In the Shrine of the Heart. Sants of Rajasthan from the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
24 Mar 2023
DOI: 10.11588/hasp.1151
Chapter 2: The Authors and Their Network
The authors represented here were connected by a network, in principle laid out by Dādū himself. This network linked and keeps linking towns and villages where he set up his residence for shorter or longer periods; otherwise he roamed in the company of his disciples. This circuit touched upon the previously existing religious centre of Didvana, the hub of the Proto-Nirañjanīs, represented by Hardās from the first half of the sixteenth century. The network corresponds by and large to a section of Indian trade routes eventually joining international ones. The international trade of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries benefited from political stability in Mughal India and its relations with Safavid Iran, and the Ottoman Empire.1 One of the chief commodities transported on the trade routes in Rajasthan and adjacent regions was salt from the salt lakes of Sambhar and Didvana, important sources of income of the Rajput states and therefore also a bone of contention between Marwar and Eastern Rajasthan. The trade route running via Hanumangarh to the north was lined with towns inhabited by Agraval traders, originating from Agra and spread over the whole region between Delhi, Agra, Rajasthan and well beyond. Important traders like the Maheshvaris, whose genealogical origins lie in Didvana, are reported to have lived in Bahavalpur in Sind.2 Among other commodities for which Rajasthan was famed were textiles, of which a centre was Merta. Its rank as a commercial and financial centre is evidenced by demographic numbers referring to 1663, when out of the town’s 5,860 individuals from occupational castes, 2,638 were mahājans, merchant-bankers, and other traders, among whom were also numerous Multanis.3
Seminal information on all the authors except Hardās comes from the cumulative hagiography Bhaktmāl, written in 1660 by the Dādūpanthī Rāghavdās. It forms the Dādūpanthī remake of Nābhādās’s Bhaktmāl, dating from around 1600. Rāghavdās’s work comprises mythical, historical, and actually living figures. It also records sects that shared the habitat with the Dādūpanth and thereby represents a regional religious ethnography. Dādū alone is the topic of a hagiography named Dādūjanmalīlā, written by his disciple Jangopāl probably soon after Dādū’ death in 1603.4 While focusing on Dādū, it also recounts the presence and deeds of his disciples at the various stages of his life, but it does not give as extensive information on individual sadhus and devotees as is the case in Rāghavdās’s work. Jangopāl’s work is of greatest sociological importance in recording the life of Dādū and the process in which he and his followers established their spiritual realm and made their first monastic settlements. These were founded along their circuit on which they depended on the patronage of laymen. Jangopāl, a prolific poet in his own right, came from a merchant caste in whose dealings record keeping was fundamentally important. He put his caste-specific skill to use in his hagiography. In chronological sequence he gave the details of Dādū’s shifts and stays, the various localities, the disciples who helped establish the local strongholds of the emergent sect, and the patrons. Apart fom the hagiographical sources mentioned, other largely unpublished hagiographical material of a later time records oral history. Information about our authors and their network comes also from colophons of early manuscripts. Inscriptions, records on land grants and taxation, topographical and architectural testimony give additional information and corroborate many a historical detail recorded in hagiographical accounts.
Hardās, an Early Yogic bhakta of Marwar
Hardās, who belonged to Didvana, predates the Dādūpanth. His lifetime is variously estimated as dating between 1455 and 1538 or 1543 CE.5 Didvana, with its six of formerly seven magnificent gates, was an ancient town owing its commercial and political importance to its salt production, and, therefore, was connected to the major trade routes. The neighbouring principalities competed for control over it for its salt tax. Called in the Hindi texts of the period by its ancient name Ḍiṇdupura, the town was the habitat of Hindus, Jains, and Muslims, and the cradle of the Maheshvari traders, named ‘Ḍīdū-Maheśvarīs’.6 In the Sultanate period, Firuz Shah Tughluq had two mosques built in the town. In the same era the governors of Gujarat and the Rāṇās of Mewar also competed for control over Didvana. Rāṇā Kumbhā of Mewar (1433–1468) collected Didvana’s salt tax and thereby confirmed his suzerainty over the area which he assigned to the Khans of Nagaur.7 For the Śvetāmbar Jains, Didvana is a sacred place. The Khartara-gaccha Jain monk Samaysundar mentions that his congregation (saṅgha), while on its way from Gujarat to Lahore on Emperor Akbar’s invitation, passed through Didvana in 1591 and held debates and discussions in the city.8 Akbar had the mosque in the local fort built in the memory of Muʿīn al-Dīn Chishtī. The Kyāmkhānīs of Fatehpur in Shekhavati also held Didvana for a while, and its salt trade is mentioned by the Kyāmkhānī poet Jān Kavi.9 Didvana’s bond with the Dādūpanthīs was forged by Dādū sometime around 1596. His followers and patrons there were merchants.10 Prominent among these was Prāgdās Bihāṇī, who had his ashram in the town and moved to Fatehpur in 1606. Here he founded the ashram that was to house Sant luminaries like Santdās and Sundardās.11
Hardās was the fountainhead of a Sant bhakti supported by yoga practice. This type of bhakti was carried further by the Nirañjanī sect, the centre of which was and has remained Didvana. Hardās referred to Gorakhnāth and Kabīr as the two masters whom he followed. True to this, he combined bhakti to the formless God with a yoga of breath discipline and meditation. There can be no doubt that he was a sadhu of the yogic bent, for in his compositions he frequently summons the yogic ascetic (avadhū). His impact was so great that he was made part of the pentad of authors canonized by the Dādūpanthīs, at the latest a decade after the death of Dādū. He is mentioned with great respect by a number of disciples of Dādū, though only once in a poem assigned to Dādū but not forming part of his canonized works. This is indicative of the zeal shown by the young Dādūpanth to affirm Dādū’s connection with the Marwari tradition of bhakti-yoga. The hagiographer Rāghavdās does not mention Hardās. Hardās’s oeuvre consists of 102 songs, just five distichs, and four didactic treatises. Terse and rich in Marwari vocabulary and popular imagery, it challenged Dādūpanthī commentators of the eighteenth century. Only in 2007, Hardās’s works were edited for the first time with a Hindi paraphrasis, based largely on the commentaries. The samples appearing in this volume represent the first translation of his poetry into a western language.12
