The Quotidian Revolution: Vernacularization, Religion, and the Premodern Public Sphere in India

The Biography of Literary Vernacularization

I have waited until now to introduce Jnandev and Chakradhar as “historical” figures, that is, as figures with a biography in time, in part because I seek to avoid the “great man” theory of history, of appearing to argue that two individuals were the sole instigators of literary Marathi’s origins. As I argued in an earlier book (2008b), the device of biography is a historiographic device—a history of an age that is contained in the retelling of a life story. It is beyond my ability to determine the truth or falsehood of any particular claim to the biographies of the two figures at the center of this book; what is possible is to see how, through the device of biography, a history is told or, if you prefer, a historical memory is preserved. This is not a history of an individual, but of a collective, of a public, changing through time and often disagreeing with those who had gone before. Here individuals serve as memorial devices and the memories of their lives are metonymic biographies, representations of the larger story of Marathi literary vernacularization itself.

In this book I read into and through the vernacular literary moment in which the lives of these two figures are vital. I want to uncover something like the idea of a “social imaginary,” as sociologists use this term, to outline a vision of the world that reflected back upon itself a view of a social, moral, and political order. To do so, however, is also to invest in the remembered lives of figures such as Jnandev and Chakradhar. I would not argue that Jnandev and Chakradhar are simply agents of change, but rather they are bright stars in a constellation of historical currents. Yet historical memory often conforms around individuals, and we use them to anthropomorphize history, in a sense, which is also what we do with celestial constellations, finding in them shapes that reflect our present cultures, metonyms for our timely concerns.

This chapter seeks to provide the essential biographical data imputed to Jnandev and Chakradhar, drawn from sources said to be coterminous with their lives. My intention here is emphatically not to reduce the moment of literary vernacularization to the genius of these two men. We remember Jnandev and Chakradhar, or any figure of history for that matter, because of the ways a collection of memorial materials have been assembled around them. And, to understand this assemblage, we need to get a sense of figures at the core, if only through the translucent lens of “biography.” In order to understand how this assemblage works, and why, I will propose we see such figures in relation to the kinds of moral, spiritual, scriptural, political, and financial economies that I outlined in the first two chapters. The goal of this chapter, then, is to draw to a point the received biographies of Jnandev and Chakradhar in relation to the literary vernacular moment, but also to provide one way to understand these figures as reflections of the social imaginary of their age.

The two previous chapters have laid out the social fields in which Chakradhar and Jnandev are positioned. Along the way, I have noted how this Brahminic ecumene forms its own kind of economy of literary and religious merit linked to financial and political rewards as well as how this economy is nestled within the feudalistic world of the Yadava period. This chapter provides a final layer, delving into the remembered biographies of these two figures and their social contexts, arguing that we must see them within the fields of these various overlapping social ecologies or even “economies” of the Yadava era.

I will argue here that Jnandev and Chakradhar serve a role something like what Foucault called the “author-function,” that these figures as “authors” of literary vernacularization represent “the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning.”¹ To press this further, I will attempt to show how, as a new field of Marathi literature emerged in the thirteenth century, the biographical assertions around Jnandev and Chakradhar—and the texts associated with them—register a new kind of symbolic economy, the symbolic economy of the emergent literary vernacular. I do not examine Jnandev and Chakradhar as historical entities, but as principles of social and religious organization in time, and I adopt the organizing concepts of symbolic capital and spiritual economy to do so. Around these figures a new spiritual economy takes shape, borrowing old patterns and subjects—new in that it is in Marathi yet old in that it returns to the figure of the common person. Kumkum Sangari, in a powerful essay that engages the “spiritual economy” deployed in the compositions of Mirabai and Kabir, suggests that “the liberalizing and dissenting forms of bhakti emerge as a powerful force which selectively uses the metaphysics of high Hinduism…in an attempt to create a…transcendent value grounded in the dailiness of material life.”² In a similar way, I use the idea of a spiritual economy to suggest that vernacularization, in the Marathi case, the “dailiness” or quotidian quotient, provides the very means by which the spiritual economy can be reconfigured around the topos of the everyday and, in particular, its public composed of “women, low castes, and others.” As we will see in the chapters that follow, such “dailiness” is a constant feature of the reconfiguration of the high metaphysics of Hinduism here—especially the very idea of dharma, which will be brought down to daily life in the Līḷācaritra and will form the core ethics of salvation of the Jñāneśvarī.

As I have suggested in the previous chapters, vernacularization as a discourse around the topos of everyday life is well established in much earlier sources, such as the epics, the purana literature, and, of course, in the Bhagavad Gītā itself. Yet these were Sanskrit texts, even if their stories were unrestricted to any single language and circulated in the oral/aural sphere of myth, folk tale, and legend. With the shift into Marathi in the thirteenth century, the figures of Jnandev and Chakradhar provide nodes of orientation; they present a human, rather than textual, accommodation to the quotidian. We might adapt Foucault’s term, “the author function,” here and see the process whereby individuals are inscribed within broad social change in this particular case as the “the sant function.” It is in part this position within a new spiritual, social, and literary economy that I think makes Chakradhar and Jnandev unique and important and allows them to function as principles of thrift within the various meanings that Marathi literary vernacularization bears through time.³

In this chapter I flesh out the received biographies of these two figures, with reference to the resources available, and then move on to a discussion of how to understand the public memory of both of them within the symbolic economy of the era. Each biographical description, however, comes with certain challenges. With Chakradhar, we have only biography, a stark literary realism conveyed in the Līḷācaritra and other texts, composed with the primary intention of relaying everything that Chakradhar said and did in exact detail. On the other hand, we have no biography of Jnandev until after he is said to have composed the Jñāneśvarī. As the ample later hagiography is a vernacularization of Jnandev himself, I feel it is anachronistic—even diegetically so—to import that later hagiography into the earlier context of the Jñāneśvarī and apply it to the remembered author of that text. So I restrict the outline of his received life story to what can be gleaned from his eponymous text; as a result, there is relatively less biographical information for Jnandev to engage here, but those limited details are nonetheless vital. Since the next four chapters deeply draw on the life of Chakradhar in the Līḷācaritra and on the sense we have of the social ethics of the figure of Jnandev in the Jñāneśvarī, here I engage only those salient issues that locate these two biographically constructed individuals in relation to the prevailing norms of the Yadava century, but also set them against those norms in ways that reveal the nature of the unique innovations ascribed to them and which they represent.

