The term dharmaśāstra denotes a vast historical intellectual tradition in South Asia, as both Kane’s volumes and this one make clear. I think of this as an intellectual field that expanded in India over millennia. I consider it a field of Indian social science, rather than a set of laws or legal texts in Sanskrit. Certainly, laws and legal texts are embedded within this field of social science, but Dharmaśāstra has always been about much more than legal codes. It has also included the general consideration of social order represented in diverse texts, from the epics to the Purāṇas to the local articulations of ideal and actual social order in regional literatures. As a set of texts about social order, Dharmaśāstra is an intellectual history of ideas about human organization in relation to soteriological concepts and goals, and these goals are engaged with transhistorical ideas as much as quotidian human ends. And though this literature is surely a grand intellectual field, it is still but a fraction of the intellectual traditions of South Asia that engage with dharma as a category of normative social order, much less of transcendental cosmic order. Within the field of Dharmaśāstra, we also have social critique, an immanent appraisal of normativity itself. That is to say, the broad intellectual engagement with dharma as a kind of indigenous Indian social science is not entirely or solely premised on articulating normative social orders, but also contains a critical relationship to normative social order. Buddhism, for example, was certainly a critique of dharma and so a Dharmaśāstra of a heterodox sort. Though Buddhism may provide the most well-known example of a critique of normative social order within the Sanskritic tradition, there are many other places to look for such critique, such as the epics, the Purāṇas, and the many literary traditions that intersect with bhakti . Texts in Sanskrit tend to dominate our understanding of Dharmaśāstra, as this volume and Kane’s work shows. But the engagement of dharma in conversation with the Sanskritic traditions of Dharmaśāstra is also a feature of the broad range of literary vernacularization on the subcontinent. In many cases, when Indians began creating literature in regional languages, they were not merely transferring norms of kingship (rājya ) or literary aesthetic (kāvya ), but they were also articulating intellectual and ethical positions on social order (dharma ).
In the history of literary vernacularization in Maharashtra with the emergence of Marathi, critique of normative social order of the kind epitomized by the Sanskritic Dharmaśāstra tradition is a central issue of debate. Literary vernacularization occurred in Marathi during the Yadava Dynasty, a period when a non-Brahmin royal family buttressed their rule with a complex system of state entitlements to Brahmins. And these entitlements were given, in the main, to support the production of Dharmaśāstra discourse in Sanskrit. The first literary works in Marathi engage a prevailing Brahmanical and Sanskritic intellectual world that proposed normative social orders and offer a critical appraisal of that very Brahmanical and Sanskritic intellectual world. The historical record of Marathi as a literary language is also a record of Marathi as a language of social critique that is self-consciously set alongside Sanskrit and debates about social difference in that language. Vernacularization, in Marathi in any case, was in part a critique of Dharmaśāstra, or perhaps an extension of it into a heterodox realm, both heterodox in terms of language (Marathi) and subject (a redress of social inequity to a degree). Indeed, even today, in the context of new kinds of vernacularization, like the vernacularization of democracy traced by political anthropologists of India, 1 we can still see that a critique of dharma as normative social order, of the regulation of human bodies in political and religious worlds, is a subject very much in the center of public debate.
In this chapter, I will take Marathi literary vernacularization in the thirteenth century as an opportunity to think through one possible relationship between the rise of vernacular intellectual worlds and the enduring questions of Dharmaśāstra. I do not argue that Marathi literary history is emblematic of all other regional literary histories—such a generalization would ignore far too much history. But I do suggest that the kinds of problems that were engaged by the earliest Marathi literary works are problems that still endure with later and even contemporary vernacular publics, both literary and religious ones, as well as political ones. I argue that Dharmaśāstra’s enduring claim to systematically represent normative social and legal orders represented one kind of sociocultural politics; vernacularization presents another, and sometimes competing, social politics. The limits and new possibilities for this emergent vernacular sociocultural politics in the name of dharma is perhaps nowhere clearer than when the normativities of the Sanskritic social sciences touch the vernacular world and its emergent literary sphere, where the “sacred canopy” of Sanskrit contacts the earthly ground of regional cultures. My argument is that vernacularization involves a reassessment of social relations because it, perforce, enlarges the scope of intelligible discourse to the widest sphere isolated to a region with a shared language. In other words, the lateral breadth of a cosmopolitan language like Sanskrit is replaced by the vertical depth of a regional language. A literary language that reaches a thin layer of society spread over a vast territory (Sanskrit) is replaced by a literary language that is confined by geography but spreads deeply among social strata—from elite to non-elite, among women and men, high caste and low. Given the relationship between social order and literary language here, it is natural to see also that this “paradigm shift” implies changes to shared concepts of social order fundamentally. This important demographic innovation compels a significant change of subject, a reconfiguration of discourse from elite registers to the context of everyday life, from the politics of the elite to the politics of the quotidian. My essay discusses what happens when the normative discourse of dharma and social order is rearticulated in the vernacular, the language of everyday life. My source for this discussion is the earliest extant work of Marathi literature, the Līḷācaritra (c. 1278 ce ), a text that remembers the life of Chakradhar (b. circa twelfth century), the founder of the Mahanubhav religious order. As we will see, the Līḷācaritra and the concerns of Chakradhar and the early Mahanubhavs are deeply engaged with regnant ideologies of social organization, and actual texts and discourses around Dharmaśāstra formed an important part of this text and the tradition it marks, including the tradition of literary vernacularization in Marathi.