Dādū, the Founder of the Dādūpanth
According to tradition, Dādū was born in Ahmedabad in 1544 (VS 1601). He came from a family of cotton-carders (dhuniyā or piñjārā), typically Muslims. From Ahmedabad he moved to Rajasthan. This origin raises questions as to his religious orientation and the causes that made him move to the boarderland between Marwar and Eastern Rajasthan. He first appeared in Sambhar around 1568, and stayed there until 1579. The town is now part of the Jaipur District. The Chauhan Rajputs ruled from Sambhar before transferring their capital to Ajmer in the twelfth century.13 In Sambhar, too, stood the temple of their clan goddess Śākambharī. The town had great economic importance due to its salt-lake which can be traced back at least to the tenth century.14 Its salt production is also mentioned in an inscription dating from Firuz Shah Tughluq’s epoch, when a Jain temple, too, was built in the city. Apart from its salt, Sambhar’s saltpetre trade was important for the economy of the Mughal period.15 After the Khans of nearby Nagaur and the Rajputs of Chittaur had fought over the town in the fifteenth century, the Marwar king Māldev took control of it in the mid-sixteenth century.16 In the Mughal period Sambhar became a part of the province of Ajmer. Here, Akbar struck his first marriage alliance with Rajputs by marrying the daughter of the raja of Amber, Bhārmal. This was in 1562, and in the same year he built a mosque and a tank in the town. Sambhar’s architecture was added on to by his successor Jahangir as well as by Aurangzeb.17 The Mughal highway (śāh-rāh or pātiśāhī mārg) passed through the city and further routes converged in Sambhar making it a trade hub.18 Besides, the major commercial route from Agra to Surat passed close by. This route merged with the royal highway in Amber and, after a split, again merged with it in Ajmer.19 When the Kyāmkhānīs of Fatehpur traced their parentage, they took pride in connecting themselves to the town.20
Sambhar became an important place of the Dādūpanth as Dādū lived there for seveal years. He is commemorated by a canopied memorial in the salt lake and by a magnificent temple of the nineteenth century in the market place which superseded a previous simpler construction.21 It was also in Sambhar that Gopāldās compiled his Sarbaṅgī in 1628.22 In Sambhar, Dādū is recorded to have led the life of a married householder, with two sons and two daughters. After his death, each of his children took turns in running the sect. His two sons became consecutively his successors as heads of the Dādūpanth of Naraina, the headquarters of the sect. In Sambhar, Dādū preached and recruited his first disciples. At this stage, the view of him as a householder disappears from hagiography, and henceforward he is described as a semi-sedentary sadhu carving out a spiritual realm for himself, roaming the region with his disciples and benefiting from local patronage. The settlements coming up—if not exactly the original buildings, reminiscences thereof—have largely survived, and the communities taking pride in their patronage of the Dādūpanth have stayed in place into our day and age.
Dādū’s spiritual affiliation before and after his arrival in Sambhar is an intriguing issue and a delicate one for the Dādūpanth. Dādū himself spoke of the invisible satguru who manifested himself twice to him in the guise of an old man, once in Dādū’s childhood and a second time in his teenage days. The name given him in hagiography is Bābā Būṛhā, ‘Venerable old man’. The verses in which Dādū proclaimed his mysterious initiation have been cited by Dādūpanthīs over and over again, from the time of the earliest manuscripts. Hagiography describes the procedure of this initiation, which had both Sufi and tantric characteristics. Dādū himself made it abundantly clear that his religious path was beyond the beaten sectarian tracks, a fact that has been endorsed unanimously by his sect. He is said to have picked up an ancient path beyond sects and sifted elements from other creeds which served his purpose. This is, of course, an interpretation reflecting debate about true faith in the midst of the manifold religious debates of the period. It has been suggested by William G. Orr that in Sambhar Dādū had been initiated by a Sufi shaikh named Buḍḍhan from the Qādirī order.23 Buḍḍhan is not an uncommon name for a shaikh. This shaikh belonged to a family of hereditary qazis of Sambhar and had dedicated himself to religious life. At least until the mid-twentieth century, Orr reports, the qazi of Sambhar sent a robe of honour to the newly installed mahant (superior) of Naraina. Without the receipt of this item, the ceremony would not have been complete. Furthermore, on the eleventh day of the bright half of the month of Phālgun, the mahant of Naraina would send a formal payment of the kind due to an inferior to the qazi family of Sambhar. This ceremony was discontinued in 1931. It may, however, be mentioned that into the 1980s, during the procession at the annual melā of Naraina in the month of Phālgun, the procession stopped at the mosque and the imam and the mahant of Naraina exchanged formal greetings. The Muslim parentage of Dādū has been all but wiped out in the Dādūpanth’s representation of their founder, and the argument of Orr has, therefore, not been pursued without bias. However mysterious the encounter between young Dādū and his satguru may have been, it does not seem unlikely that in Sambhar he may have affiliated himself to a local Sufi before laying out his own religious path.
In 1579, when Dādū was thirty-five years old, he moved to Amber and settled at the foot of the hill on which the residence of the rajas of Amber was situated. Hagiography has it that around 1584 the raja mediated a meeting of Dādū with Emperor Akbar in Fatehpur Sikri.24 After fourteen years of residence in Amber, Dādū moved to Kararala (Kalyāṇpur), where he stayed for a year, after which he resumed the life of an itinerant preacher. For around ten years he roamed the region, made disciples, and finally, in 1602, settled in Naraina (Narāiṇā, Narāyaṇā). Naraina became the headquarters of the Dādūpanth. Hagiography postdating the seventeenth century describes Dādū’s entry into Naraina, and in the twenty-first century, this report has been transmitted in stage performances as well as CD and DVD recordings. According to this narrative, a snake appeared before Dādū and showed him the way to the spot where he should establish his settlement. This legend is significant because it links Dādū with both the myth of origin of the Kachvaha dynasty of Amber25 as well as with the snake as companion of Gogā and other folk deities. Corresponding to this image is also the metaphor of the guru as the supreme healer from snake bite. In this fashion, Dādū is rooted in the regional understanding of saintliness.