Speaking of the lives of saints is a risky business. Hagiographical materials are hardly “historical” materials in the sense in which they present a positivist historiographical archive—they are of a different sort than land revenue records, state inscriptions, bureaucratic red tape, statistics of populations, ethnological data, and the like. Yet they are indisputably records about the past and about human life. All lives—in history, biography, or hagiography—are imagined into being, whatever the proximity to that written account and the actual events of the life depicted. But, at the onset, let me recognize that my use of the materials that convey the contours of biography here—the Līḷācaritra, other texts of the Mahanubhavs, and the Jñāneśvarī—provide the only archive we have for reimagining the lives of these figures. I allow the reader to decide whether the lives I outline here and throughout the remainder of this book are real or fictional or somewhere in between. For me, these biographical materials are evidence of a public discourse in Marathi that links questions of social inequality with the possibilities of spiritual salvation, and so I treat these lives as “real” and “factual” within this discourse. I do not make claims that either Chakradhar or Jnandev or others did or did not live, did or did not do this or that—I have no doubt that they did live. But my analysis here is premised on tracing the facts of their public memory; the truth claims behind this public memory are not for me to judge. My interest is in how these figures—their lives, their companions, their contexts, and the texts associated with them—form primary documents in the evolution of a nascent public sphere, a conversation in the vernacular about what society ought to be.

The Memory of Two Lives

Chakradhar (c. 1194)⁴

The life of Chakradhar and the emergence of literary vernacularization in Maharashtra are in some fundamental way the same subject, for our primary text for Chakradhar’s life—the Līḷācaritra (completed c. 1278 CE)—is also the oldest surviving work of Marathi literature.⁵ Yet the first life story given in the text is not that of Chakradhar but of another figure, Changadev Raul. The Līḷācaritra opens with an explanation, as given by Chakradhar, of the origins of the Mahanubhav spiritual genealogy that he typifies.⁶ The Mahanubhavs worship five “Krishnas” or pañcakṛṣṇa, and hence they comprise a Vaishnava Krishnaite religion in a formal sense. The five Krishnas are the Hindu deities Krishna and Dattatreya,⁷ and three human incarnations of those two deities, Changadev Raul, Gundam Raul, and Chakradhar, all purported to have lived within the thirteenth century.⁸ Despite these five forms of Krishna, Mahanubhavs consider themselves monotheists—each of the five Krishnas is a manifestation of the “Great Lord” or Parameshwar.⁹

The Līḷācaritra’s first several episodes or lilas (literally “plays”)¹⁰ tell us that Changadev Raul, born into a Karharde Brahmin family in Phaltan, in Maharashtra, received śakti or “divine power” from the deity Dattatreya while living in Dvaraka in Gujarat.¹¹ Changadev, in turn, passed the sacred lineage to another human figure, Gundam Raul, or Govinda Prabhu of Riddhapur, in Maharashtra, and Gundam Raul’s story is the subject of the Ṛddhapurlīḷā.¹² Gundam Raul was born in Riddhapur, Maharashtra, into a Kanava Brahmin family.¹³ The Līḷācaritra’s emphasis on specificity and fact is apparent in the careful way it records the sociocultural backgrounds of its key characters, and caste is a preeminent subject to recall. The Līḷācaritra then tells of how Changadev Raul was beset upon by a powerful female yogi, or yoginī, named Kamaksha or Kamakhya,¹⁴ who insisted upon sexual intercourse with Changadev, even though he had sworn to Gundam Raul to remain celibate, a brahmacārī.¹⁵ Rather than submit to Kamaksha, Changadev Raul “left his body,” that is, died of his own volition, freeing his soul to migrate elsewhere. At this point the Līḷācaritra shifts perspective to “Gujarat,” and here starts the biography of Chakradhar.

Changadev’s soul entered the body of the son of a royal minister, a pradhan to King Malladeva (r. c. 1154 CE) in Bharavasa or Broach (now Bharuch) in Gujarat in 1193 CE.¹⁶ The son was named Haripal, and his birth corresponds to the period of a series of incursions into this region by Jaitunga’s Yadava armies, a fact registered in the Līḷācaritra.¹⁷ Haripal’s father’s name was Vishaldeva and his mother’s name was Malhandevi. In his youth Haripal was married to a woman named Kamalaisa. The Līḷācaritra tells us that Haripal was a particularly ill-behaved young man and appeared to be addicted to gambling.¹⁸ At some point, Haripal fell ill and died. It was at this juncture, as he was being carried to the funeral pyre, that the soul of Changadev, escaping the yogic lust of Kamaksha, entered the body of Haripal, and the minister’s son revived.¹⁹ Thus Haripal, who later takes the name Chakradhar, is both the son of a Gujarati royal minister and a kind of reincarnation of Changadev, a Karhade Brahmin from Phaltan; also, he is considered as one with Gundam Raul, as well as the incarnation of both Krishna and Dattatreya.

At this point, we might ask: what was Chakradhar’s caste? Can one even speak of the caste of a figure with such a complex cosmic-genetic nature? This is an important question to ask because caste designation is an essential part of the life-descriptions of most figures of the Līḷācaritra and also of Jnandev in the Jñāneśvarī. Yet it is also a curious feature of the Līḷācaritra that Chakradhar’s caste remains somewhat vague. Even while the caste—jati and varna—of almost every other major figure of the text is made explicit, as with Changadev and Gundam Raul, there is no such clarity regarding Chakradhar, the very subject of the Līḷācaritra.²⁰ Not only is there no scholarly consensus on this question,²¹ Mahanubhavs themselves seem not to be in agreement regarding Chakradhar’s caste.²² Furthermore, from a theological point of view, the question is moot for Chakradhar, like Gundam Raul and Changadev, declares, as God, to be beyond all caste distinction.²³ It may be that this caste indeterminacy, so unusual in the Līḷācaritra, is part of a way such a maverick figure defies conventional matrices of social order, a feature of his own “heresy” in the cultural field that surrounds him. And yet the text leaves us with clues, and the question of how the Līḷācaritra and other texts may have conceived of Chakradhar’s social status seems an important issue to investigate.

