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

Chakradhar did not compose the Līḷācaritra, but rather his followers after his departure did so; yet the content of the Līḷācaritra is Chakradhar’s life, words, and actions. In some fundamental sense, he is its object and subject, its “prime agent,” I would say, though he is not the text’s literary composer. While we often refer to Mhaibhat as the author of the Līḷācaritra, he was in fact its editor and compiler, according to historical memory, a person who took down the details of the remembrances of others; Mhaibhat was a scribe and editor in the main, and as a late addition to the Mahanubhavs (perhaps joining them six to twelve months before Chakradhar’s departure), he depended on long-standing members of the community to convey the data he required, the remembrances that are called lilas or “plays” in this text. Where the Jñāneśvarī has a purported author—Jnandev²—the Līḷācaritra is a text with many authors, but a single subject—Chakradhar. The figure of Chakradhar is the prevailing logic of the text in every way including language. In this study, therefore, I consider the Līḷācaritra to be a text whose agent is Chakradhar, and, as such, the text serves to transmit his voice and actions—whatever the historical reality of that content.

The Līḷācaritra is as unadorned a reflection of Chakradhar as possible, keeping in mind the ways in which human memory operates when recalling the past. I say this knowing that the text, as with all texts perhaps, may be “unreliable” in a positivist historical sense; as a product of many centuries of human preservation the text, like all texts, has changed over the years. And so I take it that the Līḷācaritra, in the form in which it is conveyed in historical memory in general in Maharashtra, encodes the life, words, and deeds of Chakradhar as collectively chronicled by his followers. For this reason, text and agent are inseparable—Chakradhar and the Līḷācaritra join to form the first work of Marathi literature that we have.

The Līḷācaritra is interesting in another way. While the Jñāneśvarī is clearly a work of theology, philosophy, and (secondarily) social critique, it is all couched within the sphere of dharma, the quasi-religious, quasi-social concept of the proper functioning of society and cosmic reality, and so the text is primarily a theological and philosophical treatise. As such, the Jñāneśvarī is fundamentally a didactic text. The Līḷācaritra, though it also engages dharma, theology, and philosophy, in addition to politics, history, culture, economics, and many other subjects, is still fundamentally a text meant to accurately record of the life of Chakradhar above all. Because of this deep commitment to “the facts” of Chakradhar’s life, the prose of the Līḷācaritra conforms to a kind of historical literary realism.³ Chakradhar commands his followers to “remember me as you have seen me,” and the implication of veracity in this command is faithfully carried out by his followers in the Līḷācaritra.⁴ Certainly the text is devotional, as the source of Chakradhar’s teachings, as well as hagiographical, as it records the life of the founder and deity of the Mahanubhav community. Yet the aesthetic and intended effect of the text is far more similar to the Marathi chronicle genre that will emerge a few centuries later, called bakhar, than it is to either the Jñāneśvarī or to the devotional songs of the sants of the region (abhang), or to the hagiographies that will emerge after Namdev (1270–1350).⁵ Thus the first text of Marathi literature is a text that one can describe heuristically as a work of historical literary realism.

If the Līḷācaritra is a historical chronicle, and the primary subject of its history is Chakradhar, which also makes it a biography, I hesitate to call it a hagiography for reasons I will discuss further on in this chapter. I use the term historical here not to assign this text a place in Indian literary typology—the lack of the existence of such a form has been at the center of a long and ongoing debate in South Asia studies.⁶ This is not a subject that must be belabored: those who do not think that India has “history” before modernity are grappling with a problem germane to modern historiography, not to India’s record of its past. I refer to the text as “literary realism” to touch upon the way it sought to preserve a record of the past in exact detail, with particular attention to everyday life, as an unadorned record of actual events in chronological and geographical order—to historicize as exactly as possible and with great attention to location was inherently a feature of the religion and devotional orthodoxy of the Mahanubhavs. It is essential to the theological purpose of the text to give the richest possible details to their remembrance of Chakradhar so that nothing would be forgotten. This means the Līḷācaritra contains vivid, even tedious, details of everyday life. Political events and the names and lives of political leaders, kings, and ministers are amply recorded. We have notes about all sorts of features of daily life: food and food prices; weather conditions; descriptions of towns, villages, and cities; common rituals of all sorts; various trades and occupations; the curiosities of specific Marathi argots and euphemisms, and so on.⁷ Almost every lila records a dialogue, and often this dialogue is inflected with efforts to record argot, accent, and so on; on more than one occasion an observer notes that Chakradhar speaks Marathi well for a Gujarati; in several cases Chakradhar imitates the speech of others, and this is captured in peculiar Marathi phonetics. Another sign of this realism, and the historical impetus behind it, is the fact that we get a picture of Chakradhar that is “warts and all.” He is displayed as quick tempered sometimes, as somewhat harsh at other times; he appears to gamble, and this is carried forward into stories in which it appears Chakradhar does not like to lose games, even to children, who cry when they are defeated by Chakradhar.⁸ These are of course the features of lila, and Mahanubhavs interpret these episodes as the unique configuration of the Chakradhar’s divine status, of the fact that Chakradhar does things that are beyond human fathoming. One final effect of the literary realism of the Līḷācaritra is the relative lack of “miracles” for a story about a divine person. This is highly unusual in South Asia or elsewhere—such as in Catholicism where every saint must evince a miracle in order to qualify for sainthood. There are almost no miracles associated with Chakradhar, save those that surround his purported disfiguration and decapitation. Instead, we see Chakradhar as a highly skilled human being with a tremendous charisma, yet perhaps more than any “normal” person. For example, at one point in the Līḷācaritra, as we will see, Chakradhar is poisoned. He does not cure the poison through a miracle, but rather through assiduously drinking milk, and his treatment takes a great toll on his health, as the text records. For this reason I find the term hagiography too loaded with assumptions about divine intervention and miraculous effect to adequately describe this unique text. There is no doubt that the Mahanubhavs worship Chakradhar (as well as Gundam Raul and Changadev) as deities (manifestations of the one deity, Parameshwar), and it is part of their theology of his divinity that each of his actions and words should be preserved exactly as they happened. In the Līḷācaritra historical literary realism is technically a theological position.

In describing the Līḷācaritra as historical literary realism, I find a particular parallel with Sanskrit texts of roughly the same period, such as the Rājatarangiṇī (c. twelfth century) and Prabandha Cintāmaṇi (early fourteenth century). Daud Ali states that both texts “seemed to be characterized by great ‘realism’ ” because they “portrayed everyday life,” giving them a “tantalizingly ‘historical’ character.”⁹ Ali wisely distances himself from Orientalist-era claims that the Rājatarangiṇī, for example, was premodern India’s one and only work of something like historical writing. But Ali’s point is that these texts, though shot through with “the magical and supernatural,” did not represent “ ‘failed’ historical consciousness, but a conceptualization of the past that was the product of significant shifts at the turn of the millennium in Western India.”¹⁰ These historically inflected narratives Ali calls “useable pasts.”¹¹ I would argue that the Līḷācaritra is a preeminent example of just such a useable past, a text that sought to preserve an accurate record of the past, but in a context at a far remove from modern historical writing or modern literary realism.

The Līḷācaritra has very little to say explicitly about the use of Marathi rather than another language current within the Yadava century, such as Gujarati or Kannada, and especially Sanskrit. The Līḷācaritra’s primary statement about the use of Marathi is the text itself, that is, the record of Chakradhar’s voice. The early Mahanubhavs used Marathi because this was historically accurate: it was the language Chakradhar spoke, even though it was not his first language. Yet nowhere in the text is there an explanation of why Chakradhar chose to speak in Marathi. Practical concerns would have guided him away from his native Gujarati, which would have been uncommon (but familiar) in the Deccan towns and villages where he circulated. He is also said to have traveled through the South, especially the regions of Kannada and Telugu, and lived there for many years—presumably he would have spoken the languages of these regions as well. But it is less clear why Sanskrit lost out. As the lingua franca of South Asia at the time, Sanskrit was well-known to Chakradhar, the Līḷācaritra tells us, and to at least his male Brahmin followers if not also, perhaps, to a fair number of his female Brahmin followers.

The remainder of this chapter will use the Līḷācaritra to infer a likely rationale and ethics for the use of Marathi, especially in lieu of Sanskrit. To foreground this discussion, though, we should observe two things. First, we must understand the associations not just of region but also of class, caste, and particularly gender that accompanied the use of Marathi in this period in general. We have explored this subject to some degree in part 1, confined to the uses of the Yadava state and the Brahminic ecumene, and we return to it here, placed within the larger Brahminic ecumene, the taxomonies of Sanskrit, and the possible position of a regional language like Marathi within that Brahminic Sanskrit world. Second, we can observe that Chakradhar’s followers, faced with the task of preserving Chakradhar’s legacy, viewed the use of Marathi rather than Sanskrit as essential to conveying their teacher’s legacy in the future. We can then see more clearly the contours of a rationale for the use of Marathi by Chakradhar and the early Mahanubhavs, hence a motivation for literary vernacularization itself. We will conclude by engaging the story of Chakradhar’s trial to see how the various strands of this chapter and the previous one may be read in the judgment of the tribunal, a moment that not only registers a transgression of normative everyday life but also signals the swirl of discourse in public culture around issues of caste, gender, and language, the first formations of a nascent public sphere.