There is a very good reason that the earliest layer of Marathi literary vernacularization engaged with the idea of dharma and with social critique in general. In the period in which literary Marathi arose, the Yadava Dynasty controlled most of the political territory called “Maharashtra.” From 1187–1317 ce , the Yadavas ruled a region that is coterminous, roughly, with the modern state of Maharashtra and that was called “Maharashtra” even in their time. Though the Yadavas were not Brahmins, they patronized Brahmins and Brahmanical institutions, proliferating a socioeconomic system around such royal entitlements as agrahāras (land grants), brāhmaṇapuris (village grants) vedaśālas (schools for Vedic and ritual instruction), maṭha s (institutions for Sanskrit and ritual learning), and so on. These were all forms of state endowment to fund Brahmanical activities of one kind or another. The non-Brahmin Yadavas and their royal patrons (many of whom were Brahmin) liberally endowed many such institutions that generally supported Brahmins, and sometimes literary castes such as Kayasthas and non-Brahmin temple priests, such as Guravs, to do things deemed “Brahmanical”: maintain temples and temple worship, teach Sanskrit, enact Sanskritic rituals, create genealogies, and produce Sanskrit literary texts. The single most common literary activity supported by the Yadavas and their royal patrons was the production of Dharmaśāstra materials by Brahmin authors and institutions of learning. The first figures of Marathi literary vernacularization were drawn from this sphere of Brahmanical elite clientalist culture. Chakradhar was the Brahmin son of a pradhān to the Gujarati king of Baruch, and the other major innovator of early Marathi literature, Jnandev, purported author of the Jñāneśvarī (c. 1290 ce ), was a Deshastha Brahmin of high Sanskrit learning from the very hub of Yadava-era Brahmanical culture, Paithan. 2
I refer to the general field of literary production, supported by a routinized system of endowments and entitlements, as a “Brahmanical ecumene,” borrowing a term of Rosalind O’Hanlon. 3 Chakradhar and Jnandev, as well as other figures associated with Marathi literary vernacularization, were all Brahmin, mostly male, and all associated, in one way or another, with the Brahmanical ecumene of the Yadava period and, hence, also with its focus on Dharmaśāstra. To understand how and why Dharmaśāstra mattered in the earliest layer of Marathi vernacularization requires a snapshot of the broad cultural, religious, and political field of Yadava rule in the territory of Maharashtra.
Though the Yadava kings, like many kings, were often referred to as “patrons of the arts,” the literary work of the Yadava period in Sanskrit appeared to come primarily in one flavor: the study and reification of an ideal social order around an analysis of Dharmaśāstra. 4 The fact that Dharmaśāstra eclipsed all other literary endeavors of the age may be suggestive. As Romila Thapar says of the original creation of this literary canon on social orthodoxy, “The severity of the Dharma--Shastras was doubtless a commentary arising from the insecurity of the orthodox in an age of flux.” 5 While Thapar is discussing a period around the beginning of the first millennium ce , we might assume that the recurring dominance of this literary genre within the restricted literary sphere of Sanskrit in the Yadava century implies just such a rising “insecurity” within an orthodox Sanskritic establishment. Though there are a few exceptions, 6 under Yadava reign, the vast majority of Sanskrit literary production took the form of commentaries and nibandha s or “essays,” based upon Dharmaśāstra texts, even though we also find a few commentaries and distillations of the Bhagavad-Gītā , such as Bopadeva’s Harilīlā .
