Heidelberg Asian Studies Publishing

This exploratory chapter examines the great diversity of literary production in the Gurmukhi script in the early modern period, only a subset of which has received significant scholarly attention. One domain in which Gurmukhi materials invite consideration is in what Michael Allen (2017: 291) has called the field of ‘Greater Advaita Vedānta’, which incorporated vernacular works, non-philosophical works, and works that integrated with diverse traditions such as bhakti, Sikhism, and yoga. This was a part of the proliferation of Advaita thought across diverse languages and scripts in North India, and its influence in Gurmukhi philosophical and literary domains has been considerable; Jvala Singh’s new work on the Sūraj Prakāś, by Santokh Singh, provides crucial new details on this dynamic. The Vicārmālā attributed to Anāthadās / Anāthapurī can be put in this category of ‘Greater Advaita’: composed in VS 1726/1669 CE, it was published in print as early as 1876 CE in Devanāgarī with Hindi commentary – and perhaps earlier – and later into Gurmukhi; it was later translated into English, on the basis of the 1876 commentary by Lala Sreeram (Calcutta, 1886). In addition to being well represented in Gurmukhi manuscript collections, the Vicārmālā was thus also a popular text for replication and commentary in the burgeoning print culture of colonial North India – and in Punjab. It was therefore clearly a well-known text over an extended time in Punjab, in Gurmukhi, in both manuscript and print. This paper will consider this text in preliminary terms, as an example of the field of Greater Advaita Vedanta in the Punjab context, to suggest the diversity of texts available in Gurmukhi script that invite our attention.