The Sanskrit linguistic world presents a view of itself and other languages ordered in a hierarchical taxonomy governed by religion, class, caste, and gender, primarily; in other words, Sanskrit, from its earliest Vedic forms to the present, has been described by its scholars and practitioners as a language suited for a very narrow and elite subset of people: high-caste males.¹² In a very general sense, then, the linguistic world is divided between Sanskrit and everything else. Sanskrit was a language used by Gods, Brahmin and other high-caste men, and at times certain women, particularly ascetics, queens, and other exceptional females who represented “power” in the male-dominated fields of Sanskrit usage. Everyone else is attributed some version of a Prakrit language, a “natural” or “ordinary” language, or of various “corrupted” or apabhraṃsha languages, primarily of northern India.¹³ Marathi, like all North-Indian Indo-Aryan languages other than Sanskrit, is considered a form of this “ordinary” and “corrupted” genealogy, even though it is not likely that Marathi is “derived” from any language, whether Sanskrit or even any considered Prakrits. In other words, I do not think Marathi is derived from anything, but is likely a language with a unique origin on the subcontinent in the region of Maharashtra that long predates its uses in inscription or its references in other Sanskrit texts, even if that ur-language has been modified by many languages along the way. For Marathi, these would be Sanskrit, of course, but also importantly Persian, as well as Konkani, Kannada, etc. Despite this, in the taxonomies of Sanskrit historical philology, Marathi is an example of a Prakrit, a language of “nature,” gendered in the feminine, and associated with the autochthonous field. In an intellectual world dominated by Brahminic Sanskritic learning such as the Yadava century, it is useful to see how this field of knowledge might have understood the literary value of Marathi.

In Sanskrit dramas, women and low-caste men would speak some version of Prakrit, such as Maharashtri, a language associated with the region of Maharashtra and in particular the Satavahana Empire (c. third century BCE to third century CE). Maharashtri is sometimes described as the origin of Marathi, though I think this is very unlikely. Instead, I find it more likely that Maharashtri is the attempt to represent the language of the region of Maharashtra within the phonological world of Sanskrit. It is, in this sense, a representation of an actual spoken language, but not an origin for that language. Marathi becomes connected to Maharashtri through its status as an apabhramsha language within the Sanskrit typological system.¹⁴ Thus Marathi, from the point of view of Sanskrit linguistic or grammatical typology, is a language inferior in status to Sanskrit, twice-removed and “corrupted” in a sense through Maharashtri and regional apabhramsha dialects, and this inferiority is registered by the fact that it is considered a language suitable primarily for women and low-caste men—here we see age-old associations with the land and nature, on the one hand, and women or the “demotic,” on the other.

This taxonomy became canonical well before the Common Era. For example, Jains first used the Prakrit language Ardhamaghadi and Buddhists composed in the Prakrit language Pali in part to excise themselves from the fields of Brahminic superiority represented by Sanskrit: these new religions of the sixth and fifth centuries BCE—Jainism and Buddhism—rejected the social orthodoxy of varna and admitted women into their monastic communities, in contradistinction to what we might call Vedic Brahminic Hinduism of the age. The early rejection of Sanskrit was, in a sense, an acceptance of its taxonomic world—Jains and Buddhists excluded Sanskrit as a means to position themselves in opposition to the social and religious ideas represented by the language. Curiously, however, Buddhists in particular would return to Sanskrit for practical purposes—to make their debates with Hindus and others standardized to a single language, a reflection of a shared discursive economy among Jains, Buddhists, and the rest (“Hindus,” for lack of a better word), which is to say, the Sanskrit cosmopolis.¹⁵ Within the Sanskritic cosmopolitan sphere we also see this taxonomy in force. As noted, this is amply displayed in Sanskrit drama and epic literature, where women and low-caste men use languages other than Sanskrit, imperfect languages of place as well as social location. Yet this hierarchy did not always imply inferiority. As Madhav Deshpande notes, a key theoretician of poetic aesthetics, Rajashekhar, in his Kāvyamīmāṃsā of around 900, describes Prakrit as a language that is “feminine and delicate” as opposed to the “masculine and terse” nature of Sanskrit; hence for Rajashekhar, a Prakrit language like Marathi is the more appropriate medium for poetry and emotion.¹⁶ We can draw from this not only the clear sense in which Sanskrit is a masculine high-caste language reserved for particular purposes and people, but also that the mastery of the entire linguistic spectrum—Sanskrit, Prakrit, and other “corrupted, natural” forms—was still within the domain of a certain learned Sanskritic sphere. Thus while Jains and Buddhists, at early stages of their literary production, did not use Sanskrit, they used the nomenclature and philosophical worlds inaugurated and sustained by Sanskrit, and in rejecting the use of Sanskrit they yet participated in a self-conscious positioning within the Sanskrit cosmopolis. After all, the Prakrit speech of women in classical plays and epic texts was created for the most part by high-caste men as a feature of the Sanskrit public and literary sphere, as a marker of social distinction. Whether or not this actually reflected a real-world or quotidian reality of language use is a much harder question to answer—and beyond my ken in any case. But I point this out for, as we know, the surviving materials we have that display the inauguration of Marathi as a literary language both emerge from the genius of members of the Brahminic ecumene of the thirteenth century, even if at its periphery and only to critique its origins. Like the Buddhist and Jain literary production before it, the advent of the Marathi literary field in the thirteenth century is a critique from within a Sanskritic Brahminic ecumene, a shared epistemology that exhibits radical and divergent interpretations, and this inner nature of the criticism of social restrictions placed on Sanskrit will naturally display a degree of ambivalence, as the last chapter on Jnandev and the Jñāneśvarī will make plain.¹⁷

The sense from within the Brahminic ecumene in which the “ordinary” and “natural” languages of India in this period are “feminine” is borne out in highly self-conscious ways in both the Līḷācaritra and in the Jñāneśvarī. As we will see in the next chapter, Marathi is referred to as a “maiden” on several occasions in the Jñāneśvarī; the poetic meter of the text is the ovi, a form associated in popular memory with women’s working songs.¹⁸ And we might also note that one of the most popular names for Jnandev in Marathi is māulī or “mother,” a term that describes him as “mother” to his devotees, but perhaps also progenitor of Marathi literature.¹⁹

Similarly, the Līḷācaritra implies this connection between the use of Marathi and gender. Although we have no clear statement attributed to Chakradhar about why he used Marathi rather than Sanskrit as his medium of communication, we can notice that his initial followers are women, both in his “solo” period, when he first befriends a fellow yogi, the female ascetic Muktabai,²⁰ and when he acquires his first disciple, Baisa, in the period that marks the end of his solo time. The prominent presence of women (many of whom were widows), within the ascetical nonsexual community of Mahanubhav renunciates is one of the primary social features of Chakradhar’s circle of followers, and it will also become one of the chief complaints the tribunal raises against him. In any case, a group dominated by women in the thirteenth–century Maharashtra, even Brahmin women, would be a group in which Marathi was the dominant language. Aside from a mythic morphology of the language, Marathi also has a sociocultural location relevant to gender and caste.

Though the idea that Marathi was derived in a second-order way from Sanskrit may be fanciful, the associations with gender and caste do not appear to be. As a medium to communicate among women especially, Marathi was clearly essential to Chakradhar, and Marathi was also essential for leaving an intelligible, accessible legacy for the generations of Mahanubhavs that would form and flourish after Chakradhar’s departure from Maharashtra. A story in the transmission of the Līḷācaritra makes clear why and how women were so essential to Mahanubhav religion. The story recalls that during invasions of the Deccan by Sultanate armies in the last decade of the thirteenth century, all extant written copies of the Līḷācaritra were destroyed by accident during the chaos of war. The text survived because the female devotee Hiraisa had committed it to memory.²¹ We can see this emphasis on gender, access, and language in the wake of Chakradhar’s departure, where a push to convey Chakradhar’s message to all his followers across caste and gender lines becomes a key subject. The record of this period is the Smṛtisthaḷa.

Shortly after Bhatobas’s death in the early fourteenth century, his biography was compiled by various followers and likely completed by the latter half of the fourteenth century, in a text called the Smṛtisthaḷa or “A Collection of Memories.”²² This text, as Feldhaus and Tulpule describe it, shows the followers of Chakradhar and Bhatobas as they “remember, interpret, and try to apply the teachings” of their absent leaders.²³ In this text we see the early Mahanubhavs, bereft of their original leadership, struggling over what Weber might have identified as “routinization”: what should the essential teachings of the order be? How should they conduct themselves? What modes of succession should then be put in place? And, vitally, what language(s) should they use to preserve their faith?