By the end of the Yadava century, one figure in particular stood out as emblematic of the meeting point of the non-Brahmin royal court and the Brahmanical ecumene. This was the figure of Hemādri, who lived from the middle of the thirteenth century until the first decade of the fourteenth century. He served as a vital minister of state and war for at least two Yadava kings (Mahadev and Ramchandra), and sat at the apex of a vast system that reified the power of orthodox social Brahmanism. If Dharmaśāstra commentary was the subject that dominated the literary sphere of Sanskrit in the Yadava period, Hemādri was also the literary star of this sphere. He epitomized the ascendency of Brahmins who served royal political interests in multiple ways, as minister or advisor and as the author of Dharmaśāstra commentary. The Sanskrit compositions of Hemādri are also among the primary resources for all Yadava dynastic histories—fully linking a text on elite and everyday dharma prescriptions with the historiography of dynastic politics. In the Yadava era, the social science of dharma interlocked symbolic capital with the actual administration of royal power—a common feature of the Indian political sphere from the premodern period, through the colonial era, and even enduring, to some extent, in the contemporary age. 7
Hemādri stands as the Yadava’s chief archivist, having supplied an extensive genealogy of the dynasty in his Caturvarga Cintāmaṇi and throughout his works, recording the affairs of the Yadava state in his time and before. He is regularly credited, dubiously, with being the figure who formalized the records of state in Marathi in moḍi script. 8 Indeed, Hemādri composed or oversaw the composition of nothing in Marathi other than perhaps simple state records and inscriptions, for which we have no record in any case, and thus no basis for speculation. The many works, around thirteen extensive treatises, for which Hemādri is well known, were all composed in Sanskrit, and the Yadava court records no patronization of literary work other than work in Sanskrit. Hemādri wrote no “literature” of any kind, no poetry or drama or commentary on poetics. Though he also wrote about astrology, astronomy, mathematics, architecture, and Ayurvedic medicine, his primary subject was Dharmaśāstra and, in particular, a study of how to sustain proper social relations among varṇa s. 9
Hemādri’s voluminous Sanskrit Caturvarga Cintāmaṇi is considered his greatest work. The text is multifaceted and is a response to the emergent social order of the Yadava realm—just as he provided the Yadavas a genealogy linking their line to that of Krishna and other Yadava luminaries, so, too, he provided a genealogy for Yadava-era social order, linking the Yadava present to the idealized theories of social order contained in orthodox Dharmaśāstra. Hemādri appears to direct his text to the common person, in particular, when discussing “vows” or vrata s appropriate for everyday life, ritual, and special occasions—thus, a version of vernacularization, one might say, rooting his Sanskrit text in the practices of the region of Maharashtra. 10 As a text concerned with prescribing norms of society in the quotidian world, it stands above most others in this period, not only because of its extensive erudition but also because of the considerable political power wielded by its author, and, thus, the influence, though brief, the text had on Yadava royal thinking about social and legal policy. So influential was this text in the later Yadava century that it is often simply referred to as Hemādriśāstra , “Hemādri’s [social] science.” This Sanskrit compendium detailed the scope of orthodox rites, rituals, observances, and social mores incumbent upon each of the four varṇa s in the varṇāśramadharma system, and so it was a text, at least in intention, for all classes and segments of society, a quotidian social science, articulated in a language of elite Brahmanical discourse that was inaccessible to its purported subjects.
Thus, in the figure of Hemādri, several spheres of power intersect. His position as a chief advisor to the Yadava king Mahadev and as prime minister to the Yadava ruler Ramachandra provided the opportunity to further buttress this nexus of interests through patronizing Brahmanical literary work around Dharmaśāstra and, perhaps, to turn the socially conservative philosophical perspectives epitomized by the Caturvarga Cintāmaṇi into state legal practice and norm. Several sets of evidence suggest that the Yadava period, particularly the later years under Hemādri’s tenure, was a time when the state and its agents strictly enforced caste and other social rules derived from a particular reading of Dharmaśāstra. The Līḷācaritra portrays the era as one of significant caste segregation and caste-based punishment. We hear of Shudras suffering tortures for transgressing their caste-based social location; “Untouchables” living outside of villages and undertaking ritually impure, arduous tasks. The text conveys stories of bitter caste rivalries between Kayasthas, Guravs, and Brahmins, and among Brahmins of different jāti groups arguing about the propriety of specific rituals. We learn that Shudras could worship only at the drainage ditch of temples, and “Untouchables” were not allowed to view the deity even at a great distance. 11 Yet we also learn from this text other interesting and perhaps unexpected things: widows were not treated as impure nor were they ostracized, at least Brahmin widows were not, and Islam was deeply integrated into civil society in the era, as masjids and madrassas were common in the Yadava region.