Naraina is located close to Sambhar and Didvana and flourished thanks to the salt trade. The town was a nodal point of the trade route running from Bayana in the Bharatpur District to Khatu in the Sikar District, and from Naraina to Ajmer. In the early sixteenth century and during the Mughal period, Naraina was known as Mozamābād. Similar to Sambhar and Didvana, Naraina had long-standing and strong constituencies of Jains, Muslims, and Nāths, all of them predating the Dādūpanthīs. Here, Jainism can be traced back to the tenth century, and the town was listed among the important Jain pilgrimage places in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.26 The town had been under the rule of the Chauhans of Sambhar and Ajmer since the eleventh-twelfth century. In 1305, its fortress served ʿAlā al-Dīn Khaljī as a jail for several thousand Mongols taken prisoner in Siwalik and finally executed in Naraina. In the fifteenth century, Mujāhid Khān made both Naraina and Sambhar part of his principality of Nagaur.27 He made the town strikingly beautiful to serve him probably as a retreat recalling ‘the luxury of the palaces of the Malwa Sultan’.28 In 1437, he built the huge reservoir29 on the banks of which the Dādūpanth would install itself, and in 1440/1 had a ceremonial gateway (Tīn Darvāzā) erected over a ramp for drawing water.30 The mosque, constructed in 1444, is one of the finest built by the Khans of Nagaur. In the sixteenth century, Naraina came under the rule of Māldev of Jodhpur.
The Dādūpanth owes this magnificent site to the munificence of Bhojrāj from the Khaṅgārot clan of the Kachvahas, the ruling Rajputs of Amber, whose territory it was by that time.31 Dādū was granted land on the eastern side of its reservoir. Jahangir visited the city in 1605 and gifted Dādū’s successor, Garībdās, two residential buildings and a well.
Dādū died in Naraina in May 1603. In response to the myth surrounding the death of Kabīr and also that of Gurū Nānak, according to which their Hindu and Muslim disciples fought for the correct funeral—for cremation, the Hindus, and for burial, the Muslims—Dādū willed that his body should be neither cremated nor buried but exposed to the wilderness in Bhairana, not far from Naraina. This kind of funeral remained somewhat singular in the Dādūpanth. Bhairana became a pilgrimage site studded with memorial slabs of sadhus, and it is also to Bhairana that some people take ashes of their deceased. Over the last few decades, Dādūpanthīs have invested stupendously in its buildings and infrastructure.
Dādū left an oeuvre of over 2,450 aphorisms and some 440 songs, albeit whose numbers vary according to the editions. United in this huge corpus are his own compositions as well as items he adopted from the tradition by adding (or not adding) his signature. In Sant poetry, authenticity is established by sharing and confirming the truth transmitted by previous saints and constantly adapted by later ones. Dādū forms no exception, but in its totality his oeuvre exudes the special flavour expressed in his epithet dayālu or dīn dayālu, ‘Compassionate (with the Afflicted)’. This was given to him by his earliest disciples. One may not go wrong in associating it to the following chain of thought: The Supreme Self is often called by Dādū Rām-Rahīm. Raḥmān, ‘the Most Graceful’ and Rahīm, ‘the Most Merciful’ are quintessential epithets of Allah as they appear in the Basmala. If one applies this to the principle that the Supreme Self and the human self are identical, ‘Dādū Dayālu’ points to this unity. Dādū’s works started being collected during his lifetime, and its edition was finalized and practically canonized soon after his death. There do, however, exist compositions ascribed to him that stand outside that canon and have been preserved in anthologies. Because the anthologies started appearing within twenty-five years subsequent to his death, one gets a clear picture of the compositions considered authentic by his earliest followers.
In Rāghavdās’s hagiography, Dādū is the point of gravitation of a galaxy of saints. Accordingly, the two stanzas forming his account of Dādū can be expected to contain the very essence of the master’s life and message.32 Written over half a century after Dādū’s death, these stanzas bear the stamp of the unanimous views held by early Dādūpanthīs. They represent just the seed of a Dādū vita, which has remained unabatedly in flux. The longer recension of Rāghavdās’s hagiography is recited and expounded to this day regularly by sadhu preachers at sectarian melās and caumāsā functions and transformed into plays and films.
Rāghavdās says:33
The deeds of Dādū, Compassionate with the Afflicted (Dīndayāl), says Rāgho, were performed by Hari:
There were seven parties in Sambhar, from the food served by all of these he partook,
He met Emperor Akbar, and created a vision of a throne of light;
The hand of the qazi became infested; a pile of cotton was burnt;
The letters in an epistle were changed; he made a boat reach across the sea;
In Shahpura he met a rich merchant; by the power of Hari the elephant was frightened;
The deeds of Dādū, Compassionate with the Afflicted, says Rāgho, were performed by Hari.
The servant Dādū was another sun, he released a pure rain of words.
His utterances meant good fortune because they contained wisdom, bhakti and renunciation,
After sifting through countless treatises, he presented a path in brief,
His intellect was absolutely clear and unobstructed, he shone pure and omniscient,
He emitted the light of supreme bliss which put an end to the deep darkness on earth,
The syllables he spoke were drops, his distichs water, his songs were streams in the sea of Hari,
The servant Dādū was another sun, he released a pure rain of words.