Of over three hundred works attributed to the Mahanubhavs from the thirteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth century that Ian Raeside records, we find twenty-two texts written in Sanskrit.²⁴ Most of those Sanskrit works appear in the early, formative years of the religion in the fourteenth century, when a good number of devotees were Brahmin.²⁵ Most of them are commentaries on the Līḷācaritra, Sūtrapāṭha, and other aspects of Chakradhar’s teachings, and they all appear to be composed (or attributed to) male Brahmin devotees (especially Mhaibhat and Kesobas), which is the norm for all early Mahanubhav literature in Sanskrit or Marathi. The remaining texts, and importantly the Līḷācaritra, as well as the Smṛtisthaḷa, Sūtrapāṭha, and Sthānapothī, among other texts, were all in Marathi. The choice of Marathi was therefore not a foregone conclusion but a conscientious decision.

The Smṛtisthaḷa records a debate among the early Mahanubhavs about the appropriate language to use in producing a literary archive and commentarial tradition for their sect. That this was an issue at all is a further reflection of the deeply ingrained value of literary writing already vibrant within the small Brahmin-dominated community of the Mahanubhavs. Many of these followers would have been skilled in Sanskrit and may have viewed it as the appropriate medium for so lofty a goal as recording and remembering the lives and teachings of the founders of the Mahanubhav faith. Yet, as Feldhaus and Tulpule note, even though the Mahanubhavs who produced the Smṛtisthaḷa, for example, were almost all Brahmins, “the world to which the group portrayed in the Smṛtisthaḷa sees itself opposed is primarily that of Brahminical Hinduism.”²⁶ And part of this opposition was the practical, ethical, and historical decision to use Marathi rather than Sanskrit. At several points in the Smṛtisthaḷa, Brahminism, as a thing distinct from Brahmins themselves, is highlighted and ridiculed.²⁷ Brahmin male Mahanubhavs generally were required to cut their Brahminic “top knot” and were forbidden from wearing their Brahminic thread.²⁸ Thus the early Mahanubhavs evinced an irony: a group of Brahmins who opposed Brahminism, as we saw in the Līḷācaritra in the last chapter. And part of this struggle with Brahminism, at least as displayed in these early texts, was a struggle with the use of Sanskrit or Marathi.

While it bears repeating that Sanskrit was not the private domain of Brahmins in the history of South Asia, or in the region of Maharashtra, the association between Brahmins and Sanskrit is indelible in the Mahanubhav materials, as it is in the Jñāneśvarī and indeed, as I have argued in part 1, throughout the Yadava realm and well beyond the thirteenth century. The Smṛtisthaḷa displays the use of Sanskrit among several key figures—Bhatobas, Mhaibhat, and Kesobas primarily²⁹—and these uses highlight the contentions around language among the early Mahanubhavs. For example, at one point Bhatobas differentiates between two devotees, Kesobas and Pandit. Although both can compose in Sanskrit, only Pandit can compose in Marathi too, a testament to Pandit’s superiority over Kesobas in this case.³⁰

Mahanubhavs in contemporary India regularly recalled to me two other incidents from the Smṛtisthaḷa when I would ask them about the privileging of Marathi as the medium of their literary materials over Sanskrit. In the first incident, recorded early in the Smṛtisthaḷa, Kesobas composed in Sanskrit a text, the Ratnamāla or “Garland of Gems,” a commentary on a selection of passages from the Līḷācaritra. He presented this text to Bhatobas, who praised it.³¹ However, when Kesobas proposed to compose a portion of what would become a chapter of the Sūtrapāṭha, the sayings of Chakradhar, Bhatobas instructed him not to use Sanskrit, for, if he did, this would “deprive” his mhātāriyā, his “elderly women.”³² The word used by Bhatobas for “deprive,” nāgavane, literally means “to undress,” to strip naked, and implies theft, shame, and ruination—a description particularly potent when applied to the female followers among the Mahanubhavs. The implication is that all women (but also non-high caste men) would have no access to Chakradhar’s teachings if they were preserved in Sanskrit. This injunction, delivered with some vehemence, quells Kesobas’s desire to represent the direct teachings of Chakradhar in any language other than Marathi, though commentaries, translations, and other texts in Sanskrit were permissible and do exist, as noted. This incident is drawn from a rather simple reality of the quotidian world: women, by and large, did not know Sanskrit, nor did the general public of the Yadava century. The rationale is hardly theological and just barely registers a social ethic. It is really much more a matter of “common sense,” but its effects will be profound.

The second incident often cited by contemporary Mahanubhav devotees to me as a rationale for the use of Marathi implies a theological and didactic rationale for Marathi, and a historical one, based on the life of the religion’s founder. This was also the incident they most often recounted about why the early Mahanubhavs used Marathi rather than Sanskrit, perhaps because it carries some of the humor so often present in early Mahanubhav literature. Again, Kesobas raises the issue of Sanskrit: “One day Pandit and Kesobas were conversing [with Bhatobas]. Kesobas asked a question in the Sanskrit language. In response, Bhatobas said, ‘Pandit, Keshavadeva, I do not understand your “hences” (asmāt) and “whences” (kasmāt). Chakradhar taught me in Marathi. Ask [questions] in that [language].’ Then they agreed [to do so].”³³ Bhatobas chides his two followers by using the Sanskrit words asmāt and kasmāt, words that appear in verbal formulae within high rhetorical argumentation, as Feldhaus and Tulpule note, a kind of parody of obscure philosophical debate in Sanskrit.³⁴ At other points, as well, the Smṛtisthaḷa displays the use of Sanskrit within quotidian life in ways that both emphasize how special Sanskrit is, how it marks a particular kind of social distinction, but also how this social distinction can be a subject of humor. In one episode Mhaibhat and Lakshmidharba are mistaken for thieves. As they are about to be beaten, Mhaibhat says to his companion in Sanskrit, with a kind of verbal shrug, “Either a fever or a weapon,” referring to two ways to die, as in “everyone has to die of something.”³⁵ This invocation of Sanskrit is enough to persuade the gathered crowd that Mhaibhat and his companion are not thieves—for how would a common thief speak Sanskrit?

Such moments may appear to contradict the praise Bhatobas gave to Kesobas for his Sanskrit commentary on sections of the Līḷācaritra, the Ratnamāla. The passage in which Kesobas and Pandit questioned Bhatobas in Sanskrit, however, portrays a pedagogical, living environment, and it appears as if Bhatobas, in addition to citing historical precedent, is protesting the gender and caste exclusion that such group discussions would imply if they took place in Sanskrit. For this reason, perhaps, he invokes Chakradhar to remind Kesobas and Pandit, and others, that the primary medium of instruction while Chakradhar was among them, particularly oral instruction, was Marathi. This injunction to speak in Marathi would become a kind of linguistic orthodoxy among the Mahanubhavs where Marathi would become the standard language for oral instruction and the de facto language for textual preservation for similar reasons in Maharashtra.

Put another way, Marathi was the language of the quotidian—of the “elderly women” as a rather sexist (and ageist) metonym for the everyday sphere of interaction—the language Chakradhar used every day, when a theological lesson might emerge during a stroll, a meal, a wrestling match, or the waning of a long day. Commentary and other kinds of materials could be composed in Sanskrit, and appreciated, but the essential transmission of the Mahanubhav teachings, formed during the routines of everyday life in Chakradhar’s presence, would require Marathi, not because of a particular regional or cultural pride associated with the language, but because this was the language of Charkadhar, a language he used so that he could communicate with all his followers, women and non-Brahmins especially.

As Chakradhar’s time in Maharashtra comes to an end, we see him consolidating his theology and ethics with his core group of followers. In this context he makes several demands of them, which become the canonical statements of the Līḷācaritra and the Sūtrapāṭha.³⁷ Here is Anne Feldhaus’s translation of those statements preserved in the Sūtrapāṭha:³⁸

These sutras or statements of instruction given by Chakradhar are primarily meant to convey to the early Mahanubhavs that they should not seek out places of comfort where ascetics will be treated well, such as the Kannada or Telugu regions (also places of Chakradhar’s early life) or Matapur or Kolhapur. They should stay in Maharashtra “at the foot of a tree at the end of the land.” But why? Anne Feldhaus has presented several compelling answers to this question. She notes that Chakradhar demands that his followers speak and compose in Marathi, and so restricting the movements of his followers to Maharashtra confines them to this linguistic area but also reveals their loyalty to Marathi.³⁹ While Kannada, more often than Marathi or Sanskrit, is the language of inscription among the Yadavas, particularly in the time of Chakradhar’s floruit, the areas around Devgiri, the areas traversed by Chakradhar for the most part, are within the Marathi-speaking heartland.⁴⁰ Chakradhar’s commitment to Marathi, a language foreign to him,⁴¹ is not for the love of the language itself—whereas for Jnandev his love of Marathi as a literary language will be apparent. Chakradhar likely chose Marathi because this is the dominant language of everyday life in the regions around Devgiri, where most of his life and teaching took place. Marathi was the language of the quotidian world in which Chakradhar flourished.