In an early lila Haripal and his family are described as raje, a word that draws its meaning from a root that means “king” and might therefore imply Kshatriya varna status.²⁴ However, as we have seen, kings can be of any caste (jati or varna), and the varna term is a theoretical one, a term that exists in ritualistic fields of symbolic capital. In any case, the term raje in Old Marathi is not the plural of raja or “king” but rather a derivative of rajya or “royal.”²⁵ Feldhaus and Tulpule in their Dictionary of Old Marathi gloss raje as “rule; administration,” a word attested to, for example, in an old copperplate inscription from Khategram issued within a century of this period.²⁶ In other words, the designation raje likely means here a person or thing associated with the royal court; it is not an ascription of caste, jati, or varna.

The first time a suggestion of Chakradhar’s caste is made is during a curious episode early in the Līḷācaritra when Chakradhar gets married, for a second time, while at Warangal in the Andhra country.²⁷ During negotiations for the wedding, the father of the bride-to-be asks Chakradhar about his caste. Chakradhar says he has no caste, but, when pressed, says his caste is “Lād Sāmak,”²⁸ a jati title that appears to indicate a Brahmin caste group who recite the Sāma Veda and who are from the Lad or Lat region of Gujarat, the region in which present-day Bharuch is located.²⁹ This ascription of caste to Chakradhar is repeated again when a group of Mahanubhavs is discussing the variety of wedding rituals practiced in the region. One of Chakradhar’s followers responds to Chakradhar’s description of his own wedding by saying, “No sir! That is not our way. That is your way among the Lāds.”³⁰ Similarly, there are many other points in the Līḷācaritra that appear to reinforce a claim that Chakradhar is a Lad Brahmin of the Sama Vedi branch from Gujarat.³¹ Still an ambiguity over Chakradhar’s caste is a feature of the narrative of the Līḷācaritra at many points, as we will see in the chapters that follow.³²

Haripal, the Līḷācaritra tells us, continues to live a wayward life, even after the spirit of Changadev comes to inhabit his body. He has a wife and son, but neglects his family in favor of gambling, at which he loses disastrously. One day, when he demands money from his wife, Kamalaisa, to pay his gambling debts, she shames and ridicules him. Feeling dejected at his own addiction and the low point to which he has sunk, he asks his mother and father to allow him to go on a pilgrimage to Ramtek in the region of Maharashtra. Though his parents resist, they eventually allow him to go. He makes his way to Riddhapur in the district of Amravati in modern-day Maharashtra, which is some four hundred miles from Bharuch.³³ In Riddhapur, he is said to meet Gundam Raul, who, as we have seen, received “sacred knowledge” or jñānaśakti from Changadev himself, now incarnate in young Haripal. Upon meeting, Gundam Raul gives prasad to Haripal in the form of a half-eaten sweet, which Haripal takes and is thus initiated by Gundam Raul and given the name Chakradhar, “the one who holds the discus,” a reference to the Hindu deity Krishna.³⁴

After this initiation, the hagiography of Chakradhar generally divides his life into three parts.³⁵ The first part, sometimes called the “solo” part or ekāṃka, describes his time living alone in the mountains for twelve years, undertaking a vow of silence. After those twelve years he decides to return to society, much like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, and begins to associate with other ascetics.³⁶ He initiates a period of wandering through the political-linguistic region of the Yadava dynasty and into areas along its southern borders, particularly to the regions of Karnataka and Andhra, where he is apparently known as a Natha yogi adept.³⁷ His facility with yoga is apparent in several contemporary depictions of him, such as the one in figure 3.1. During this period Chakradhar appears to match the more or less conventional attributes of the wandering yogi. He has some followers, some students, but is generally peripatetic.

The second phase of Chakradhar’s hagiography, usually called the “Pūrvārdha” or “Initial Half,” begins when he takes up residence in Paithan. This geographic stasis allows a group of followers to grow around him there. They take vows, enact daily routines, enter initiation, and see to Chakradhar’s veneration as their ritual core. Significantly, this phase is inaugurated when Chakradhar accepts the first of his devotees who will form the core of the Mahanubhav socioreligious community,³⁸ in particular a woman named Nagubai, a Deshastha Brahmin of apparently lofty pedigree whom Chakradhar comes to call Baisa.³⁹ In Paithan his circle of disciples grows along with his fame, and it is at this point, as the next two chapters will show, that the following of Chakradhar flourishes. He innovates a new social order, tied to the use of colloquial Marathi among his followers, though his own first language would have been Gujarati.⁴⁰ Despite the fact that we find many examples, some to be detailed, of Chakradhar’s expertise in Sanskrit, he does not use Sanskrit with his followers. Many of his followers, Brahmin males, were conversant and even experts in Sanskrit, yet Marathi becomes the lingua franca of their community. The ethical rationale for the use of Marathi within the Mahanubhav order is the subject of chapter 5.

FIGURE 3.1. Contemporary poster art depiction of Chakradhar. Author’s collection

Given this rejection of Sanskrit, the location of the original community of the Mahanubhavs in Paithan is significant. The town was well known then, as it still is today, as a center for Brahminic learning and Sanskrit literary production; it was the intellectual capital of the Brahminic ecumene in the Yadava century. A Brahmin male of high learning, royal pedigree, and superior Sanskrit like Chakradhar would have been a regular sight in Paithan, though we have no evidence from the Līḷācaritra that Chakradhar chose Paithan for this reason. Yet we can imagine that a spiritual innovator with an eye toward reordering social relations within a given cultural field would find Paithan to be the ideal ground for recruiting like-minded elites. Chakradhar does not belong to the dominant Brahmin jati of the town, the Deshastha Brahmin community, and in many other ways, as we will see, he stands in stark relief to Brahminic culture in Paithan, in part as an outsider and in part because of his retinue of followers, which appears constituted by a majority of women. Yet he does belong there in other ways, and his many Brahmin followers circulate within this region, brought here, directly or indirectly, by the gravity of the Brahminic ecumene itself. It is in and around the Brahminic ecumene that many of the significant events of Chakradhar’s life will take place.