The overall image of the core nexus of entitlements that made up the Brahmanical ecumene reveal that a sphere of self-replication was firmly set, producing texts and experts on social order and segregation, in a social environment in which Dharmaśāstra norms of caste and gender were upheld. The state commitment to lavishly fund traditional Brahmanical occupations is clear evidence of a caste-based political order of privilege. Furthermore, the fact that the chief subject of these funded endeavors was the production of texts and ritual instruments for the maintenance of traditional varṇa social norms in the form of Dharmaśāstra intellectual-literary production further emphasizes the degree of caste and gender enforcement dominating a particular view of society, as well as a theory of state-society relations in this period.
In addition, several state inscriptions reiterate the demands of traditional social order. Ramachandra is described as the protector of the varṇa system and a figure who would extol the virtue of Sanskrit learning. 12 Thus, it is common to find donors referred to as vedārthāda or “expounder of the Vedas,” and sarvajñasārasvati , “one omniscient like the [Vedic Goddess of learning] Saraswati,” or daśagranthī , “one who knows the ten books [of Vedic learning],” and so forth. Plates that record a land grant by Ramachandra to the Brahmin minister Purushottama, which Purushottama in turn donated as an agrahāra to a group of Brahmins, praise Purushottama for his commitment to maintaining dharmic order and for making his subjects “conform to the rules of conduct as laid down in the varṇa s and āśrama s.” 13 Another inscription, from the era of Yadava ruler Krishna, cited by S. Ritti, states that the primary role of the Yadava ministers was to maintain the “four legs of dharma ,” which indicates the varṇa social system conceived through Dharmaśāstra. 14
This social world in which Dharmaśāstra held high cultural capital within Sanskritic and courtly circles, spheres that intersected in the Brahmanical ecumene, is the environment in which Marathi vernacularization occurred. The two key figures of this process—Chakradhar and Jnandev—were both highly literate male Brahmins who existed within the Brahmanical ecumene of the Yadava period. The texts associated with them show that they both well-understood Dharmaśāstra, and knew it to be the normative social science of their age. Yet both figures articulate a critique of Dharmaśāstra and the prevailing normativities of dharma in general in their time. I think this critique, as I have argued above, is the result of a reconfiguration of discourse from elite circles in Sanskrit to everyday contexts in Marathi. The lofty concerns of the Brahmanical ecumene around Dharmaśāstra and proper social order are brought down into the quotidian world. And so we see a corresponding concern about dharma and social order among the elite Brahmin males who are at the forefront of Marathi literary vernacularization. It is the “baggage” so to speak of their social ontology, a concern with dharmic order, that follows them into a new discursive realm, that of the regional language of everyday life. It is to this particular story of the vernacularization of dharma and the creation of a new sense of dharmic social ethics that we now turn with a closer look at the Līḷācaritra, Chakradhar, and the early Mahanubhavs.
The Līḷācaritra is considered the first work of Marathi literature. It is remembered to have been composed in 1278 ce , by a group of mostly Brahmin devotees of a spiritual leader named Chakradhar (c. 1194), who left Maharashtra, and human history, around 1273 ce . 15 The people who formed a community around Chakradhar called themselves the Mahanubhavs, the people of “the great experience.” They believed Chakradhar was both God and man, a figure who represented five distinct yet ultimately singular divine entities they called the Five Krishnas (pañcakṛṣna ): the Hindu deities Krishna and Dattatreya, and three human incarnations, Changadev, Gundam Raul, and Chakradhar. These five aspects of divinity they believed were all expressions of a singular divine form, Parameshwar. The Līḷācaritra conveys some of the life of the other two human divine figures, but it is the life of Chakradhar that occupies the vast majority of this compendium of līḷās , or playful episodes in the divine life of Chakradhar. The earliest Mahanubhavs gathered after their guru left the region of Maharashtra. Collectively, they recalled their memories of him and his teachings and produced the first work of Marathi literature, a text without a single author, but a remembrance of a single luminous life.
The social context for the creation of the Līḷācaritra is the cultural and political world of the Yadavas outlined above. All of the key figures of the early Mahanubhav community were Brahmin men and women, though most of the latter were widows. While Chakradhar is remembered to have had non-Brahmin followers, the text of the Līḷācaritra is dominated by the voice of his Brahmin followers and it shows Chakradhar and the early Mahanubhavs in constant contact with the Brahmanical ecumene of the Yadava era, interacting with Yadava kings, Brahmin officials, temple priests, and Dharmaśāstra scholars. Indeed, the Līḷācaritra concludes with a confrontation between Chakradhar and the doyen of the Brahmanical ecumene and author of its most famous dharmic text in the Yadava period, Hemādri—an episode we will examine below. The caste-status of Chakradhar himself is ironically uncertain in the text. I have argued elsewhere that the Līḷācaritra appears to understand that Chakradhar was a Brahmin, a Lād Brahmin of Gujarat, an émigré to Maharashtra, but at home within the Brahmanical ecumene. 16 Aside from several references to Chakradhar’s caste as Lād or Lāt Sāmavedi Brahmin, we also see Chakradhar’s expertise in Sanskrit and Sanskritic learning displayed throughout the Līḷācaritra . He wins debates in Marathi, Sanskrit, and Gujarati with equal finesse. Whether or not he was a Brahmin, there is no doubt he was habituated to the Brahmanical ecumene of the Yadava period and self-consciously challenged the normative orders of Dharmaśāstra within his own community, commenting upon and critiquing dharmic social order in many other contexts. And members of this Brahmanical ecumene, with a desire to preserve the social and political capital of Sanskritic Dharmaśāstra, turned their attention to Chakradhar and the Mahanubhavs. Many episodes from the Līḷācaritra show Chakradhar in contact with highest echelons of Brahmanical and royal power in the region.