Feldhaus also points out that the injunction in the Līḷācaritra and the Sūtrapāṭha to “stay in Maharashtra” appears to indicate that Chakradhar does not want his followers seeking easier lands in which to live.⁴² Maharashtra is a difficult place to be for the wandering mendicant, or so it seems, and suffering is a key component of the religious practice of the Mahanubhavs—hence Chakradhar commands that they stay in a land not amenable to them, the land of Maharashtra.⁴³ This may strike the reader as odd given that it seems Chakradhar and the Mahanubhav order flourished in the Yadava century, that is until Chakradhar ran afoul of Hemadri and other powerful Brahmin figures. This statement to stay in Maharashtra, located toward the conclusion of the Līḷācaritra, comes as Chakradhar’s fortunes have turned in the region.⁴⁴ It is a curious injunction—that his followers remain in a land of jeopardy. Feldhaus points out the irony here, noting that in later commentaries Maharashtra is praised as a land of “physical and psychological benefits…[and] moral superiority.”⁴⁵ I get the sense that Chakradhar implores his followers to stay in Maharashtra because the land has been marked by his presence—its geography is also his own history.

As Weber pointed out, in religion, as in states and other formations of society, the personal charisma of a figure gives way, after his or her death, to a routinization of that charisma.⁴⁶ Literally, the routes of Chakradhar, trailing through an inhospitable land for his followers, become the sacred geography for the movement he founded and thus their “home,” however rough it may be.⁴⁷ Hence Feldhaus’s observation about later commentaries referring to the region as a “great land” that is “blissful and beneficial.”⁴⁸ The passages seem to indicate two things at once: stay out of places where you will find too many comforts and stay in Maharashtra, where you know the language and you know your way around, where you will find the places Chakradhar has been. It appears to argue that one’s own “vernacular” (place, language, culture), even if it be hard and inhospitable, is better than another’s vernacular, however enticing it may be.

The function of this routinization is to domesticate and make “local” the foreign figure of Chakradhar, to make him “Marathi” in some fundamental sense. Chakradhar, literally and literarily, is vernacularized by the Līḷācaritra, and by extension, the Sthānapothī, Sūtrapāṭha, and other texts. He is written into the language of the place—Marathi—and into the place itself, through the network of sthāns or locations where he halted during his life and the many sutras in Marathi that record his teachings. The Līḷācaritra is not a literary endeavor in terms of its primary aim, but it is an endeavor to vernacularize a figure whose life and sayings, preserved in a language of place, will become the core of a new religion. The literary realism of the text is instrumental in configuring a vision of vernacularization that collapses time, place, language, and idiom. In a reverse sort of way, Chakradhar has vernacularized Maharashtra. Just as we saw in chapter 2 with the inscriptions from Pandharpur in 1311 that described Maharashtra as a land of Vitthal devotees, for the Mahanubhavs Maharashtra becomes the land of Chakradhar’s life’s legacy, a map drawn by the places he has been—in both cases land and faith become one and the same.

The goal of the Līḷācaritra, in this sense, was not to inaugurate a new literary genre in a regional language, but to articulate a foreign religious leader, Chakradhar, with the geocultural zone of Maharashtra and its everyday life (time, place, language). The process of vernacularization was not literary but contextual, a process of situating Chakradhar in the quotidian contexts of Maharashtra. And this geocultural zone is not merely “Maharashtra” but encompasses its particular public culture, its “hostility” perhaps but also its “blissful and beneficial” qualities. Marathi, not Sanskrit, circumscribes the boundaries—linguistic and geographic—of the early Mahanubhavs and their texts, and this linguistic medium expands a different set of boundaries, those of caste and gender in particular, in the formation not just of a vernacular literature, but a vernacular space. Chakradhar speaks the language of heterogeneity rooted in place.

It is clear, I think, why the Mahanubhavs chose Marathi to convey Chakradhar’s teachings into the future, but it is less clear why Chakradhar himself used Marathi when he could have preserved his teachings in Sanskrit, which would have allowed them to spread over a much wider, and far more elite, field of literature.

This story appears to depict Chakradhar replicating the way in which Shudras were required to worship at Hindu temples, in particular, at a Shaiva temple, and doing so by repeating physical actions and especially verbal formulae in an argot of Marathi that we are to understand is particular to Shudras. That Shudras were forced to remain outside of the temple, standing near the drainage line that would have carried the leavings of offerings from within the temple to the outside, is clear from this passage. This was perhaps the opportunity afforded to Shudras for acquiring prasad or materials offered to the deity in the temple, blessed, and then returned to devotees in part. Standing at the drainage line, Chakradhar intones a specific verbal formula in which he calls out names of other famous Shaiva temples and provides a verbal “prostration” to them all. He then asks for the blessings of three boys and three girls by name, and the alliteration of their names implies naming practices, or at least stereotypes about these. He concludes by addressing his own followers as if he were a Shudra, “in character,” in a sense, calling them elders and declaring that his act is pure, that he has not transgressed any rules of purity; this too we might conclude was a verbal formula required of Shudras. Chakradhar’s followers are sufficiently unaware of Shudra practice that they must ask for clarification, and so we might also assume that none of Chakradhar’s followers are Shudras in this moment.

Conversely, we can notice those few moments in the text when Chakradhar speaks Sanskrit, a language associated with high-caste males exclusively, when he takes on the social affect of a Brahmin male of high learning rather than the affect of a Shudra. In one story a character named Prajnasagar, a figure who appears throughout the Līḷācaritra and was likely a learned Brahmin of the Brahminic town of Paithan or Pratishthan, approaches Chakradhar.⁵⁰ Prajnasagar figures significantly in the last days of Chakradhar’s time in Maharashtra, as we will see. We first encounter him querying Chakradhar on esoteric theological matters. When Chakradhar insists that salvation or moksha is attained by service to God and not by mere knowledge of the self, he appears to us listeners to be criticizing Prajnasagar’s own haughty and prideful sense of self.⁵¹ Shortly after this interaction, Prajnasagar again approaches Chakradhar to ask about his caste this time, by generally asking “Who are you?”⁵² To this, Chakradhar replies not in Marathi (though Prajnasagar puts the question in Marathi), but in Sanskrit. Here is Anne Feldhaus’s translation of Chakradhar’s answer in Sanskrit:

This Sanskrit passage is repeated in the Sūtrapāṭha and is also attributed to Gundam Raul in his biography, thus it forms a kind of verbal formula bearing some weight of irony.⁵⁴ No explanation is given here for why Chakradhar would speak in Sanskrit to Prajnasagar when questioned in Marathi, but, given what we know of Chakradhar, we can be sure it was not unintentional. When the same phrase is used in the biography of Gundam Raul, there is some rationale. In that context a “Dravidian” Brahmin comes to Riddhapur to meet Gundam Raul, having heard of his divine nature. The Dravidian asks Gundam Raul essentially the same question, and Gundam Raul gives the same response, verbatim. However, in this latter story, we learn that since “no one could understand” the language of the Dravidian, Gundam Raul speaks to him in Sanskrit, the cosmopolitan language of Brahmins. This lack of mutual comprehensibility in any language other than Sanskrit would explain, perhaps,⁵⁵ Gundam Raul’s choice of Sanskrit. But what might have been the rationale for Chakradhar to use this language when Marathi would have done just as well?

To help answer this question we must look ahead to see how and why Prajnasagar appears in subsequent lilas. He appears twice more, once during the trial of Chakradhar, as one of the judges adjudicating Chakradhar’s alleged crimes. Immediately after this lila, which results in Chakradhar’s nose purportedly being cut off, Prajnasagar and fellow adjudicator Mayata Hari are apparently so disturbed by the outcome of the trial that they leave “Maharashtra” entirely, as we will see.⁵⁶ Prajnasagar is thus, like Sarang Pandit, a figure who appears at once to be fascinated by Chakradhar, but also threatened by him, ultimately participating in his trial even while he protests its proceedings. Prajnasagar is a key member of the Brahminic ecumene, as his place at the trial makes clear, and he is a man with a stake in preserving the moral integrity of the Brahminic ecumene, as he sees it.

The reason Chakradhar responds to Prajnasagar in Sanskrit, that is, the logic proposed within the omniscient narrative structure of the Līḷācaritra, is to highlight the challenge to the social capital of Sanskrit linguistic and literary prowess that Chakradhar embodies; Chakradhar is speaking to Prajnasagar who serves as a metonym for the Brahminic ecumene itself. A Brahmin, in Marathi, asks Chakradhar about himself, and Chakradhar answers in Sanskrit. His answer conveys information about him, about his species (he is divine), as well as his “station” in life, but importantly also about his caste in relation to the usual social conventions of Brahminic orthodoxy. Chakradhar, in his response, links Sanskrit and caste in such a way as to present an answer embedded in an irony. For in answering in Sanskrit, Chakradhar is revealing his high caste-status, if not his Brahminic status, even while he claims to recognize no such status at all. He thus gives Prajnasagar two answers: I am a high-caste divine male person who is beyond all such distinctions—which is, in some sense, the declaration of Krishna in the Bhagavad Gītā as well.⁵⁷ It is indeed the sole privilege of the elite to reject elitism. Chakradhar is using the language, and the habitus, of the elite as a technique of criticism.