The last phase of Chakradhar’s hagiography, usually called the “Uttarārdha,” or “Latter Half,” is marked at the point when Chakradhar meets and inducts Nagadev, later to be called Bhatobas, a Brahmin devotee who has apparently given up a life as a highly successful mercenary to follow Chakradhar and who succeeds him as head of the Mahanubhav order when Chakradhar departs Maharashtra.⁴¹ This phase of the Līḷācaritra describes short visits to areas around the Godavari River, but focuses primarily on Chakradhar’s efforts to establish the contours of his order and transmit his teachings. He appoints Bhatobas as his successor and dictates restrictions on his followers’ actions and movements. Bhatobas’s life is the primary subject of the Smṛtisthaḷa (c. 1312).

It is worth observing that a certain kind of affinity is displayed between Chakradhar and Bhatobas: both are Brahmins, yet trained in the arts of state and war—we see Chakradhar’s own skills with a sword on at least one occasion.⁴² They are both “warrior” Brahmins—Brahmins who have been schooled in the craft of politics or raje. As such, Bhatobas and Chakradhar are intermediary figures, ideal types of the nexus of state and Brahminic ecumene that characterizes the Yadava period.⁴³ Indeed, the Līḷācaritra will detail several stories that convey the interest of successive Yadava rulers—Krishna, Mahadeva, and Ramachandra—about Chakradhar and the Mahanubhavs, an attentiveness that turns from curiosity to admiration to hostility.

At the end some versions of the Līḷācaritra we find a set of stories describing Chakradhar arrested by Yadava soldiers and persecuted by the state on the orders of Hemadri.⁴⁴ As mentioned in the “Note on Translation,” many Mahanubhavs do not believe these stories to be historically true, and I do not endorse them as true in this book, but rather engage them as remnants of the larger story of vernacularization. In some versions of the Līḷācaritra, soldiers bring Chakradhar to a temple and a tribunal accuses him of impropriety in teaching women, a charge with multiple implications. The tribunal of Brahmins and others, including Hemadri, purportedly puts Chakradhar through a public trial, an event that we will examine in detail in chapter 5.⁴⁵ Chakradhar is portrayed as indifferent to the tribunal’s affairs and encourages the august gathering to do as they see fit. They order him brought to another temple where allegedly his nose is cut off as a punishment, what some versions of the Līḷācaritra describes as Chakradhar’s “sacrifice” or pūjā.⁴⁶ Later, responding to the anguish of his followers, Chakradhar allows his severed body part(s) to be regenerated.⁴⁷

At the end of the Līḷācaritra, Chakradhar begins to make arrangements to leave the region of the Yadavas.⁴⁸ He appoints Bhatobas to succeed him as the group’s leader following his departure.⁴⁹ The Yadava state, however, continues to persecute Chakradhar, according to some versions of the Līḷācaritra. Indeed, though this lila is likely a later addition, in one episode Chakradhar apparently predicts the ruination of the Yadava state at the hands of mlechha or “Muslims,” a reference to the Delhi Sultanate’s advance into the region in 1294 CE. This prophecy of dynastic doom suggests a theme of animosity between Chakradhar and the Mahanubhavs, on the one hand, and the Yadava state, on the other.⁵⁰ In Belapur Chakradhar is apprehended by Yadava soldiers again and brought to a mountainous area, where he is purportedly beheaded.⁵¹ However, after the soldiers leave Chakradhar’s body, the lila tells us that his head and body rejoin, a feat witnessed by a group of Natha yogis. It is important to reiterate here that some Mahanubhavs do not accept the veracity of these stories, even while they are present in the scriptural record of the Līḷācaritra.

Revived, Chakradhar begins his final journey north, toward Ujjain, but not before encountering his former follower, the Brahmin teacher and now minister of the Yadava state Sarang Pandit, who, in Judas fashion, had betrayed his friend and mentor at the tribunal mentioned earlier. Filled with shame, Sarang Pandit tries to hide his face from Chakradhar but is noticed.⁵² This, and another chance meeting, are related to Bhatobas and Chakradhar’s followers as eyewitness testimony reassuring them that their master is still alive and is journeying northward.⁵³ Indeed, though some Mahanubhavs accept the stories of Chakradhar’s mutilation and decapitation, and some do not, most Mahanubhavs believe that Chakradhar lives still in the Himalaya. The Līḷācaritra ends as Chakradhar leaves the region of Maharashtra toward Ujjain.⁵⁴ The general date for the end of the historical memory of Chakradhar in Maharashtra is 1273 CE. Many of his followers retreated to Riddhapur, to remain under the tutelage of Gundam Raul and collectively recall the life of their departed leader. This recollection is said to have taken the form of the Līḷācaritra in 1278 CE, compiled and written out by the Brahmin follower Mhaibhat or Mhaimbhat.