The first of the stanzas is basically an aide-mémoire for the informed, sadhu preachers or ordinary devotees. It enumerates miracles which Dādū performed, or rather, which were manifested by Dādū as the agent of the formless divine performer of these. They were not attributed to Dādū from the distant vantage point of later generations. Rather were they imagined as real by his earliest disciples and mentioned, for example, by Jangopāl, Bakhanāṃ, and Santdās. During his very lifetime, Dādū was experienced as divine. In his commentary of 1800 CE on Rāghavdās’s hagiography, Caturdās dwelt on those miracles at length. They belong to the Dādūpanth’s hagiographic stock inventory. In the form of ‘Praise of Kevaldās’ they form part of the sect’s liturgy.34 The marvels mentioned are: First of all, Dādū’s omnipresence at seven festivities held simultaneously in Sambhar; secondly, his meeting with Akbar in Fatehpur Sikri at which he appeared to the Emperor all-luminously sitting on a throne of light; thirdly, the sad end of a qazi of Sambhar who had denounced Dādū, and the ruin of another man of qazi status who dealt in cotton; fourthly, the transformation of a ban issued against Dādū in Sambhar into a warrant of privilege; fifthly, Dādū’s remote rescue of merchants and their goods from a capsizing ship, and finally Dādū’s taming of a mad elephant. Not a few of these miracles belong to the existing popular stock.35 The stanza is an exemplar of the localization of common hagiographic events. Its theological thrust lies in the first line, repeated as the concluding line. In this it is emphasized that the deeds Dādū manifested were actually deeds of God. This reflects the identity of Dādū with the innate formless god, and is also expressed in the Dādūpanthī greeting formula (dādū rām) satya rām, ‘(Dādū is Rām), truth is Rām’. Moreover, the murmured mantra dādū-rām, repeated and eventually fading into just rām-rām, conveys the same.36 The second stanza extols the epiphany of Dādū during his audience with Akbar. Dādū, sitting on a throne of light, appears as sheer luminosity. It is of greatest significance for our understanding of this saint’s community and of his own thought against the background of the period’s religious perceptions. Rāghavdās calls Dādū another sun and the light providing highest bliss. To Rāghavdās is also assigned the perhaps apocryphal hymn on the ‘Throne of Light’ (nūra hī kā takhata…), which figures powerfully in the Dādūpanthī liturgy.37 This evokes the notion of Muḥammad as a mode of the divine spirit appearing as light (nūr muḥammadī) as it was worked out by Ibn ʿArabī.38 This notion of the preexistent light of the Prophet inspired the Sufis of South Asia. The throne of light evokes the ‘throne verse’, āyat al-kursī, Quran 2.255, and the luminosity of Allah, famously expressed in the ‘light verse’, āyat al-nūr, Quran 24.35. This is all the more striking because Akbar himself was hypostatized as the sun, identical with the divine light, by a complex apparatus of literary and artistic means.39
The hagiographic emphasis on the light of Dādū is fully warranted by Dādū’s own thought. Profusely does he speak of the supreme luminosity. This notion is preponderant in a composition found at the end of the ‘Chapter on the Divine Guru’ of the sākhī part of his works.40 In their aṅgabandhu recension it is grouped as the second of four stanzas, of which it is the centre piece, under the heading ‘Teaching of the Guru’ (guru upadesa).41 It represents an enumeration of the aspects of the supreme truth each of which lending itself to be recited as a mantra. This sequence of aspects culminates in the nineteenth to the twenty-second aspects: nūra, teja, joti, prakāsa, all of these meaning ‘light’. Together with the preceding aspects, the four light mantras are summarized as the Supreme (parama). The cluster of mantras of light arguably forms one of the links by which Dādū joined Muslim and Hindu sensibilities. Though this is not spelt out in Sant poetry, one can imagine that the idea of the Supreme Being and the saint embodying it also formed a transit both to the yogic concept of the Universal Man (mahā-puruṣa or puruṣa) as well as to Muḥammad as the Perfect Man (insān kāmil), according to Ibn ʿArabī.42
There is, finally, in Rāghavdās’s second stanza a proposition reflecting the Dādūpanth’s shared opinion of the character of Dādū’s doctrine (line 3). Repeatedly early Dādūpanthīs—to mention only Jagjīvandās, the first mentor of Sundardās; Sundardās himself, or Bakhanāṃ—affirm that Dādū’s teaching is nothing but the truth of yore presented in an easily accessible form. The path of Dādū is the path of the Supreme Self, and on earth, it begins with mythical figures like Prahlād or Dhruv and runs through Śaṅkara, the Sants and Nāths until it is revealed again in pristine clarity by Dādū.43
Bakhanāṃ, the Archer Poet
Bakhanāṃ (Bakhanāṃ, Bakhanau) was a resident of Naraina. He had met Dādū first in Sambhar, where he invited the former to Naraina to a feast organized in his honour. This was sometime around 1570.44 That he was able to mobilize support for this indicates the authority Bakhanāṃ enjoyed in his community. He was of Muslim descent, though no further details about his particular community have been recorded. The Dādūpanth describes him as a householder. He outlived Dādū and spoke affectionately of Garībdās, Dādū’s successor. Garībdās died in 1636, a fact not mentioned by Bakhanāṃ. Accordingly, he may have been dead by that year. Bakhanāṃ’s death memorial in Naraina disappeared long ago.45 Rāghavdās says of him:46
Bakhanauṃ, a great archer, is a disciple of Dādū Dīndayāl.
He is devoted to his guru and a servant of the servants, representing in essence staunch virtue and remembrance.
His words are wrapped in the mood of separation, and he can guess others’ inclinations.
He is drunk with the intoxicating juice of Hari, day and night he is inebriated.
His work revealing immediate experience is pure, the Lord [himself] delights in listening to it.
He has erased worldliness, egotistic attachment, arrogance and frenzy from his mind and body.
Bakhanauṃ, a great archer, is a disciple of Dādū Dīndyāl.
In the panth of Dādūjī, Bakhanauṃ is the archer poet,
A knower of the true being twanging hard and stretching the bow string of his rhymes.
Few are able to expound his words,
The power of his bow is like that of Arjun in the Bhārat war.
His pads and sākhīs spread within and beyond the boundaries
As far as moon and sun travel on their circuit.
Rāgho says: Day and night he pleases Rāmjī,
He does not accept defeat in singing, his singing makes him a Gandharv.
Bakhanauṃ is great, passionately loving Hari, drunk with the juice of love.
He pleases by his speech, his words charm the mind.
When he sings like a Gandharv, he is in tears for his Lord,
His love is endearing, and he dispenses happiness to all.
With every breath he is engaged only in remembering the Name,
He is disillusioned with the world and inebriated (with God).
When the king of Delhi came, he instructed all qazis,
Made the pandits bow, and shattered the doubt of the king.