The juxtaposition of Sanskrit and Marathi, situated within a cultural politics, is made more explicit when toward the end of the Līḷācaritra we first encounter Mhaibhat, a Brahmin described as a kind of rising star in the Brahminic ecumene and a skilled Sanskrit scholar, undefeated in debate, who hears of Chakradhar and seeks to challenge him in rhetorical contest.⁵⁸ Mhaibhat is also associated with the Yadava state in some capacity, as he is described as undertaking “political activities” (rājakāya).⁵⁹

In preparation for the debate, Mhaibhat asks his teacher, Ganapati Appaye, “Is he [Chakradhar] a philosopher?” Appaye says, “No, he is a Mahatma.” Mhaibhat appears unimpressed by this august honorific and asks “Well, does he know the Sanskrit texts?” Appaye answers, “I do not know what he knows or doesn’t know. But he does speak Marathi fluently.” Mhaibhat replies with what appears to be sarcasm: “So he’s a Mahatma and he speaks Marathi, but how will he speak with [someone like] me? He may speak Marathi, but I will debate in Sanskrit!”⁶⁰ Chakradhar and Mhaibhat meet, but Mhaibhat is too overwhelmed by Chakradhar’s presence to begin the debate. Chakradhar initiates their discussion, in Marathi. When their interchange gets going, and Mhaibhat realizes Chakradhar is getting the better of him in the vernacular, Mhaibhat switches to Sanskrit, only to find that Chakradhar can also debate in flawless Sanskrit. This lila that describes the meeting of Chakradhar and Mhaibhat is one of the longest in the entire Līḷācaritra and ends when Mhaibhat admits defeat. A series of lilas follow that convey core philosophical teachings of Chakradhar, couched within the scope of a narrative debate and subsequent discussion with Mhaibhat. However, it would still be some time before Mhaibhat would become a follower of Chakradhar.⁶¹

Chakradhar’s first encounter with Mhaibhat is instructive in many ways. First, it is clear that Mhaibhat will become a repository for Chakradhar’s philosophy and theology, and Chakradhar prognosticates about Mhaibhat’s evolving role in their order.⁶² Though Mhaibhat and Chakradhar’s encounter begins as a confrontation, for Chakradhar it appears to be something more like a job interview: Chakradhar is sizing up Mhaibhat, for he appears to seek a highly skilled, sensitive, and literate person who can help codify in writing his new religious teachings. In this sense, Mhaibhat’s skills as an “agent” within the Brahminic ecumene are vital for the transference of his symbolic capital into the nascent Mahanubhav order. It is only Mhaibhat’s arrogance that initially blocks his entry into the Mahanubhav faith, and over the course of many long lilas, in which Chakradhar imparts key teachings through debate with Mhaibhat, and wears down his ego and attachment to glory, we see the Brahmin scholar’s arrogance dissolve into devotion.

Chakradhar both rejects the Sanskrit philosophical sphere in confrontation with Mhaibhat as well as shows his mastery of that sphere. Furthermore, these debates with Mhaibhat provide primary articulations of Chakradhar’s philosophy, as if to say that the best person to understand such lofty ideas is another Brahmin with scholarly acumen. Indeed, alongside Bhatobas, Mhaibhat appears to fulfill the job of reflecting some aspect of Chakradhar’s Brahminic past: Bhatobas, though a Brahmin as well, mirrors Chakradhar’s legacy as the son of a state minister in Gujarat, trained in martial arts and political theory; Mhaibhat mirrors Chakradhar’s high Brahminic learning and facility with Sanskrit. While Chakradhar defeats them both “at their own game” (he outwrestles Bhatobas, challenges him at races, etc., to show his physical and martial dominance),⁶³ they both exhibit some aspect of Chakradhar’s charisma after his departure.

The sphere of the Brahminic ecumene appears to surround Chakradhar, and this is revealed in several ways. The many encounters Chakradhar has with Brahmin spiritual teachers suggest an environment where spiritualists and philosophers sought out new disciples, grew their fame, and pursued access to the benefits given by the Yadava state and other benefactors for such ventures. These were not all Brahmin figures,⁶⁴ but it appears that the Brahmin figures vying for or seeking to preserve their place within the Brahminic ecumene posed the greatest threat to Chakradhar, perhaps because they perceived that Chakradhar posed a threat to them. Chief among these figures were Mahadashram, Sarang Pandit, and Hemadri, all figures associated with the Brahminic ecumene of the Yadava century, and they would all play their role in Chakradhar’s trial. Hemadri, in particular, represents the height of achievement within this context as the prime minister of the Yadava state under Ramachandra. Given that Chakradhar’s trial will take place at the intersection of the Yadava state and the Brahminic ecumene, it is necessary to understand how the Yadava state, and political matters in general, are registered within the Līḷācaritra and in relation to Chakradhar.

Pollock’s argument that literary vernacularization deeply involved the engagement of the royal court may have some parallel in the case of Maharashtra through the portrayal in the Līḷācaritra of the relationship between Chakradhar and the early Mahanubhavs, on the one hand, and the Yadava state and the Brahminic ecumene, on the other. While it is not the case that Marathi literary materials emerge at the Yadava court or through courtly patronage, it is clear that the benign ambivalence about Marathi evinced by the Yadava court is a vital aspect of the history of Marathi vernacularization, as chapters 1 and 2 suggested. At the same time, the Līḷācaritra amply records that the Yadava kings,⁶⁵ as well as key figures of the Brahminic ecumene, took great interest in Chakradhar and the early Mahanubhavs. The Līḷācaritra also makes fascinating comments about the machinations of the state politics in its age. This interest in governmental-political affairs, the “political field,” to use Bourdieu’s term, hints at the vitality of the range of subjects within the nascent Marathi public sphere. Whether or not such interactions record historical fact, the emphasis on them in the Līḷācaritra suggests that vernacularization occurred at the intersection of state and public culture, which is the location of the public sphere in general.⁶⁶

Chakradhar first attracts the interest of the Yadava state early in the Līḷācaritra when the king Krishna hears from a temple Gurav of the wondrous beauty and luster of Chakradhar, a story already discussed in this book.⁶⁷ Krishna sends messengers with gifts of gold coins to Chakradhar, who refuses them. When Chakradhar does not touch a bag of gold coins that the king and his younger brother Mahadev attempt to give him,⁶⁸ the king then donates the funds to a temple for the repair of a wall, which is perhaps represented in an unreadable Sanskrit inscription at the temple of Lonar.⁶⁹

Following this encounter, another political figure named Ramdrana, a regional governor in Amravati, near the town of Achalpur, hears of Chakradhar’s majesty. Ramdrana entices Chakradhar to stay for ten months in his palace.⁷⁰ During this time, it appears as if Chakradhar takes on the position of the guru of Ramdrana, and even accepting, as the lila says, a temporary role as a political adviser or minister (rājyadharma svīkarile). It is curious that though Chakradhar refuses the funds of the Yadava king, he responds to the invitation of Ramdrana, serving as his political guru and surrogate ruler. The lila implies that the instruction Ramdrana received from Chakradhar was in governance, not solely religious matters. These two unusual interactions with political power, it should be noted, come quite early in Chakradhar’s life in Maharashtra.

Shortly after this encounter, we meet one of the key figures of the Līḷācaritra, Sarang Pandit, who, though he appears throughout the text and is vital to the narrative of Chakradhar’s life, is not a follower; indeed, Sarang Pandit struggles to assert his peer status with Chakradhar.⁷¹ Sarang Pandit will follow Chakradhar throughout the Līḷācaritra, appearing at times to be his admirer and worshipper, at others as a skeptic and potential enemy. Dados is a kind of new spiritualist, as mentioned earlier, and Sarang Pandit is a similar figure, though he chooses to enter and rise in Yadava state service and the Brahminic ecumene rather than gather an informal following drawn from general public culture. Sarang Pandit is one of the key judges in the trial that ends the Līḷācaritra, as mentioned, and he is also one of the last people to see Chakradhar before he departs for the North.

We learn early on that Sarang Pandit was a reciter of lore, a pauraṇika, and thus a scholar of Sanskrit, who served a figure named Gadonayak, probably a minister at the court of Mahadev. Enamored of Chakradhar, Sarang Pandit first begins to worship him, and they appear to strike up a relationship somewhere between friendship and devotion. One lila tells an interesting story. The queen of Mahadev, Vaijarani, commissioned a temple to be built near Paithan and gifts were made to Brahmins in perpetuity. Sarang Pandit appears to have felt dejected that he has not risen in the ranks of his caste fellows within Yadava social orders to attract the benevolence of the king and queen through such a donation. Chakradhar assures him that if he goes to Paithan to visit the queen, who is in temporary residence there, he will see his name among the honored Brahmins, which of course is the case, as Sarang Pandit discovers.⁷² As if this assistance were not enough, Chakradhar cures Sarang Pandit of a fever shortly thereafter. This intervention in the life of Sarang Pandit marks the ascent of his career within the political realms of the Brahminic ecumene, which brings Sarang Pandit and Chakradhar into conflict as the Līḷācaritra’s narrative progresses and Chakradhar gathers the ire of various Brahmin figures of power and is taken to trial. What is interesting here is to see reflected in the Līḷācaritra the cogs in motion within the Brahminic ecumene buttressed by the non-Brahmin Yadava state. Sarang Pandit, as a charismatic professional expounder of Sanskrit mythology, is a good candidate for state sponsorship in the Yadava century.