The Līḷācaritra is a “Brahmanical text,” in that its key preoccupation, aside from communicating the life of Chakradhar, is to comment upon social relations from the point of view of a group of heterodox Brahmins, Chakradhar and his followers, observing a world of orthodox social order. Yet it is not a “pro-Brahmin” text. Quite the opposite. The text registers a consistent critique of Brahmins and Brahmanism, referred to as brāhmaṇya and brāhmaṇatva at various points in the text, and associating this with adhamatva and adharmatva , vileness and “a-dharmic” behavior. As a text about this key aspect of social order, being Brahmin, it is also a text about proper social behavior, and so it is in line with the dominant subject of the age within the Sanskrit Brahmanical ecumene of the Yadava century, Dharmaśāstra. It is remembered as an antithesis to a text like Hemādri’s Caturvarga Cintāmani . Rather than a prescription of normative social order composed in Sanskrit that valorizes Brahmins and social orders of purity, and prescribes punishments for transgression, the Līḷācaritra is a Marathi text that rejects Sanskrit, observes injustices of social inequity, disavows rules of purity within the circle of the Mahanubhavs, and rewards acts of caste transgression or even of socio-religious inversion. For example, in one famous episode, Chakradhar receives a half-eaten piece of food from an “Untouchable” of the Mang caste and redistributes it to his Brahmin followers as prasād , his divine grace—forcing his nonplussed Brahmin followers to choose between their caste prejudice or their devotion to Chakradhar. 17 A moment like this reveals the normative influence of dharmic ideals, Dharmaśāstra distilled to the level of habitus—but the story’s preservation helps draw out of the Līḷācaritra a competing vernacular Dharmaśāstra, one localized, set in the quotidian sphere, articulated in Marathi, and critical of traditional social injunctions.
When actual scholars or references to Dharmaśāstra appear in the Līḷācaritra , they are usually antagonistic to the ethics of the Mahanubhavs. In one episode, early in the life of Chakradhar, a Chambhar, a member of what was considered an “Untouchable” jāti , comes to follow Chakradhar in the region of Beed. 18 When Chakradhar departs, the Chambhar continues to preach the teachings of Chakradhar in the town square. The villagers are enraged and they call an expert in Dharmaśāstra, a nibandhakār brāhmaṇa , to decide what to do. The legal expert consults the Dharmaśāstra nibandhas and determines that he should be covered in a water-limestone pit that will slowly eat away his flesh. The story ends when the Chambhar man miraculously appears, fully intact, in the village square again. The Brahmins of the village who persecuted the Chambhar man then bow to him, and call themselves Chandals, a stylistic term for “Untouchable” in Sanskritic contexts. The story, in metaphor, impeaches the moral order of Dharmaśāstra and the social system that replicated these ideas in the Yadava period, with a particular caste and class association.
Yet there are one or two times that the Dharmaśāstras are positively invoked in the Līḷācaritra . In one place, Chakradhar instructs his followers “You should beg from all four castes as the Dharmaśāstra instructs. Do not be selective among the houses you visit, and do not visit the home of someone you know.” 19 Indeed, all of his instructions to his renunciate followers seem to follow all the prescriptions of the sannyāsi articulated in Chapter 6 of the Laws of Manu . 20 The Dharmaśāstra does not appear to orient Chakradhar’s social critique, even if they are usually on the receiving end of that critique. Instead, it is the normative social order of caste and gender injustice that compels Chakradhar—if the Dharmaśāstra serves this end at some point, he will cite them, as we can see. He is not opposed to texts on ideological grounds, but opposed to a stratum of social ideology within the text, or rather, within society around him.