Rāghavdās speaks of him either in predicative sentences without copula or in the present tense, which can also function as a historical present. So the verses provide no clue whether Bakhanāṃ was alive or dead when Rāghavdās composed them. The authority Bakhanāṃ enjoyed among the followers of Dādū is revealed by the fact that he acted as a spokesman of the panth and contained the ill-will of orthodox critics of the sect when Emperor Jahangir (d.1627) visited Naraina. Maybe this was when the emperor was en route to the shrine of the Sufi saint Muˁīn al-Dīn Chishtī in Ajmer (d. 1230). Rāghavdās calls Bakhanāṃ an archer. The poet, in fact, speaks of himself allegorically as a lowly foot soldier, literally ‘quiver bearer’, of king Rām (text no. 37), wearing the virtues of a bhakta for his coat of mail. In this way Rāghavdās captures two facets of Bakhanāṃ’s personality, his bhakti stance of suffering heroically the pain of separation from God and the pointedness of his poetry. From Rāghavdās we also learn that he was a singer suffused with emotion, and even the mere textual surface of his songs gives an inkling of what his actual performances may have been like. In Bakhanāṃ’s work Muslim tradition is fused with the single-minded devotion to the interior Rām. He is one of the poets whose works mirror their regional culture in great detail, especially in similes and proverbial expressions.
Rajab, the Bridegroom bhakta
Rajab (Ar. Revering, Worshiping), who also spoke of himself as Rajab Khān, was a direct disciple of Dādū. Though modern editions spell his name ‘Rajjab’, this spelling does not occur in manuscripts.47 Sometimes, however, metre suggests the pronunciation ‘Rajjab’. According to Dādūpanthī tradition, Rajab was a Paṭhān Muslim from Sanganer, where he also had his ashram.48
Located about eleven miles south of Jaipur, Sanganer is now part of this city which was founded as late as the eighteenth century. Sanganer has an ancient history. It had for long been a Jain place of pilgrimage with a strong presence of Digambar Jains. Its magnificent Singhjī temple, affiliated to these, bears an inscription of the year 954 CE.49 The town was part of the small Kachvaha kingdom, which in the second half of the sixteenth century came under Mughal suzerainty and thence emerged as a major political and territorial power. It was founded anew by Sāṅgā, the fourth son of the Kachvaha Prithvīrāj (r.1503–27). At the same time, the bhaṭtārakas, domesticated Digambar Jain monks of great power and wealth, transferred their chief seat from Delhi to the region of Amber. Their presence in Sanganer is documented by a number of manuscripts dedicated to them.50 They triggered both veneration and strong disaffection. Veneration is testified by those manuscripts, while disaffection was aroused by their lavish, quite mundane domesticated lifestyle. In the seventeenth century, Digambar lay intellectuals, who wished to purge Jainism from what they saw as a corruption of the ideal of a houseless Jain monk, militated against this. Eventually Sanganer became the cradle of the reformist Terāpanth. The celebrated Jain merchant-author Banārsīdās, based in Agra and a stalwart of the Adhyātma movement among Jains, was witness to those conflicts when he visited Sanganer and Catsu (the modern Caksu). He records this in his autobiography dating from 1641.51
The dates of Rajab’s birth and death can only be estimated. He met Dādū first in Amber. This may have been sometime between 1594 and 1596. He is reported to have come to Amber as a bridegroom riding in his own wedding procession, and is said to have renounced worldly life then and there under the impact of his encounter with Dādū. Rāghavdās refers only obliquely to this decisive turn in his life. At that time, he was supposedly a teenage boy. He is said to have died before Sundardās, who passed away in 1689.
Rajab must have witnessed and been stimulated by the Jain debates, though in his oeuvre he engages with the Jains in the rather disappointing stale stereotypical fashion of Sant criticism of the Jains.52 Jain sources of his period from Sanganer suggest a lively, if not altogether friendly, Jain response to Santism which points to a fomenting relationship of give and take.
Assuming that Rajab was a Paṭhān, he would have exhibited properties particular to the Paṭhāns of Shekhavati, the land bordering modern Jaipur and extending further to the north.53 Paṭhāns hailing from Panni in Afghanistan had played a role in Shekhavati since the second half of the fifteenth century, when they joined the army of Rāo Śekhā, the ancestor of the Śekhāvat clans. These Paṭhāns venerated Śaikh Burhān, a Sufi saint who had allegedly come from Mecca via Multan to Amarsar, the place where Rāo Śekhā ruled. Śaikh Burhān is popular across the different faiths in Rajasthan. In Afghanistan, ancestors of the Paṭhāns had already been followers of the tradition from which Śaikh Burhān descended. As for Rāo Śekhā, he is reputed as a champion of Hindu-Muslim reconciliation. Because in his army Muslims and Hindus had to cooperate, he made sure that they could practise commensality. The Paṭhāns had to pledge giving up beef eating, and the Hindu soldiers, to give up eating pork—as was common with both Rajputs and low castes— and to start eating only halal meat. In our collection of texts, Rajab’s plea for strict non-violence and vegetarianism is amply illustrated. This attitude may well have been a feature of his type of Muslimhood liminally positioned between Hinduism and Islam. As for the Rajasthan of his period, there exist only occasional demographic details of Paṭhān presence. In the year 1663, for example, thirty-one Paṭhān families, tabulated as a category separate from other Muslims, were recorded in the city of Merta.54
Rajab is the author of an immense oeuvre of his own and the compiler of an anthology, like Gopāldās’s anthology named Sarbaṅgī, ‘Complete with all limbs’, a common title for a collection. The entry on him in Rāghavdās’s hagiography consists of no less than ten stanzas, some by Rāghavdās, some by others.55 The sheer quantity of stanzas shows the great distinction Rajab enjoyed in Dādū’s sect.
Rajab, of wondrous deeds, was a diligent disciple of Dādū.
To him appealed the formless, unsullied Nirañjana devoid of qualities.
In the Sarbaṅgī he told of the ultimate reality, in this he collected the poetry of all.
Of his distichs (sākhī), songs (sabad), and kavits, none comes without an example.
All the anecdotes in the world stand reverentially at his disposal.
He who remained day by day in the attire of a bridegroom had truly renounced women.
Rajab, of wondrous deeds, was a diligent disciple of Dādū. (378)
In Dādū’s sect there was a great Sant hero,
Rajab, the wondrous one, who bears resemblance with the following:
He is like Dhruv and Prahlād in relation to Nārad, like Hanumant to Rāmcandra,
The sons of Kaśyap in relation to the rising sun,
Bhartṛhari in relation to Gorakh, Kabīr in relation to Rāmānand,
Paraś, the righteous Sant, in relation to Pīpā.