Jnandev (c. 1271)

As mentioned, a significant asymmetry of biographical data from the period of this study exists between Chakradhar, portrayed in the Līḷācaritra, and Jnandev, portrayed in the Jñāneśvarī. Though the life story of Jnandev is perhaps one of the best-known biographies in the Marathi-speaking world, the texts that tell us of his life come some decades, perhaps even centuries, after the purported time period when the Jñāneśvarī is composed. These are the biographies of Jnandev that emerge when the subject of his life is taken up by a person considered to be of a Shudra or “low” caste, a tailor or Shimpi named Namdev (1270–1350 CE).⁵⁵ These biographies are divided into three parts (an organizational theme in many hagiographies, as we see above with the Līḷācaritra). The three parts of Jnandev’s biography attributed to Namdev are thematically arranged in this way: the story of Jnandev’s parents and his childhood (called the “Ādi” or “Beginning”); Jnandev’s meeting with Namdev and other low caste and female sants, as well as a journey with Namdev to pilgrimage places in northern India (called the “Tīrthāvaḷī” or “The Journey”); and Jnandev’s voluntary entombment in the place of his birth, Alandi (called the “Samādhi” or “Entombment”). In terms of philological historiography, the “Ādi” and “Tīrthāvaḷī” are represented in texts as early as the seventeenth century; the “Samādhi” is represented later, but, for various reasons, I suspect that it was composed around the same time as the other two texts.⁵⁶ In terms of public memory, all three texts are said to have been composed by Namdev after Jnandev completed the Jñāneśvarī (which is a moment that closes the story of the “Ādi”); the “Tīrthāvaḷī” and the “Samādhi” would, according to diegetic logic, have been composed after those events as well. This means that even if we take Namdev’s hagiography of Jnandev at historical “face value,” the latter two parts would have been composed after 1296 CE, and the first part at or after this time. For these reasons—the philological and diegetic position of this biography after the composition of the Jñāneśvarī—I do not draw on these biographical details in my analysis given here of the Jnandev portrayed in the context of the composition of the Jñāneśvarī and hence the biographical outline of its purported author. Instead, I draw from the Jñāneśvarī itself whatever biographical details we can glean and I restrict myself to this sphere, though I do return to the biography attributed to Namdev in the conclusion.

The biographical details we can glean from the Jñāneśvarī begin with a name, Jnandev. This is the self-designation of the person composing the text; we do not see the name Jnaneshwar, the root of the eponymous popular title of the work, anywhere in the text. The Jñāneśvarī suggests that its author lived around 1290 CE when the text’s colophon tells us it was composed,⁵⁷ and he lived in the region of Nevase in Maharashtra, a town sixty kilometers south of Devgiri and about that far to the west of Paithan; in other words, a town within the nexus of major urban areas of the Yadava century and along the key circuits of the Brahminic ecumene. Jnandev does not tell us his caste in this text, though it is implied in several ways, as we will see in later chapters, that he is a Brahmin. As noted, his later hagiography will position Jnandev within an ambivalent social ontology—an “outcaste” Brahmin who both attempts to return to caste status (along with his siblings), but one who becomes deeply critical of caste distinction (as the Jñāneśvarī will show and as his later hagiography will emphasize). The Jñāneśvarī assumes that Jnandev is a Brahmin and displays this indirectly in many ways.

One reason to assume Jnandev is a Brahmin is that he is clearly a scholar of Sanskrit, for his primary text is the Sanskrit Bhagavad Gītā, which he quotes throughout the text; he is also not a “scribe” (thus unlikely a Kayastha), for the Jñāneśvarī is an oral performance transcribed by a figure who calls himself “Satchidananda Baba” in the text’s colophon. Jnandev delivers the Jñāneśvarī as an oral performance to an audience who, at least theoretically, attended a discourse composed of over nine thousand verses in Marathi in the town of Nevase at the end of the thirteenth century. This indicates that Jnandev had a following within the region; which is also suggested by the fact that this text exists at all. He may not have had “devotees,” but he had an audience who viewed him as an authority. He describes this audience, in ideal terms, as including “women, low castes, and others” (strishudradika).⁵⁸ My point here is that Jnandev’s diegetic audience implies a circle of attentive listeners (if not so much a following) and a community that is at least socially capacious in terms of caste, gender, and class.

The content of the Jñāneśvarī reveals that Jnandev is aware of a broad range of Sanskrit material in philosophy, Dharma Śāstra, mythology or purana, aesthetics, poetry, and even apparently haṭha yoga, among many other things.⁵⁹ Jnandev, therefore, is a Sanskrit expert, though he does not take on epithets of such distinction, such as paṇḍt or ācārya. Instead, he makes several self-deprecating statements, even while displaying his mastery of the field of Sanskrit knowledge. Jnandev tells us that his guru is Nivritti, who may also be his brother—this is a claim of later hagiography and not made explicit in the text, but there is clearly a jocular intimacy between Jnandev and Nivritti that seems to extend beyond the social mores of a teacher-student relationship alone; that is, Jnandev tends to act like a “little brother” might. But whatever this familial relationship, Jnandev clearly declares Nivritti to be his guru, and, through Nivritti, Jnandev traces a lineage for himself within the Natha yogi genealogy.⁶⁰ The popular depiction of Jnandev in figure 3.2, seated in the lotus position, upon a small platform, raised above a diegetical audience, conveys some of the features described here.

Though Jnandev is a Sanskritist, it is perhaps most obviously a feature of his biography that he is a speaker of, and literary artist in, Marathi. Whereas Chakradhar and the early Mahanubhavs—all very much like Jnandev in their positions as Brahmin male Sanskrit experts (particularly Mhaibhat, the overall “editor” and compiler of the Līḷācaritra)—use Marathi conscientiously as an ethical and practical means, Jnandev explicitly seeks to create a high aesthetic value for Marathi and engender a new Marathi literature. He not only has an ethics around salvation and access to the Bhagavad Gītā for all, but he also has an artistic agenda with Marathi—to make the language a medium for literature. In this sense, Jnandev is an innovator in literature itself. He is a “new wave” author crafting a new idiom of art.

The diegetic setting of the Jñāneśvarī has but two explicit characters—Jnandev and Nivritti—and a general audience that Jnandev sometimes addresses, but that is not described. We hear no biographical details of Jnandev’s parents or other siblings and nothing about other companions. In terms of his “community”—religious, social, and so on—we have no further information. This is important to note. Though Jnandev would later become a key figure in the Varkari religion,⁶¹ focused on the worship of the deity Vitthal/Pandurang in the town of Pandharpur, we hear nothing of Vitthal, Pandurang, or Pandharpur in the Jñāneśvarī. In other words, the Jñāneśvarī does not indicate reverence for Pandharpur or Vitthal, nor does it suggest that Jnandev is a “Varkari,” though this does not of course mean that he did not revere Vitthal or that he was not a Varkari. In later hagiography and in the abhangs or “songs” attributed to Jnandev, he is indeed a Varkari and Vitthal devotee. He may have been a Varkari before and during the composition of the Jñāneśvarī; however, this text simply does not address these issues and does not mention Vitthal, Pandharpur, or other sants of the Varkari tradition.