The texts of the Dharmaśāstra are less visible in the Līḷācaritra than are the human figures who represent Dharmaśāstra and its ideals, the human capital at the heart of the Brahmanical ecumene. In this category, a cast of characters populate the Līḷācaritra , and they seem to lead Chakradhar toward a public (and let me emphasize, purported ) trial in which he is accused of transgressing rules of dharma . While many Mahanubhavs dispute the stories of Chakradhar’s trial—and they may indeed be apocryphal—these stories do exist in most versions of the Līḷācaritra and suggest something interesting about the culture of Dharmaśāstra as it is portrayed in this first, earliest text of Marathi literature. I read this event not as historical fact but as an artifact of history that tells us something about the past and how Dharmaśāstra was conceived of as a cultural form in the period of Marathi vernacularization.
The events that will lead to Chakradhar’s trial begin with a chance encounter with a Yadava minister of dharma , a figure named Mahadashram, a Sanskrit master who runs an endowed śāstramaṭha or monastery that teaches Dharmaśāstra and serves as a rājpurohit , a Brahmin advisor to the king Ramachandra. 21 Chakradhar is himself traveling to a śāstramaṭha to give lectures on dharma in Marathi, a suggestion that Chakradhar’s ideas may have had influence reaching back upon the Brahmanical ecumene itself. Unable to match Chakradhar in the battle of verbal debate, Mahadashram tries several times to kill Chakradhar—once with poison and once with a booby-trapped throne. These attempts on his life foreshadow the full fury of the Yadava-supported Brahmanical ecumene and its disapproval of Chakradhar’s transgressions of dharma that will be expressed through the story of the purported trial he will undergo.
Late in the Līḷācaritra , following on these encounters with Mahadashram and other members of the Brahmanical ecumene loyal to the Yadava court, we find our titular figure of the influence of Dharmaśāstra in Yadava society emerges: Hemādri summons Chakradhar to this public trial. 22 Here is a translation of the līḷā or account of the trial (which, let me reiterate, many Mahanubhavs believe did not happen ):
Then Chakradhar, having crossed the Godavari River, went to Paithan, where a tribunal (sabhā ) gathered at the Aditi temple of Mudha. Hemādri, Sarang Pandit, Mayata Hari, Prajnasagar; 23 the major leaders of the village, the Brahmin elites [mahājan ], scholars, historians, holymen, celibates, Jain ascetics, members of the Natha sect—they all assembled. Chakradhar was brought into the Mudha Aditi temple. Chakradhar took a seat in the middle of the assembly hall.
They said to him, “Who are you?”
Chakradhar said, “I am an ascetic, a Mahatma.”
[They said,] “There is nothing more you’d like to say?”
[Chakradhar] said, “All of you gathered here are eminent people. Scholars, students, renunciates, milk fasters, legal scholars, historians.”
And then his gaze fell upon Sarang Pandit, and Sarang Pandit looked aside.
[Chakradhar continued,] “You who have assembled are the leaders of all eighteen families [of Paithan], Jain ascetics, Natha yogis. You would not drink unknown water. 24 Then you ask yourself what it is that I am.”
[They said,] “The women are attracted to you, no? Isn’t this the way it is? And you are similarly attracted to the women, isn’t that the case?”
Those gathered said, “Yes!”
Someone among the tribunal clapped, and they all began to quietly conspire (i.e., “whisper”) with one another.
Then two people, Mayata Hari and Prajnasagar, stood up [and addressed the tribunal]: “That you conspire [against Chakradhar] is wrong.”
The conspiring talk ended.
Mayata Hari and Prajnasagar said, “You [tribunal members] are bring ruin upon this country (rāṣṭra ) and you are acting like Chandals.” Then Mayata Hari and Prajnasagar left.
Chakradhar said [to the tribunal], “You each are religious experts (agāmika ). Each of you holds a position of political importance (pradhān ). Please consider what it is you’d like to do.”
“No need, we’ve decided already,” they said.
“Is it so? Then whatever it is you’ve decided, just do it,” [Chakradhar said.]
Then they took [Chakradhar] to the temple courtyard. There he voluntarily offered his nose. 25
This episode conveys at least two resonances with Dharmaśāstra that suggest the trial is a reaction on the part of an orthodox Brahmanical ecumene to a threat to the social status quo, articulated as violations of Dharmaśāstra itself. Both of these threats seem to be related to social and religious prescriptions around gender. There is also perhaps a more general critique here related to the process of justice in the adjudication of a dharma sabhā such as this one.