When Chakradhar went to stay for a while at Verul, twenty kilometers from the Yadava capital in Devgiri, the Līḷācaritra tells us, his fame had spread throughout the northern reaches of the Yadava territory and into the coastal areas of the Konkan.⁷³ Eminent figures visited Chakradhar during this period, bringing offerings and listening to his discourses. However, two prominent Brahmin administrators in the court of King Mahadev, Mahadashram and Brahmasan, grew jealous and plotted against him. Learning that Charkadhar never refused offerings of food, they poisoned him with such offerings on two occasions. The text narrates how Chakradhar showed the physical signs of poisoning but went into seclusion for three days, drinking only milk, and recovered from these attempts on his life. In a dialogue that hints, again, at the humanistic humor within the Līḷācaritra, Baisa asks why, if he knew the offerings were poisoned, Chakradhar accepted them. Chakradhar replies that he did not want to disappoint Mahadashram and Brahmasan after all the trouble they took to poison him. The text makes clear that the threat Chakradhar posed to the Brahminic ecumene was the way in which the attention of the Yadava kings as well as their subjects had turned toward Chakradhar. Sarang Pandit represents the middle ground between, on the one hand, the political rulers and the Brahminic ecumene and, on the other, through his association with Chakradhar, public and religious culture in general.

One day Sarang Pandit decides to visit Chakradhar along with a fellow court narrator of the Sanskrit epics, a Pandit named Gopal.⁷⁴ Meeting with Chakradhar, Gopal displays his erudition. Chakradhar is not impressed and critiques Gopal’s narrative techniques. Gopal accepts Chakradhar’s advice, and he returns to the court of Mahadev having significantly improved upon his skills as a result. As Chakradhar’s fame spreads further and he gathers a larger audience, the sabhāmaṇḍp, or hall of council, at the court of Mahadev becomes empty.⁷⁵ The king is furious over this matter until he hears Chakradhar’s name, at which point perhaps he recalls having met Chakradhar in the company of his father, Krishna.⁷⁶ When Mahadev’s messenger tells Chakradhar of the king’s curiosity about him, Chakradhar halfheartedly consents to a meeting.

What follows is both comical and curious. Twice Mahadev attempts to leave Devgiri to visit Chakradhar, and each time an ill omen and a natural act prevent his departure: the spontaneous death of an elephant and the sudden onset of torrential rains. The third day, Mahadev departs, while simultaneously Chakradhar orders his followers to pack up their belongings and leave Verul. By the time the king arrives at Verul, Chakradhar has moved to Mudkhed. This pattern repeats itself four more times, each time Chakradhar and his followers moving just before the Yadava king reaches their town or encampment. At one point Baisa asks Chakradhar, “Why won’t you just meet the man?”⁷⁷ To this, Chakradhar replies that he is worried the king will visit him, become a devotee, renounce his kingship,⁷⁸ hand over his kingdom to Chakradhar, and then dominate all his other followers. In other words, the king’s “political capital” will transfer to this other social realm, and this transference of symbolic capital will amount to a “takeover” of the social order. It will also change Chakradhar’s own social position, forcing him to return, perhaps, to a political life he has already renounced. In addition, Chakradhar notes that the king comes to give treasures and ornaments—the implication is that he bestows benefaction, we may presume, upon Brahmins such as Chakradhar. This, we understand, would have had a negative effect on Chakradhar’s followers and run contrary to his general rejection of gifts of state, as we saw with the story of the Yadava king Krishna (this antipathy to state patronage is also seen in the later story of the court poet Narendra narrated in chapter 2). Importantly, though, Chakradhar is asserting that the nature of the movement he has inaugurated must take place independently of the Yadava court as well as of the Brahminic ecumene, for these two locations of power bear the orthodoxy that Chakradhar seeks to undermine within his small community of followers.

Chakradhar’s revolution is a quotidian one, not financed by state or secular power, but buoyed by the slow accretions of everyday life and an investment in that life. Here we see this clearly—the interventions of state are not welcome in Chakradhar’s sphere. Even in the case of Ramdrana, Chakradhar serves the governor for some time, then departs, and he accepts no intervention within his own spiritual social world. So we see Chakradhar avoiding royal patronage and, by extension, rejecting state support. While Mahadev’s interest does not suggest that the Yadava state might have pursued support of Marathi vernacularization—for Chakradhar, as we know, was not an “author” or a “writer,” nor did he compose anything in Marathi—it does suggest, as Bhave and Tulpule implied, that the Yadava court took a nonstate interest in Marathi public cultural forms of instruction and entertainment, and a new spiritualist of local renown would have supplied both. The story of Mahadev finding his court empty while Chakradhar’s “court” was full is clearly a story of the inversion of some social capital, a purposeful juxtaposition of royal power and a new power center out in the world beyond the court.

The series of episodes regarding Mahadev ends when a key minister of King Mahadev, Palha Dangia, approaches the encampment of Mahanubhavs at Sinnar in a final attempt to contact Chakradhar.⁷⁹ Although Palha Dangia has visited Chakradhar many times, he does not recognize him because Chakradhar has “disguised” himself with a Gujarati-style headdress and speaks in Gujarati rather than Marathi. Although Palha Dangia understands Gujarati, he does not manage to see through Chakradhar’s subterfuge.⁸⁰ So Chakradhar is a master of many things, apparently also of disguise, and Palha Dangia returns to Mahadev to tell him that Chakradhar has left Sinnar and his whereabouts are not known. We might note here the irony of this “disguise,” for Chakradhar is actually a Gujarati, and so speaking and dressing as one is perhaps to return to another “vernacular” in this moment, to “go home” in idiom and affect.

This is the last we hear of Mahadev and his efforts to meet Chakradhar. This “Initial Half” (“Pūrvārdha”) of the Līḷācaritra concludes just as two key figures of the Mahanubhav order enter the narrative: Mahadaisa and Bhatobas (as devotees of Dados). If the episodes with Mahadev and Chakradhar’s encounter with secular power reveals an anxiety about social structure and leadership within Chakradhar’s community, the section that follows these remembrances, the “Latter Half” (“Uttarārdha”) begins to track the process whereby a stable communal leadership was established among the Mahanubhavs, centered on the figure of Bhatobas, a kind of preroutinization period. This will also mark the period in which the persecution of Chakradhar intensifies.

Chakradhar may distance himself from the state; shunning courtly patronage, though, is not the same as remaining ignorant of politics and state power. Indeed, Chakradhar believes his devotees are obliged to observe these aspects, too, of the quotidian world. While the beginning of the “Uttarārdha” of the Līḷācaritra is usually marked by the acceptance of Bhatobas to the inner circle of Chakradhar’s followers, this half of the narrative also revolves around a change in Yadava courtly power. We can recall from Yadava history that Mahadev had agreed to rule until his nephew Ramachandra, the son of Krishna, came of age. However, upon Mahadev’s death, his son Ammanadeva attempted to usurp power from the heir apparent, Ramachandra. The Līḷācaritra records this political conflict as well, but with an entirely different valence: Chakradhar tells his follower Indrabhat that Ramachandra has attacked Ammanadeva and has “plucked out his eyes.”⁸¹ We get none of the bravado of the Yadava record, but rather a bare account of brutal succession. It is unclear from the text how Chakradhar knows this, but the text implies that he gathered the information from passersby. As Indrabhat was on an errand to a nearby village, Chakradhar scolds him for not gaining this knowledge himself, for not inquiring about world affairs while circulating in public. He tells Indrabhat, “You’re a Mahatma, no? A Mahatma must investigate conflict and strife occurring as part of state politics (rājyavārtā) and the affairs of the land (deśavārtā). He should live in those places that are stable.”⁸² The Mahanubhavs are situated within the general public culture of the Yadava era, and they remain keenly aware of the machinations of politics and state around them. This threat to stability is perhaps a further example of the prevailing stability of the age—for this bloody internal conflict, though short-lived, is perceived as aberrant for the age.