It is perhaps related to this latter point that we also see a clear critique in Jnandev’s text—and even in the existence of his text—of the elitism surrounding the exclusive use and transmission of Sanskrit among upper-caste males. As we will see, Jnandev utterly rejects the idea that the salvational materials of Sanskrit should be inaccessible to a majority of humanity, especially women, low castes, and those deemed “Untouchable.” In some sense, his later biographies will seek to explain why this is the case, how it is that this erudite male Brahmin Sanskrit scholar chose to write a commentary on a Sanskrit text in everyday Marathi and present within it explicit rejections and condemnations of elitism around caste and gender difference in relation to the literary and religious treasures of Sanskrit. In the Jñāneśvarī we have an intellectual, philosophical, and theological engagement with many things, including an evolving social ethics around language and salvation; but we have almost no biographical narrative, no romantic journey of our hero as he reaches the height of his literary powers.

What this tells us in terms of a biographical sketch of Jnandev is that he was a self-conscious innovator, aware of the dynamics of the cultural fields that surrounded him, particularly of the intersection between the literary field and the Brahminic ecumene. Jnandev, in distinction to Chakradhar, is in this sense an “author,” an agent and a producer, who contends with the relational nature of the cultural field, seeking to press out the boundaries of some aspects of that field while retaining other boundaries, as we will see. While both Chakradhar and Jnandev are spiritual and cultural innovators, it is Jnandev who leaves us with a text that has an agenda, what I’ve called a “vernacular manifesto,” that conveys a cultural politics beyond the confines of a particular religious group. If Chakradhar and the Līḷācaritra speak to the circle of initiates within the frame of the Mahanubhav religion, Jnandev will speak to a field very similar to the one identified in chapter 2 in the last inscription of the Yadava era in Marathi, the gift to the Pandharpur Temple of 1311. In that inscription, marāṭha, meaning a region, a language, and a field of devotion, is an idea quite similar to what Jnandev will propose—that Marathi is not merely a language but a medium for social unity and soteriology. The two do not map onto one another (Jnandev does not invoke Pandharpur or Vitthal as the 1311 inscription does), but they are both expressions of a distinctive public crafted from the materials of everyday life. In the Līḷācaritra Chakradhar will circumscribe a boundary for his followers—the sphere of “Maharashtra”—but this is a physical sphere of limitation, a territory. For Jnandev, however, Marathi (though not “Maharashtra”) is a way to cross over borders and boundaries, reaching “women, low castes, and others” to whom he is compelled to offer the salvational benefits of the Bhagavad Gītā. Jnandev’s innovative spiritualism is a blueprint for a future yet to be constructed, but one that will be built in part from Marathi.

The “Sant Function” in a Changing Spiritual Economy

I want to expand here on a heuristic adaptation of Foucault’s “author function” with the idea of the “sant function.” It is not only a feature of South Asian history, but of the history of the world, that figures emerge from time to time to form new spiritual and social paradigms, and in the bhakti milieu of western and northern India the term often used for these figures is sant or “good person.” Though the term is often rendered in English as “saint,” one hopes that the Christian connotations are erased or at least sublimated. The biographies of innovation ascribed to these sants are crafted in part from the materials of the old regimes recombined with new ideas, models, and semiotic systems. These figures may be called prophets, visionaries, gurus, etc., and they may also be called heretics, revolutionaries, traitors, and madmen or madwomen.⁶² Such figures venture in new directions within a given semiotic system and form new spiritual paradigms. I juxtapose these figures with those spiritual leaders who continue within a given spiritual or religious lineage, even as innovators yet wedded to a preservation of that lineage’s orthodoxies.⁶³ My interest here is in understanding Chakradhar and Jnandev as emblematic of a radical restructuring of the symbolic capital of a given field, in this case the field of literature or rather of public literary expression. These are perhaps figures with an inordinate share of what Weber called “charisma” and “charismatic authority” and, similarly, their success is predicated on the process of “routinization” of their new ideas in their wake, a process that often requires the institution of a “sacred biography” of the person.⁶⁴ My interest here, however, is not in this routinization but rather in the moment of innovation. I want to illuminate the moment of a new route being formed through the cultural and political power of an age. In this way the “sant function” is a device of history. The social relations involved in this moment of innovation are tracked by the way these figures and their followers are seen to interrupt and disrupt flows of power in society. The figure may or may not be a historical figure, but he or she certainly is an index for historical change.

In thinking through what it is that makes Jnandev, Chakradhar, and the early Mahanubhavs part of a “quotidian revolution,” I am inspired in part by Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of a “cultural field” as a field of forces in competition to moderate value, the material of symbolic capital. Though a now well-worn set of concepts, Bourdieu’s ideas still inspire useful ways of thinking about social change. Bourdieu uses the idea of a “field” to express a social sphere of people in relation to one another by virtue of a shared set of values and defined by that relationship—what he calls “relationality,” a constant negotiation that, in part, creates a given field.⁶⁵ A field is constructed by “agents” in relation to others who share a stake in the subject of that field, such as art, culture, politics, sports, academia, and so on. The people who produce and consume culture, for example, constitute “a space of positions and position takings” in an “objective relation” to one another.⁶⁶ I take this to mean that human relationships construct the fields of value (or “distinction”) that give things like art, literature, sports, or politics their social value. This idea expresses the core of what makes an economy something people “believe in,” having “faith in the value of the dollar,” for example. Each field is conditioned by a “circle of belief,” even a force of “faith,” in the value of that field’s products, and each field has specific “rules of the game.” Each field involves the trade of symbolic capital, what is valued in that field by agents and others. Within such fields, a normative system of “belief” in value is enacted that sustains the field. Though Bourdieu had little to say about religion, one can easily see here in his terminology a deep Weberian dependence on the cosubstantiation of religion and economy as means of symbolic interpretation.