Chapter 8 of the Laws of Manu provides a set of eighteen types of offenses that can be adjudicated by a court, and one of these is “sexual misconduct with women.” 26 At MDh 8.352, we find that under “grounds for litigation” one subject of litigation by trial occurs “when men violate the wives of others” and for those found guilty, “the king should disfigure his body.” 27 One key disfigurement involves “cutting off the nose.” 28 This is the grounds for his trial and the punishment in relation to Dharmaśāstra prescriptions in such cases of guilt. The dharma sabhā that has gathered here to judge one of their own—a Brahmin male with high social capital in the Brahmanical ecumene—brings the text of the Dharmaśāstra to bear on the body of Chakradhar. They accuse him of “attracting” women to his order and to himself, and in turn, being attracted to them. However, the word here, vedhaṇe , implies pious or spiritual devotion rather than sexual attraction; the word suggests a person drawn to another, but not necessarily, or even primarily, in a sexual way. There is no sense in the Līḷācaritra of sexual attraction between Chakradhar and his followers—they are all celibate renunciates in any case. In other words, this is a baseless accusation. The purported mutilation of Chakradhar’s nose implies the explicit law cited here was violated, but for reasons that are clear regarding the selection of words (carefully modulated language is a universal feature of legal arguments it seems), Chakradhar’s prosecutors are searching for a legal way to punish Chakradhar for an offense that is not illegal, but rather threatening to orthodox social order. In modern legal terminology, this might be the “fallacy of equivocation,” using a term of legal importance in a deliberately ambiguous way in order to reach a favorable decision. 29
Ironically, the only relevant story that explicitly conveys sexual attraction in the Līḷācaritra indirectly involves Chakradhar, but directly involves Hemādri, his chief persecutor in this trail story. A līḷā recalls that Demati, Hemādri’s wife, was a devotee of Chakradhar and returned one day from seeing him. During that darśan , Chakradhar had applied some sandalwood paste to Demati’s forehead. When Hemādri saw this, he became aroused, which was apparently unusual for Hemādri in Demati’s presence. Curious as to why he felt this way, Hemādri inquired with Demati, and Demati confessed that his feelings likely were the result of a blessing from Chakradhar, in the form of the sandalwood upon her forehead. Chakradhar, in that līḷā , predicted that Hemādri would not take this news well. This episode is related shortly before the story of the trial transpires, implying a connection between the two events, particularly in that they both share a focus on “attraction,” though of two different kinds. I believe the Līḷācaritra implies that Hemādri was jealous, perhaps also sexually embarrassed, and so this key charge against Chakradhar was a false accusation carefully worded to convey multiple meanings. He did attract female followers, but not in a way that contravenes the rule given in the Laws of Manu above. Clearly, there is an implication of impropriety of some kind. But, if it is not what is stated explicitly, then of what kind is it?
This may suggest a second contravention of a Dharmaśāstra injunction. Chapter 5 of the Laws of Manu concludes with prescriptions for women’s conduct, including the proscription of women performing sacrifice or undertaking vows or fasts independently (i.e., without their husbands/fathers/sons, or without their permission). 30 This would have been an injunction against women’s independent religious vows that would have been contravened by Chakradhar accepting into his fold Brahmin widows who take vows and undertake fasts as part of their practice as Mahanubhav renunciates. To understand why gender is important here, we might note a few things about the early Mahanubhavs. A majority of Chakradhar’s followers—and perhaps his oldest and most trusted—were all women, and many were high caste or Brahmin widows. When the early Mahanubhavs, following Chakradhar’s departure from Maharashtra, met to debate how to preserve his teachings, a discussion arose around what language to use—should it be Sanskrit, the language of the Brahmanical ecumene, or Marathi, the language Chakradhar actually used in everyday life. In the end, the debate was settled by Bhatobas, Chakradhar’s key male devotee and de facto leader of the Mahanubhavs after Chakradhar’s departure. He is remembered to have declared that Chakradhar’s life story should be preserved in Marathi, for if it were preserved in Sanskrit it would “deprive the elderly women” of his message. 31
The point I make here is that gender, power, and the use of Marathi were all intertwined, in both Chakradhar’s teaching and how his teaching, through his life, would be preserved. The idea that teaching women was essential to the Mahanubhav social ethic is, I think, a key factor in understanding the nature of the “offense” of which Chakradhar is accused. In this sense, we can see that the trial is based upon at least two principles of Dharmaśāstra—the accusation of inappropriate relations with another man’s wife and abetting women who take vows outside the confines of patriarchal assent. This seems to be the basis of the trial against Chakradhar on technical grounds. However, Chakradhar’s actual “crime” appears to be something deeper—teaching the complete rejection of orthodox social norms in favor of an ethics of social equality, at least configured around his small group of devotees. Here Sanskrit, gender, and caste are all braided, for a view of social order (dharma ) articulated in Marathi rather than Sanskrit creates a discourse out of the control of the Brahmanical ecumene. We saw earlier what happened with an “Untouchable” began emulate Chakradhar in the public square; here we see the retribution of the Brahmanical ecumene brought down upon one of its own, Chakradhar himself.