Rāgho says: To Datta the naked ascetic Śaṅkara is related as a disciple,
From him originated ten names (of the Daśanāmī ascetics); one would find no end seeking a comparison for him. (379)
Rajab, the wondrous one, came to Amber in Rajasthan.
Moved by the word of the guru, he relinquished marriage with a woman.
‘You have received a human body, this is the instrument with which to serve the Lord,
Forgetful of this, you became addicted to the juice of wickedness and sensuality.’56
He threw his wedding crown away, and dedicated body and mind to the true one.
He embraced the vow of virtue and mortified his mind so that his lust was dispelled.
Guru Dādū gave him the joy of bhakti, he filled his breast with compassion.
He took to love, and great fortune watched above his head. (380)
In the Dādūpanth, Rajab is often imagined as having worn his wedding crown perpetually. His headgear—wedding crown or other—figures in the sect’s debates on the monastic habit, which Dādū rejected, an attitude shared by Rajab (text no. 47). Dādū is reported as having advised him to keep wearing his skullcap and put a headgear on top of this. Rather than implying a wedding crown, this may refer to the conical cap formerly worn by Dādūpanthī mahants. The alleged discussion scarcely predates the eighteenth century when Dādū’s advice against exterior signs of monkhood was all but forgotten.
Santdās, Erudition and Rapture
With Santdās, the network of sadhus is seen spreading further to Fatehpur, the capital of the Kyāmkhānīs. Fatehpur lies in the Shekhavati region of Rajasthan, now chiefly known for its magnificent havelīs of the colonial period. Unlike Marwar or Amber, this region was divided into small holdings, resulting from property not inherited by the eldest son but divided amongst all the sons. Consequently, the area was dotted with numerous small centres and administrative cities functioning as market towns. The rulers of such towns depended on merchant financiers to support economy and statecraft.57 Fatehpur hosted merchant communities at least from the fifteenth century. According to a temple inscription from the same century, they came from Hisar. Shekhavati was crossed by ancient trade routes which attained renewed importance in Mughal times. This helped local as well long-distance trade grow. As for Fatehpur, it features in Mughal economy also for its red stone.58 The Kyāmkhānīs had descended from Karamcand, renamed Kyāmkhān (d. around 1418) after his conversion to Islam, who became ṣubadār (governor) of Hisar in Panjab. A branch of his descendants, headed by Fateh Khān, founded an independent state with a new capital named Fatehpur, established in 1449. In Mughal times, the Kyāmkhānīs attained prominence as Alaf Khān (c. 1570–1626) rose high in the imperial military bureaucracy.59 Alaf Khān’s son, the poet Jān Kavi, asserts that Fatehpur was ‘officially’ given to the Kyāmkhānīs by Emperor Jahangir.60 By the time Dādūpanthīs had settled there, the rulers of Fatehpur had, thus, been Kyāmkhānīs for nearly two hundred years, a dynasty as much Hindu as Muslim. In 1713 and thus after the period under review, the last independent ruler of Fatehpur lost his kingdom to Rāo Śeosingh of Sīkar, and in 1780, finally, the Kyāmkhānī territory of Jhunjhunu also fell to the Śekhāvats.
The Kyāmkhanīs were followers of the Chishti Sufi Shaikh Nūruddīn Nūrjahāṁ (d. 1396) of Hansi. In the early seventeenth century, Shaikh Muhammad was the living pir (master) of this order, which was related to Shaikh (Bābā) Farīd of Pakpattan.61 The way in which Muslim and Hindu cultures coexisted in Fatehpur is well illustrated by an inscription of 1522 on the door of the Sītārām temple. It states that the nij mandir, the actual temple of the deity, is located in the underground cell. This was connected to the ruler’s fort by an underground passage to facilitate the access of the Rajput queens of the nawab and their retinue to their place of worship. The existence of underground passages, claimed or factual, connecting Hindu and Muslim places is emblematic of the discourse about the relationship between the two groups in Shekhavati (as much as it is emblematic of the present-day situation when access to those underground passages is usually declared to be blocked).62
Santdās, by his epithet Mārū Galtān(ī) ‘the one from the region of Marwar engrossed in the love of God’, lived from some unknown point in time in the ashram of Fatehpur, where his confrere Sundardās also resided. The Dādūpanthī settlement of Fatehpur had branched off from the ashram of Didvana. The mahant of both these places was Prāgdās. He received patronage from the Kyāmkhānīs. In the inscription commemorating Prāgdās’s death, the then ruler of Fatehpur, Daulat Khān, one of the five sons of Alaf Khān, is mentioned. The Dādūpanthīs of Fatehpur also enjoyed the handsome patronage of merchant caste families, as will be discussed presently in the paragraph on Sundardās.
As a Dādūpanthī centre, then, Fatehpur was related to Didvana. It is highly probable that Santdās is identical with the guru of the anthologist Gopāldās, a connection which harks back to Sambhar. To the ashram in Fatehpur Santdās added a house (dhām), probably his own retreat, as well as an opulent congregation hall (rāma sāla bahubidhi), which he mentions in his commemorative inscription for Prāgdās, the head of the monastery. Santdās passed away in 1639.63 A grand funeral memorial was made for him. In the archival papers relating to its erection, he is referred to as ‘Camaṛiyā Agravāl Mahājan’.64 This reveals clearly the caste nexus between the sadhus of that ashram and their patrons, among whom a Camariya Agraval family is explicitly mentioned.65 Rāghavdās’s description of Santdās introduces us also to his works:66
Santdās Galtān was a disciple of Dādū Dīndayālu.
Born in an Agravāl family and a genuine devotee, he was called Mārū.
In Fatehpur he built a house, his life was steeped in the colour of Hari.
He composed the Kaṛakho, brimming with flavour, in which he praised Dādū as standing upright like a pillar.
He wrote the flavorous commentary Ekādaśāvalī,
His disciples were Caturdās, Bhīkhjan and the astute Bālakrām.
Santdās Galtān was a disciple of Dādū Dīndayālu.