One can imagine the Brahminic ecumene as the dominant agentive force of the literary field of the Yadava century. Until the advent of “Marathi literature” the literary field was also contained entirely within the Brahminic ecumene. The Brahminic ecumene does not ignore the nonelite, quotidian world, but it does not gather its symbolic capital by virtue of general public attention and consent. Within this context, I suggest that it is the effect of the “sant function” to reorder the symbolic capital of the literary field and reformulate the set of relations that constitute it. Around the public memory of Jnandev and Charkardhar a new literary economy is engendered and remembered. This new literary economy is also a new spiritual economy, for the impetus behind the texts considered the first works of Marathi literature is a spiritual and, at times, social, salvational promise.

The transformation of a given field, the literary or spiritual field, for example, is possible because fields are not necessarily stable. Bourdieu in particular was interested in change, in how fields mutate with new agents and intersections with other fields. He describes the literary field, for example, as “a field of forces, but also a field of struggles tending to transform or conserve this field of forces.”⁶⁷ A field’s stabilization of symbolic capital, what Bourdieu calls its “orthodoxy,” is often disrupted by “heresy,” where the heretics, the new “prophets,” emerge to reorder symbolic capital and social relations. Sometimes such figures are quelled and disposed of by the prevailing orthodox agents of the field, but sometimes the heretics prevail and a new set of “rules,” a new symbolic capital and habitus, is engendered.⁶⁸ Again, though Bourdieu is analyzing the fields of literary production, his language resonates with the categories of Western and Christian religious institutionalism.

I position the public memory of Chakradhar and Jnandev as innovators within the dominant literary field of the Yadava Century, yet “heretical” (in Bourdieu’s sense) to it in important ways, many of them running contrary to prevailing social norms. As argued in the previous chapters, the Yadavas did not patronize literary Marathi—they preferred to patronize socially orthodox Dharma Śāstra literary production. Yet their patronage of writing as a technical and aesthetic skill—their support for the professional skill of writing and reading and its various aesthetics—conditioned the social capital of literacy as a value in and of itself. Jnandev and the early Mahanubhavs who composed the Līḷācaritra transposed the social capital of literacy from the dominant literary field (in which Sanskrit was the preeminent and perhaps the only language of literature) to a new language, Marathi. Indeed, we will observe that literacy itself, for the Mahanubhav male Brahmin leaders, was a kind of habitus, an ingrained, semiconscious disposition of action. Their orthodoxy was to maintain the symbolic capital of literacy, but their “heresy” was to transfer this symbolic capital to Marathi. As noted already, an appeal to speak for the quotidian world has a long history in Sanskrit; shifting that appeal into the very language of the quotidian world is the character of the vernacular turn as we know it.

The sant function highlights the notion of a collective undertaking, in which an individual may be central but an endeavor that is on the whole a fundamentally asocial, nonindividualistic one. Such an individual may be remembered as an agent in a given field, yet we know of the person, and history marks his or her existence, only because of the endurance of the field, of the social sphere around the agent, not because of the “charisma” of the agent him- or herself. I follow Bourdieu when he argues of the literary field in particular that it “requires…a radical break with the substantialist mode of thought…which tends to foreground the individual…at the expense of the structural relations.”⁶⁹ Again—this is not a great man theory of history. A spiritual innovator may be an individual, but he or she is a principle of organization for a social order within a new field. My interest is, therefore, not in arguing the historicity of an innovative spiritualist, but rather the history of the cultural field that is said to have been inaugurated by that figure. Chakradhar and Jnandev can be seen as vehicles for the restructuring of a field’s symbolic capital: not the bearers of old orthodoxies, but the prophets of new ones. Around their public memories we see a reconfiguration, and sometimes an entirely new economy of belief and practice arises. My argument here and in the remainder of the book is that Jnandev and Chakradhar are conceived of as agents who inaugurate the religioliterary field of Marathi by combining a predisposition for literacy with a desire to offer salvation to the quotidian world. And thus Marathi becomes their natural medium. They are conceived as such in the texts we will study in the next four chapters, and this conceptualization is both explicit and juxtaposed to prevailing norms. Whether or not they exist as historical individuals, they certainly exist to organize a particular history, the history of Marathi literary vernacularization.

What this means, in terms of this chapter’s aim, is that we can only peer back through the prism of the newly engendered literary field of Marathi to its first substantive texts to unearth biographical data. This is because the only materials available to us to portray an image of the lives of Jnandev and Chakradhar are themselves the inaugural texts of Marathi. We are like the proverbial dog that chases its own tail: we have to return to the tail, but this is not the same thing as a beginning. My aim has been to extract from this circular discourse some sense of the biographical components of this study and of the two figures at its core and to provide a set of ideas to orient our sense of the biographical in the story of Marathi vernacularization. Spiritual innovators within the “sant function” context convey the ontology of the metonym—they are merely the human or “humanistic” part of what is also an economy, a market, an aesthetics, a social allegory, and (importantly for these subjects) a new and more equal opportunity for spiritual salvation. Jnandev and Chakradhar are not only remembered as spiritual innovators but also as indexes of innovation itself.

A new spiritual innovator exists as an organizing principle among many kinds of “economies”: spiritual, religious, social, cultural, literary, financial, political, and so on. The intersection of markets, economies, and fields—mediated by the field of power—is a key idea for Bourdieu, and I think we see it here too.⁷⁰ The highest reaches of the Brahminic ecumene, of the literary field of Sanskrit, intersected with the fields of political power (in terms of state ministerial positions, for example) and the field of the economy (in terms of rewards through instruments like the agrahara). High cultural capital in all these fields meant a socioeconomic mobility that is a hallmark of the Yadava century; “markets” of all sorts—economic, religious, social, artistic—are linked and trade in capital.⁷¹ Both Chakradhar and Jnandev demonstrate high symbolic capital within the symbolic economy of the Brahminic ecumene. With Chakradhar in particular, we will see other fields—of politics and economics—intersect with the religious field in which he operates. Jnandev, I will note, reflects several other fields in the Jñāneśvarī, though his interactions are less “heretical” in these contexts and more in line with social norms. And yet both appear to have rejected all access to the financial economy of their age (award through state entitlements, for example) in order to fully invest in the spiritual economy of their age, which, if it is set counter to the prevailing norms of the Yadava century, would also mean a rejection of the financial field of benefit. Bourdieu described the field of art as an inversion of the economic field and, as such, related to it in symbolic form. Similarly, the new field occupied by and expanded by figures like Jnandev and Chakradhar, carved in the process of Marathi literary vernacularization, reveal an inversion of the field of social, political, and economic power in the Yadava century. The idea of poverty and abnegation of worldly accumulation is a long-held value in the ethical and aesthetic systems we associate with “religion.”