We can see a third injunction related to Dharmaśāstra that involves how two Brahmin figures, Mayata Hari and Prajnasagar, reject the proceedings as unfair, essentially proposing that the trial was “rigged.” Chapter 8 of the Laws of Manu begins with a set of general ideals related to the fairness and due process of a trial. Verse 14, in particular, warns that an unfair trial is an example, as Patrick Olivelle translates it, of “Justice struck by Injustice, and Truth by Untruth, while the court officials remain idle onlookers, then they are themselves struck down.” Verse 16 declares that anyone who impedes justice this way is a “low born” (vṛṣala ), a word related to “Shudra,” a word that conveys the same effect as Chandal. 32 It seems clear that the protest Mayata Hari and Prajnasagar offer is based on this Dharmaśāstra understanding of justice—a fissure opens here in the Brahmanical ecumene itself, between those who see Dharmaśāstra as inviolate and those that see it as an arbitrary means to attain extra-judicial ends. Mayata Hari and Prajnasagar do not oppose the charges leveled against Chakradhar, but rather the injustice of the proceeding itself, its deviation from the Dharmaśāstra rule of law.
The presence of Mayata Hari and Prajnasagar at this trial—and their appearance elsewhere in the Līḷācaritra —suggest they are figures of high standing in the Yadava’s Brahmanical ecumene. And so their protest to the trial’s proceedings is significant. When they observe whispering and conspiring—presumably among Sarang Pandit and Hemādri—they know this not a “fair trial,” that justice has been pierced by injustice, and one of their own, a Brahmin male, is being treated unjustly. Mayata Hari and Prajnasagar denounce their colleagues, telling them they will ruin the “country” and that they are acting like Chandals —this latter term appears most often as an insult from one Brahmin to another, equivalent to calling the other person an “outcaste.” Mayata Hari and Prajnasagar leave the area of the trial before its conclusion, thus depriving the tribunal of a samaya or unanimous decision. So disgusted are they with the trial’s unethical procedure that they immediately pack their belongings, gather their families, and leave Maharashtra entirely. It appears that Mayata Hari and Prajnasagar resolve that they cannot live in a country (rāṣṭra ) without a fair legal system. And we might presume that this sense of a just process was also part and parcel of the Brahmanical ecumene’s discourse around Dharmaśāstra, a text that gave laws but also implied legal and ethical structure. And so Mayata Hari and Prajnasagar must leave the legal state-government entity entirely, turning their backs on a corrupt judicial system, one that has lost its connection to the ideals of social order (Dharmaśāstra). Just as Chakradhar rejects a world where salvation is denied to all people, Mayata Hari and Prajnasagar reject a world that does not faithfully conform to the Dharmaśāstra. And so this trial contains an ironic alliance of otherwise opposed perspectives at this moment of literary vernacular creation.
As we have seen, Chakradhar represents a vernacularization of dharma , and his text then gives some contours to a new Dharmaśāstra, a new social theory, one grounded in the realities of everyday life, and in the language of that quotidian world. Chakradhar’s trial, guided as it is by general principles and laws of Dharmaśāstra, reflects back upon the real threat Chakradhar poses, which is also posed by vernacularization itself. A reconfiguration of public discourse in a regional language about issues of the common good, of social justice, gender inequity, caste prejudice, and so on, all suggest a challenge to the Brahmanical ecumene and its location in the field of royal power. This is a challenge not just of language (Marathi rather than Sanskrit) or of social location (women, low castes, and others are now able to hear and participate), but it is also a challenge pitched at the same systems of social order that Dharmaśāstra exists to comment upon and even perhaps regulate. Chakradhar’s trial places the personification of orthodox Brahmanical Dharmaśāstra at the apex of a dharma tribunal, set against a fellow male Brahmin member of the Brahmanical ecumene who disavows all that world entails. The Līḷācaritra is a heterodox Dharmaśāstra in this sense for it records the life and teachings of a person who challenged an orthodox social order in his day. The trial, though it may be apocryphal, conveys by metonym the social order that is itself on trial at the moment of vernacularization. And in this moment, Dharmaśāstra typified literary production in the Yadava era, supported by state finances, populated by an elite male Brahmin clientalist sphere, represented even now by the figure of Hemādri. A new, even “modern” Dharmaśāstra, one deeply invested in everyday life and the linguistic-cultural world of the vernacular, would emerge in this period and carry forward through the centuries and into the present.