This description informs us that Santdās had pursued a project of vernacularizing the Bhāgavatapurāṇa. Manuscripts of his version of its tenth book are known.67 The untraced, or perhaps lost, Ekādaśāvalī must have been devoted to the eleventh book of the Bhāgavatapurāṇa. The Kaṛakho (Kaṛakhau, text no. 60) was considered noteworthy enough to be recorded by Rāghavdās. A kaṛakho is a poem invoking the heroic mood (vīr-gīt) and typical of Cāraṇ poetry. The composition is further qualified as a ballad (pavāṛā, v. a).68 As a ballad it exceeds the usual length of a kaṛakho. Ballads, too, are a common Cāraṇ genre. Santdās, thereby, wished to portray Dādū in a Cāraṇ mood as the hero of the faith who fights the great battle against himself and the heretics, and wins the kingdom of heaven for himself and his following. In Cāraṇ poetry, any battle can be hypertrophied as the (Mahā-)Bhārat war. This trope is found in Santdās’s composition, too (v. 44–5), and so are numerous stylistic devices of Cāraṇ poetry. Alliteration of harsh sounds is used in a more subdued way than in Cāraṇ poetry, and the sound pattern of the verse lines is not regulated in the particular Cāraṇ way, nor does Santdās use Ḍiṅgal, the literary language of the Cāraṇs. Santdās differs also from Cāraṇ poets by his explicit theological bent. The aetiology of Dādū’s appearance on the earth is that of Krishna’s avatar as it is formulated in the Bhagavadgītā (4.7): Becoming incarnate in the world to save the good and destroy the evil (vv. 1–2).
The text of the Kaṛakhau is based on two manuscripts produced in prestigious monasteries of the militant Dādūpanthīs, the Nāgās. One of these was their main seat, the other a no less prestigious branch of the former. Only one of the manuscripts mentions the date of its production, namely vs 1846/ c. 1789. By the 1780s, the Dādūpanthī Nāgās had fought in the battles of the king of Jaipur and, subsequently, became permanently attached to the Jaipur court. The manuscripts do not differ much from each other and share in being living texts in so far as they contain identical interpolations. The contents of these presuppose the period of Jaitrām, who was the abbot of Naraina from 1693 to 1732. He forged the Dādūpanth into a more or less coherent monastic brotherhood. The Nāgās had so far resisted a rigid internal organisation, unwilling to bend before a central authority. Their style of life, their patrons and the sources of their income differed starkly from those of sadhus, living in symbiosis with lay followers, and given to contemplation and preaching. Jaitrām’s leverage for creating coherence in the sect could not be grossly material, for sectarian branches are financially independent bodies. He constructed coherence rather by stipulating a ritual display, basically following the model of royal etiquette. This ritual is laid down as an ordinance and was enacted during the main festival of the sect, conducted at the seat of the abbot of Naraina. To this day, this takes place in the month of Phālgun (February–March) and is attended by all Dādūpanthī branches of sadhus. Jaitrām laid down that a ritual gift be presented to him by each sadhu attending the festival. This is called by Santdās the jizyā (v. 34a), the tax levied by the Mughal emperor from non-Muslims. As rendered explicit by Santdās, the term conveys that Dādū could claim quasi-imperial rank. In reality, it was and continues to be a mandatory ritual gift (bheṃṭ). Such ritual prestations constitute visible proof of hierarchical relationships, at royal courts and further down the social scale. It seems, then, that the passage mentioning the reforms launched by Jaitrām, about a century after Santdās, was inserted into this original source by a Nāgā author. The interpolation runs supposedly from verse 30 to 41. Thereby, Santdās’s Khaṛakhau constitutes the site of the progressively evolving sectarian history.
Sundardās, New Dimensions of Sant Poetry
Sundardās is also called ‘Sundardās the Younger’ (Choṭe Sundardās) to distinguish him from his senior namesake, an elusive figure allegedly the fountainhead of the militant Dādūpanthīs and revered by them as their prime guru.69
Rāghavdās, Sundardās’s contemporary, praises him in no less than nine stanzas, some his own, some by others unnamed authors. This shows that Sundardās had already attained distinction in the Dādūpanth by 1660. Rāghavdās gives a detailed account of Sundardās’s life. This includes his birth in a merchant family, Dādū’s blessing of his mother, his setting out for studies in Banaras at the age of eleven, and that he became an expert of several disciplines and settled in Fatehpur in Rajasthan after he completed his training. The local Kyāmkhānī nawab sought an audience with him, and Sundardās impressed him by several miracles. Only two of the verses are quoted here:70
Dādū’s Sundar was another Śaṅkarācārya.
Relinquishing the idea of dualism, he sang only the praise of the One without difference,
For all the devotees and the six philosophies existing in the world he had a maxim.
He firmly established his own teaching and the weighty point of view of his guru
Refuting other religions and dispelling illusion from the heart.
All the treatises—on the yoga of bhakti, knowledge, haṭha and sāṃkhya—he had studied thoroughly.
Dādū’s Sundar was another Śaṅkarācārya.
In Fatehpur the nawab came and clasped his feet:
‘Show me by a miracle that you pleased the Lord!’
When he lifted the corner of the carpet, he could see:
Fatehpur was lying beneath and was visible in plain view.
Under another corner was the lake, and under yet another, a big army,
And when he saw a dense forest under one more corner, the nawab was in awe.
Rāgho says: He protected the nawab’s horses and chariots from a collapsing stable.
No one has ever fully grasped the nature of the wise Sundardās.
In 1800, Caturdās, the commentator of Rāghavdās’s hagiography, elaborated greatly on Sundardās’s miraculous deeds and also gave a full list of all his compositions. Included in these is the Gazal, which does not form part of the collection of Sundardās’s works as he had commissioned it himself and is here published for the first time (text no. 79).
Sundardās was born in the Būsar lineage of the Khandelval merchant caste. He met Dādū as a young boy, presumably shortly before 1600, and became his disciple. The meeting took place at Sundardās’s birthplace Dausa on the nearby Tahalṛī hill, where Dādū’s brahman disciple Jagjīvandās had his ashram which was visited by Dādū on Jagajīvandās’s invitation. Dausa preceded Amber as the residence of the Kachvaha rajas. In the first decade of the seventeenth-century, when he was eleven years old, Sundardās went to Banaras as a ward of the same Jagjīvandās and for some time accompanied by a few other fellow Dādūpanthīs. His mentors had assigned the boy to a comprehensive education in the Sanskrit and vernacular learning of the day. In Banaras, Sundardās was trained in the dominant knowledge systems, among these the aesthetics of the ornate poetic (kāvya) tradition. Thus, Sundardās became the formally most educated among Dādū’s disciples. He personally commissioned most of his works to be written down in a single manuscript in 1685 ce, thus only a few years before his death in 1689.71 Such a case of an author’s personal authentification of his collected works is rare in the Sant tradition.