Jnandev and Chakradhar were mavericks within the Brahminic ecumene, and as such they are figures of some risk. Just as Bourdieu saw the field of literary production as an inversion of the economic field in modern Europe, so we might see the reconfiguration of the spiritual field, and its association with the social fields of the Yadava age, as also an inversion of the economic field. Through the figure of Chakradhar in particular, we will see someone who actively rejected state and financial benefit—literally running away from kings and powerful ministers bearing gifts—in order to fully invest himself in a reconfiguration of spiritual and social value. We will see this sense of risk clearly in the latter part of Līḷācaritra that documents the end of Chakradhar’s life in Maharashtra, a period that concludes when he is persecuted by the Brahmin elites of his time in the name of the Yadava king Ramachandra. And we may sense some of the mitigation of risk as well in the Jñāneśvarī toward its conclusion when Jnandev explicitly thanks King Ramachandra for his benevolence. As we will see, being a spiritual innovator, restructuring the sociospiritual capital of an era, is remembered to be a very risky endeavor.

My use of the ideas presented here—the “sant function” or the “spiritual innovator”—are meant to serve as heuristic tools. While the contours of the lives I invoke remain essential to understanding how the texts and contexts associated with them present the social and religious critiques of the literary vernacular moment, I hope the reader will find that the concepts of this chapter help illuminate particular aspects of the received memories of Jnandev and Chakradhar. For example, the idiomatic pattern of the spiritual innovator is apparent in the brief outline of Chakradhar’s life given in this chapter. Initially, as a yogi and public preacher, his power was drawn from the symbolic capital of his many intersecting social ontologies: male, Natha yogi, Brahmin, someone with deep expertise in Sanskrit and Sanskritic literature, a man familiar with politics and statecraft. Any or all of these qualities would have provided several opportunities for livelihood in the Brahminic ecumene or perhaps the ministerial functions of the Yadava state. Yet the “venture” of Chakradhar’s innovations in social, religious, and, later, literary contexts involved other, apparently “radical,” decisions: to disavow Sanskrit and adopt Marathi, a second language to Chakradhar; to found his new order with a preponderance of female devotees; to insist on the almost complete rejection of caste distinctions within the ambit of his initiates; and to reject apparent overtures of royal beneficence or support from within the Brahminic ecumene or the royal court. In the figure of Chakradhar, the conveyance of some of the symbolic capital of the Brahminic ecumene—a good deal of its esoteric philosophy and the value of literacy—are matched by a rejection of many of that ecumene’s core socioreligious values. Heresy and innovation are seamlessly intertwined.

Jnandev’s spiritual and social innovation is a feature of the apparent contradictions between his received biography—elite Brahmin male Sanskrit scholar—and the ethics of his text—a critique of elite Brahmin male exclusive access to a Sanskrit text about human salvation. As a figure who would have had access to high symbolic capital in the literary field within the Brahminic ecumene, Jnandev most explicitly transfers that capital to a new Marathi literary idiom. This is a powerful and creative reconfiguration of the literary field in the Yadava century. While the Mahanubhavs composed their text in Marathi, they did not evince self-consciousness about literary form. Jnandev, on the other hand, appears aware of his many “heretical” interventions, such as his perspective about providing access to salvational materials for non-Brahmins and women, but also the creation of a new literary world in a regional language that he champions. I consider Jnandev and Chakradhar epitomes of the sant function because their public memory recalls them as having innovated from the old a new social economy of religious, literary, and cultural value, and so they stand as human emblems of that much broader social change.

Chakradhar and Jnandev represent figures that recondition the symbolic capital of a given field. Bourdieu refers to fields as defined by relationality, by humans negotiating value and belief relevant to the conditions and products of a given field. In the quasi-Marxist (and Weberian) synthesis of Bourdieu’s thought, this involves understanding how agents in relation to other agents distribute and authorize symbolic capital. Spiritual innovators like Chakradhar and Jnandev enter a given field, perhaps by virtue of the possession of a modicum of relevant symbolic capital, but they operate within this field in opposition to the prevailing norms and relations of the field. In other words, they enter a given field to realign symbolic capital by renegotiating relationships among people within that field or, rather, to stand as indexes of that renegotiation. For Chakradhar, this involves entirely dissolving caste and gender hierarchy within his circle of initiates, but largely tolerating such hierarchy outside that circle. Jnandev’s venture comprises founding a new literary field entirely, “Marathi literature,” that can convey the salvational power of the Bhagavad Gītā to a common audience. This discursive soteriology is tempered and circumscribed by the social mores of the age, mores that are part and parcel of the idioms of Marathi Jnandev uses, the cultural distinctions that give the language its autochthonous and quotidian meanings.⁷² And yet, subverting an apparent acceptance of these social mores, we will also see the seeds of social equality planted within the Jñāneśvarī.

Chakradhar and Jnandev are not remembered simply as novel gurus or new guides. They stand in for a social force that reconfigures the spiritual economy itself and, in so doing, alters the social worlds around by inaugurating a critical public debate. Jnandev and Chakradhar may not have had the benefit of a civil society in their age, but they made claims about civility in society in the medium of the vernacular. Their innovation is not merely a new technology of the self, a new brand of worship, a public discourse on social equality, or a redirection of social value, but a combination of them all: they are human supernovas in the course of the history of spirit, streaming their stardust into the present.