This awareness of politics compels reflections in the Līḷācaritra on the major political events of the age. And while some of these may be later interpolations, in part or in whole, it is curious to note that the text’s authors or later editors felt such observations were essential to the work. For example, at several points in the text Chakradhar comments upon the forces of the Delhi Sultanate pressing at the northern line of Yadava sovereign territory, which presents Chakradhar as a political prognosticator, musing on the future of the Yadava realms. In an episode following the political succession, Chakradhar is at a madrassa, an Islamic school, in the village of Domegram (Kamalpur), 80 kilometers from Devgiri, with his female follower Sadhe.⁸³ They observe a man leading away a tethered cow and ox, presumably to be slaughtered. Chakradhar comments that he observed this in the North among Muslims or “Turks” and that the Turks would come to the region and would enslave people this way. A second prognostication occurs after Chakradhar’s trial, but before he moves north, in which he predicts the destruction of the Yadava “nation” or rashtra by “Muslims.”⁸⁴ Here we find the term mleccha for “Muslim,” and the term Yadava (jādhava) for the dynastic rule that will be overturned—both terms will appear in the Jñāneśvarī as well, a testament to the routine place of Islam in the culture of the Yadava century, contradicting the idea that the “advent” of Islam in western India is under the power of the invasions of the Delhi Sultanate in the last decade of the thirteenth century. Chakradhar relates a rather unpleasant future of killing, imprisonment, mayhem, mass exodus, and an influx of new and “foreign” people to the region. A similar statement is found in the Smṛtisthaḷa when Bhatobas, upon hearing of the capture of Ramachandra by the forces of Alauddin Khilji in 1307, predicts that the king will be released, but implies that he will yet meet his fate.⁸⁵ This fate, Bhatobas says, is because of the way Ramachandra had allowed sants and mahants, holy people, to be poorly treated, perhaps a reference to Chakradhar’s trial and persecution—the idea that it is the Yadava ruler and not the conquering Islamic polity that bears the guilt of persecuting Hindu holy men is interesting to highlight here. Though the “ruination” of the kingdom will come, according to Chakradhar and Bhatobas, it appears not to have yet happened at the time of the composition of either the Līḷācaritra or Smṛtisthaḷa; thus both are situated in a period earlier than 1318, we might presume, and a time of relative stability. In any case, the Līḷācaritra demonstrates a clear preoccupation with political upheaval and state machination, and it seeks to display a high level of intelligence regarding the politics of “place.” In particular, Chakradhar’s purported predictions about the rise of political Islam in the region both underscore the political awareness of the text but also remind us that such works, though they may seek to convey “history,” are continuously being edited and emended.

The lila in which the coup d’état and Ramachandra’s victory over Ammanadeva are mentioned marks the end of a particular political frame, one in which Yadava leaders appear to want to praise, fund, and otherwise glorify Chakradhar. However, with the ascendance of Ramachandra, and in particular that of his prime minister Hemadri, Chakradhar’s relationship with state power will take a turn for the worse. He ceases to be seen by the Yadava state and the Brahminic ecumene as a curious, charismatic spiritualist from a foreign land and instead becomes a local, recognizable threat.

One can mark this point, in part, by observing how Sarang Pandit’s role in the Līḷācaritra begins to turn from that of an ardent supporter and lay devotee of Chakradhar to one of his persecutors, albeit a reluctant one. Midway within the narrative of the Līḷācaritra’s “Last Half,” the relationship between Sarang Pandit and Chakradhar’s followers begins to sour just as Sarang Pandit’s fortunes rise as an official at the Yadava court, a position Chakradhar helped him acquire, as we saw. At one point Sarang Pandit invites Chakradhar and his followers to his now lavish home to be fed. Sarang Pandit makes a point of giving Bhatobas excessive amounts of clarified butter, a sign both of his wealth (that he can afford such delicacies) and a common trope in the representation of Brahminic gastronomic excess—Brahmins are sometimes stereotypically portrayed as fattening themselves with such things as butter from meals offered by others.⁸⁶ Bhatobas understands this act to be an insult because he is an ascetic, a follower of Chakradhar, and he also perceives the caste prejudice it contains. Yet the incident delves deeper, suggesting that Sarang Pandit, while he is indebted to Chakradhar for his high station at the Yadava court, rejects Chakradhar’s asceticism and, in particular, his band of followers. Chakradhar compels the final split by issuing an ultimatum to Sarang Pandit to join his ascetic order.⁸⁷ Sarang Pandit demurs, saying that although he knows all the success he has accrued in his life, such as his position of service to the royal court, is because of Chakradhar, still he prefers a world of pleasure (bhoga) to a life of asceticism.⁸⁸ With this rejection, it appears as if Chakradhar loses his key support among the Brahmin intelligentsia of the Yadava court.

Before discussing the lilas that describes Chakradhar’s trial, I should note here again that some Mahanubhavs do not believe this trial happened, nor subsequent events, such as Chakradhar’s purported disfigurement or beheading. The lila that records the story of the trial is present in some versions of the Līḷācaritra but certainly not in all of them. S. G. Tulpule, in his edited version of the Līḷācaritra, provides the lila describing Chakradhar’s trial in an appendix with a carefully worded paragraph of introduction.⁸⁹ I follow Tulpule’s words here by reiterating that by engaging these controversial lilas I am not endorsing their historical veracity. Though these stories may not be historically true, they are represented in the manuscript archive maintained by some Mahanubhavs over many centuries. Though I engage them here as part of this literary archive, I do not claim they describe true events, but rather relevant stories though of dubious historical truth. I do include these lilas here for they reveal, among other things, the commitment to social equality, and particular gender equality, within the Mahanubhav order represented by Chakradhar.

The sequence of events that will lead to the stories of Chakradhar’s trial and persecution in some versions of the Līḷācaritra begins when he again meets Mahadashram, the Yadava minister who had colluded in trying to poison him twice before. The two encounter one another as Chakradhar is walking toward the monastery of Ganapati Appaye (Mhaibhat’s former teacher), where Chakradhar has begun to deliver lectures in Marathi on theological subjects.⁹⁰ Chakradhar greets Mahadashram by asking him if he has achieved vṛdhāpya, which is a highly Sanskritic word that means to achieve prosperity, but in Marathi can also mean to “grow old.” This question resonates with a double entendre, for we know that Mahadashram represents the “old guard,” that stratum of the Brahminic ecumene wedded to Sanskrit literary production via state patronage, and he is not clever enough to have succeeded in his plan to kill Chakradhar. He is a Sanskrit master who runs an endowed matha or monastery where he teaches Dharma Śāstra texts on social orthodoxy. Chakradhar’s use of the Sanskrit word vṛdhāpya here might be taken by his followers as a comment directed toward the established Brahminic ecumene itself: that it has “grown old” and thus new spiritualists like Chakradhar and Jnandev have arisen in the region.

Chakradhar continues to Appaye’s school, where he holds forth in Marathi, though the school is a śāstramaṭha or “social science monastery” and thus devoted to the study of Sanskrit Dharma Śāstra literature. Around him gather students not only from Appaye’s school but also from the nearby school of Mahadashram. Furious at the truancy of his students, Mahadashram seeks them out, only to discover them seated before Chakradhar, who is lecturing in Marathi, and receiving his “blessings” or prasad. As with the story of King Mahadev, who finds his royal court empty because all his courtiers are elsewhere listening to Chakradhar’s teachings, here too we see one court emptied—the “old” court—and a new one filled. The lila closes with Mahadashram’s ominous observation: “Now Chakradhar is destroying our way of life.”

Mahadashram then attempts to kill Chakradhar a second time by luring him to public worship at a nearby temple where he has constructed a booby-trapped “throne” or yantrāsana, which Chakradhar somehow disarms with his thumb.⁹¹ As noted earlier, it is interesting to see that the Līḷācaritra does not imply that Chakradhar avoids this hazard by means of superhuman powers. Though the poison that Mahadashram uses in his first attempt to kill Chakradhar makes him ill, Chakradhar has a knowledge of poison and so also a knowledge of its cure; this is not the work of magic or miracle, but rather medicine. In Mahadashram’s next attempt to kill Chakradhar, again it is the latter’s knowledge that saves him. He understands the engineering of booby traps, and his knowledge of human behavior allows him to detect Mahadashram’s incongruous affection and thus suspect foul play. Chakradhar is not working miracles here, but rather draws on what we presume to be his training as the son of a Brahmin courtier and possibly a military commander in Gujarat.

Toward the end of the Līḷācaritra a series of plots against Chakradhar’s life and confrontations with key Brahmin figures at the nexus of the Yadava royal court and the Brahminic ecumene compel him to consider leaving the region of Maharashtra to move “north” alone.⁹² Chakradhar does not give a rationale for this decision—indeed, as we have seen, he demands that his followers stay in Maharashtra.⁹³ Toward the conclusion of the Līḷācaritra, we see him and his followers consolidating Mahanubhav practice and theology through a series of lilas.⁹⁴ It is in this context—after two attempts on Chakradhar’s life by jealous Brahmin ministers of the Yadava state and after his decision to move north—that we find the first of two important encounters with Hemadri, the most famous and influential of the Brahmin ministers who served Ramachandra and who stands at the apex of the Yadava state and the Brahminic ecumene.

Here we encounter a peculiar story that involves Hemadri, his wife Demati, and Chakradhar.⁹⁵

Chakradhar’s trial arrives in some versions of the Līḷācaritra shortly after this encounter with Hemadri’s wife, and this proximity of stories implies that there is a relationship between these two events in the literary archive. Recall that Chakradhar tried to avoid Demati, perhaps because he understood that contact with her would lead to no good. For reasons we are not given, soldiers arrive from Paithan, under the orders of Hemadri, and they attempt to take Chakradhar into custody.⁹⁶ Bhatobas singlehandedly disarms the leader of the soldiers and drives all the others away. Chakradhar demands that Bhatobas relinquish the sword he has taken from the chief of the soldiers and return it to him. It is at this point that Bhatobas, unhappy to comply, returns the sword to the soldier, quipping that if he can take the man’s sword he can take the man’s wife as well. One gets the sense this is a common jibe among soldiers.