After spending almost eighteen years in Banaras, Sundardās returned to Rajasthan in c. 1625 and settled in Fatehpur, Shekhawati. As mentioned previously for Santdās, the Fatehpur branch was an extension of the Dādū Panthī centre in Didvana, both of which centres were patronized by merchant-caste families pertaining to the Agraval and Maheshvari castes. Records mention that several constructions, including a well, were made in the ashram of Fatehpur after the arrival of Sundardās, thanks to merchant patronage of this Dādūpanthī centre.72 Sundardās was celibate (brahmacārī) and the Dādūpanthī branch cultivated by him and his confreres flourished until the early twentieth century. Here follows the translation of a part of the record of donations to the ‘Sundardās’s monastery’, that is, the part of the monastery occupied by him, in which the nexus between sadhus and patrons from merchant castes is amply demonstrated:73
Śrī Svāmī Sundardāsjī came to Fatehpur in vs 1682 [1625 CE] on the 14th of the dark-half of the month of Kārtik. An abode was constructed for him by Surekā Kiśordās Mahājan Agravāl and his sons Chabīldās, Harirāmdās and Harināthdās on the 13th of the dark-half of the month of Āṣāḍh of vs 1695 [1638 CE]. It was completed on the 13th of the month of Aṣāḍh and cost 335 rupees. For the benefit of Rāmjī’s devotees. Those who do not serve the abode constructed by Kiśordās and the holy men living at this place are indifferent to Rāmjī. Following the order of Bābā Sundardās, all devotees constructed a well along with the monastery (astal). 1. Poddār, 2. Kejaṛīvāl, 3. Surekā, 4. Camaṛiyā, 5. Mor, 6. Budhiyā—all these six [families] gave 101 rupees (ikotarai) every morning for six days (chahūṃ tiṛkā), and the total cost was 611 rupees. It was finished on the 5th day of the dark-half of the month of Māgh of the year vs 1695 [1649 CE]. Catradās copied this from old documents. Sant Rāmbhakt reproduced it from these.
Sundardās most likely composed much of his work in Fatehpur where he spent the greater part of his life (text no. 81, vv. 8-9). In just a verse, he likens the status of the geographical area in which Fatehpur was located and known as the region of Bāgaṛ with the holy Banaras:74
The Bāgaṛ region is like the sacred realm of Kāśī—
Sundar, liberated while alive, is not worried a bit.
Sundardās’s presence in Fatehpur coincides with the heyday of its ruling Kyāmkhānī nawabs, Daulat Khān II and his brother Nyāmat Khān (Jān Kavi). The latter is attributed the authorship of several Brajbhāṣā works. Rāghavdās’s description and a number of inscriptions in Sundardās’s quarters of the Fatehpur monastery suggest that these Kyāmkhānīs patronized this Dādūpanthī centre opulently.
Bājīd, the Elusive Sant
Like Rajab, Bājīd (also Bājid or Bājind) was a Paṭhān. Manuscripts of his works have been recorded since 1600, and he is profusely quoted in anthologies. The Dādūpanth claims him as a direct disciple of Dādū, though the poet himself does not refer to him as his guru.75 Rāghavdās ranks him among the twelve closest disciples of Dādū and describes him as follows:76
He relinquished his Paṭhān family and recited the name of Rām,
By the power of worship, Bājīd prevailed over false appearance.
When he killed a deer, fear arose in him, and from this fear
He grew inclined to virtue and disinclined to vice.
He broke bow and arrows, and disciplined his body,
The knowledge of the Inaccessible arose in his heart.
Rāgho says: Day and night his body and heart were ravished by the Lord,
He played with the Creator, devoid of any means to play with.
The last line, from ‘devoid…’ to the end, implies perhaps a double entendre. Khel is the noun ‘play’ and also the family name of the Pannī Paṭhāns (RSK s. v. kheḷ), that is, the Paṭhāns that joined the army of Rāo Śekhā. If understood in this sense, that last portion of the verse can be rendered as: ‘free of the concerns of the Khel’, that is, liberated from social norms. Khel is, finally, one of the several terms expressing the possession by a superior power, such as a benevolent or malevolent spirit, or as in this case, by the interior Rām. Bājīd speaks of himself as a converted from false belief. In his commentary to Jangopāl’s Dādūjanmalīlā, Ātmāvihārī mentions his birthplace as Sāṃgāpur, that is, Sanganer. Neither can his affiliation to a spiritual lineage nor a lineage issuing from him be traced. This suggests that he avoided committing himself to a particular sect. Both the Dādūpanthīs and the overlapping Dādupanthī–Proto-Nirañjanī tradition of Didvana transmitted his works. This volume contains some of his distichs on the topic of sati, the self-immolation of widows, and aril verses. The distichs on sati unmask the unholy motives underlying an ostensibly sacred act, and the arils excel by demolishing pretence.
Text Sources
The sources of the texts are mentioned in Appendix 1. A number of modern Indian editions contain excellent commentaries, which, of course, bear in mind the requirements of a common reader. Accordingly, some editors depart from the original reading of the manuscripts in order to facilitate understanding. More often than not, the original reading is better, albeit following more ancient phonetical and scribal conventions. We have tried to represent the texts in the form in which they were originally circulated in the seventeenth century. In some cases, manuscripts from a later period or editions thereof were used in default of these. These texts, then, represent diplomatic editions. We have tried to interfere as little as possible with the orthography of either sources. Implicitly, we do not privilege modern standardization over what were considered in the past meaningful graphic representations.
Chapter 2: The Authors and Their Network
Hardās, an Early Yogic bhakta of Marwar
Dādū, the Founder of the Dādūpanth
Bakhanāṃ, the Archer Poet
Rajab, the Bridegroom bhakta
Santdās, Erudition and Rapture
Sundardās, New Dimensions of Sant Poetry
Bājīd, the Elusive Sant
Text Sources