agrawal.Footnote ⁵⁷ It is striking therefore that Agrawal tries to make new sense of the bond between Kabīr and Rāmānand, the bond that Rāmānandīs like Nābhādās asserted at the end of the sixteenth century itself. By cutting away the Sanskrit texts that came to be attributed to Rāmānand only much later, as Agrawal shows, he gives us a ‘Hindi Rāmānand’ who could much more plausibly have been Kabīr's guru than the Sanskrit-espousing Rāmānand who was created to serve the needs of religious ‘upward mobility’ felt by Rāmānandī ascetics in the early twentieth century.Footnote ⁵⁸ This enables Agrawal to preserve the sectarian bond that Nābhā asserts, just as Grierson had done—if far less self-consciously—a century earlier.

I would take a different route. I would cut that away too. I find no evidence of this guru-pupil tie in Kabīr's own utterances and no particular hint of it in the Hindi poetry of Rāmānand that survives from the early modern period. These are a mere handful of compositions in any case, in contrast to the many hundreds that had already been attributed to his supposed pupil Kabīr by the end of the sixteenth century.Footnote ⁵⁹ As for Kabīr, when he speaks of the guru it is the satguru he has in mind, the ‘true teacher’ of the heart or mind who exists in all of us. I find no trace of Rāmānand there.

The purpose of arguing this point is not to propose that the stringently nirguṇa Kabīr can be separated from the saguṇa aspect that also appears in his verse—the via negativa from the via positiva, one might say, or the Protestant from the Catholic. I agree with Agrawal that one cannot ultimately dissociate the anti-imagist or anti-ritualist Kabīr from the Kabīr who is the mystical lover longing for a divine presence, a woman for her mate. To that divine presence he gives Vaishnava names like Rām, Hari, and Mādhav (Krishna). The facts of the case will not allow this saguṇa side of Kabīr to be separated from the other, no matter how hard the Sikhs, for example, tried to pull them apart. If we examine the earliest collections of Kabīr's poetry with our philological antenna engaged, we find that these two sides of Kabīr's personality are firmly joined as far back as we can trace his poems. But this does not mean Kabīr was inspired by Rāmānand—and therefore by the Vaishnava religiosity for which Rāmānuja is so famous. What was happening in Kabīr and in the society that received him so gladly is fundamentally separate from any ties that would establish its continuity with a deeper past. In Kabīr and others like him, with their merchant, artisan, and complex Hindu-Muslim roots, we see something far more radically reformist than even the image of ‘four churches of the Reformation’ would imply. This something has sometimes been called sant religion—the religion of those who were proclaimed to be good or true and whose language, message, and social origins set them substantially apart from what older understandings of Hindu (and for that matter Islamic) dharma had served to project as normative.

With such people and those who gathered to hear their songs and the preaching of their word, as reflected in the great anthological surge we observe circa 1600, we do seem to have something quite new. This is a religious vernacularity that stands at considerable remove from the courtly vernacularities that Sheldon Pollock has so effectively explored, despite the fact that they share what can broadly be described as a common tongue.Footnote ⁶⁰ It seems likely that Luther was far more deeply entwined with such courts, both secular and monastic, than Kabīr ever was. And Luther was clearly literate—something quite doubtful for Kabīr. But all this serves to make Kabīr, if anything, more ‘Lutheran’ than Luther himself, more purely the ‘Protestant’ than many European Protestants. He was an outsider chiming in. So when Nābhā, swimming in the Śrī or Rāmānandī order of ascetics, claimed Kabīr as belonging to one of the four sampradāys—his own—that turned Kabīr into a different kind of reformer than the man himself had been. It made him a reformer who inherited a reforming past—Rāmānand's. It bequeathed to him in appropriate measure the formal concerns that reformers were supposed to have. It turned him from an iconoclast into a builder and it made him into someone kings and Brahmans could embrace—and find themselves embraced in the embracing. In Grierson's apt translation, it made him in every sense a man of the Reformation.