Chakradhar then surrenders himself to the soldiers. He is taken to a temple in Paithan, one of the key centers of the Brahminic ecumene, rather than to Devgiri, the capital of the non-Brahmin Yadava state. The trial takes place in or at a temple, in public, rather than within a private royal environment. The jurisdiction, in a sense, in which Chakradhar will be accused of his alleged crimes is situated within that nexus of worlds that Brahmins uniquely inhabited, where we find mingled temple, court, Brahminic ecumene, religious life, and the quotidian world. Here is the lila (rejected as historically true by some Mahanubhavs) that records Chakradhar’s purported trial:

This is a detailed and dramatic story, a thirteenth-century courtroom drama where much unfolds. Though some Mahanubhavs reject the historical accuracy of this story, the presence of it in the literary archive of the Mahanubhavs is suggestive even as literary fiction. We find gathered together powerful Brahmin figures, ministers in the Yadava government, who have appeared throughout Chakradhar’s life up to this point—Hemadri, Prajnasagar, Mayata Hari, and his erstwhile friend Sarang Pandit are principal among them.¹⁰⁵ The tribunal accuses Chakradhar of what appears to be impropriety among his female followers, or perhaps they object to him having female followers at all. It is unclear why Chakradhar’s nose is cut off. Cutting off the nose—of people or of statues—is a form of disfigurement meant to imply degradation, emasculation, and shame, as the nose is an almost universal symbol of pride. It may also refer to a Dharma Śāstra injunction.¹⁰⁶ Given the conspiratorial nature of the purported trial—at least according to Prajnasagar and Mayata Hari—we can assume that whatever the crime of which Chakradhar was accused in this disputed lila, it was not the actual motivation for the alleged trial. Still, we might recall the encounter between Demati, Hemadri’s wife, and Chakradhar—this is the only direct connection the Līḷācaritra provides that links Hemadri and Chakradhar and involves the “attraction” of a female devotee (Demati) to Chakradhar, even though the Līḷācaritra has many examples of women and men finding Chakradhar’s charisma to be overwhelming, as we have seen. The encounter with Hemadri’s wife may indeed be the fodder of an accusation of “intimate contact,” misrepresented and misconstrued by the court—and hence the accusation of mendacious proceedings, that is, this is a false accusation.

If we take the charge that Chakradhar “attracted” female followers—perhaps as an extension of his apparent empowerment of Demati, Hemadri’s wife, in a sexual and domestic context—then we can see that this passage appears to condemn the teaching of women in general. The verb used here for “attracted,” vedhaṇe, primarily implies pious or spiritual devotion rather than sexual attraction; the word suggests a person deeply affected by the presence of another person. Demati, for example, was attracted to Chakradhar in just this way, and there is no hint in the text that there was a sexual attraction. Thus this does not seem to be an accusation of sexual impropriety, but rather an accusation that he attracts women to his order, and indeed many of his key and closest followers are women.¹⁰⁷ This apparently contravenes the social orthodoxy preserved by Hemadri and the tribunal—in other words, Chakradhar should not teach and initiate women. As we noted, Hemadri in particular is remembered as a scholar of orthodox social order and for authoring a text that detailed the quotidian vows that men, and especially women, might undertake. We can imagine that it is on the grounds of a perceived disruption of the normal social relations of everyday life that Chakradhar is supposedly tried in this court. We have the sense here that Chakradhar, as a Brahmin, and a male, has contravened accepted social practice by teaching women as well as non-Brahmins and low-caste people. The crime with which he is charged is the attraction and instruction of women and, by extension, others outside the sphere of the Brahminic ecumene. The use of Marathi epitomizes these purported crimes, for, as we have seen, the language is intimately tied to communicating with female (and by extension, non-Brahmin) followers. In using Marathi to express the ideas of his new religious order, it is clear to the tribunal that Chakradhar’s goal is to spread these ideas widely, without honoring the conventions of social distinction around knowledge and power that the Brahmin male members of the tribunal seek to uphold. A discourse in Marathi is out of the control of the Brahminic ecumene, just as an inscription in Marathi is beyond their control.

Yet there is another “trial” nestled within this one, and Chakradhar is the vehicle by which this other trial is exposed. What is it that Prajnasagar and Mayata Hari oppose? What causes them to exit the sabha, thus denying the tribunal, as Sontheimer notes, the possibility of a unanimous and thus unequivocal decision?¹⁰⁸

Quite aside from Chakradhar’s actions, it is Prajnasagar and Mayata Hari who level an accusation against the tribunal. This appears to be a challenge to something like a “speedy and public trial” by one’s peers.¹⁰⁹ The challenge arises when Prajnasagar and Mayata Hari realize that the trial is “rigged” and an outcome has already been fixed, which is indicated by the whispering to which they object. As men of integrity, they protest, and their words of admonition are strong, deploying casteist prejudice for rhetorical force. They accuse the tribunal—which includes the state’s most powerful minister, Hemadri—of having wrought “evil” or “filth” (okhaṭa) throughout the “country” (rashtra). This invocation of the “country” may also suggest the domain that the tribunal sees as their charge to protect, an idea that bears some premonition of a legal public.¹¹⁰

As we have seen, there appears a consistent connection between “Maharashtra” and the language of Marathi, even while Maharashtra was not a monolingual region in the Yadava era, nor is it now. The rashtra is not defined by its political borders exclusively, nor by its languages, but there is a clear sense here that the injustice being done to Chakradhar is also an affront to a particular place, not simply a particular person or the contravening of a given law. The trial turns in this moment from a supposed crime committed by Chakradhar to a crime committed against him: Chakradhar is the victim of an aberration of justice, an unfair trial. We can only connect the idea that this aberration of justice despoils an entire “nation,” a rashtra, if we understand some idea that links a public within a given cultural region with a sense of social justice or “due process.” And we can only assume that such a sense of region and justice intertwined exists because it is a subject of public debate at some level.

An emphasis is clearly placed on Prajnasagar and Mayata Hari in the telling of this story and so also on the injustice the trial epitomizes, for the lila that follows the story of the trial is about the two of them, not about Chakradhar. In this lila we learn that Prajnasagar and Mayata Hari hastened home, packed up their things, and, with their wives, set out to flee Maharashtra. Members of the tribunal, however, attempted to waylay Mayata Hari in particular and called out from their homes above the street, “Grab him! Grab his wife! He has deprived us of our unanimous decision (samaya)! Throw him out, throw him out of our Maharashtra!” Mayata Hari responded, “Take your own wife! And your father’s wife too! I am leaving your Maharashtra of the Mahars!”

Terms of insult of both caste and gender return to our narrative in this passage. As Mayata Hari leaves, his detractors hurl invectives at him and his wife, in particular, and he retorts with an insult directed at the wives and mothers of his abusers. Mayata Hari again refers to his Brahmin peers as “Untouchables,” only this time he uses an actual jati title, Mahar, to do so.¹¹¹ Mayata Hari’s point is not to insult Mahars, however, but to insult his Brahmin peers, and particularly those who claim some sanction on the sovereignty of the political region named “Maharashtra” here and elsewhere in the text. The effect of this passage is to reinscribe several features of social order: that the Brahminic ecumene represents “Maharashtra” is one. But another is, perhaps, that Chakradhar represents a challenge because he too accesses a “Maharashtra,” which is also a land of Mahars, and of women, Shudras, and many others who are not part of the Brahminic ecumene. As we have seen, Chakradhar has imagined his own “Maharashtra,” and here we have another articulation of “Maharashtra.” Both share the idea that region, culture, language, and social ethic interlace to form this concept of place. Furthermore, through the story, however apocryphal, of the trial we can see a space cleaved between the political motivations ascribed to Hemadri and the traditional justice system defended by Prajnasagar and Mayata Hari. It is through this newly opened space that figures like Chakradhar and Jnandev will proceed into the future.

Following the lilas that engage the trial, Chakradhar responds to the agony of his followers at seeing his disfigurement, and their pleas to preserve their “pride,” by causing his nose to regenerate.¹¹² Several key stories follow in which Mhaibhat becomes a follower of Chakradhar, Bhatobas is anointed the new leader of the group, funds and other arrangements are made for the maintenance of the group, and Chakradhar delivers a series of lectures in which the vital tenets of this new religion are laid out, including the injunction to stay in “Maharashtra.”¹¹³ This is also the section in which Chakradhar predicts the downfall of Yadava rule by mleccha or “Muslim” rule.¹¹⁴ Indeed, before departing Chakradhar proclaims, “Now I will go North and live among Muslims.”¹¹⁵ In a curious statement, when his female follower Ausa asks him why he’d want to do such a thing—to live among Muslims—he says, in a declaration reminiscent of Baisa’s question about whether Krishna belongs to Guravs or Brahmins,¹¹⁶ that all people, Muslim or otherwise, may also benefit from his teaching. This idea restates the deep humane sense of compassion the religion expounds. The statement also carries an echo of the kinds of mystic-yogic “syncretism” that will later be found in South Asia, from the Sufi saints of the medieval period to spiritual masters like Sai Baba of Shirdi in the modern period. One can imagine that figures such as Chakradhar—a person of great charisma, adept in yoga, deeply knowledgeable about religious matters, and also willing to transgress social boundaries—likely lie at the heart of the diverse meeting places of Sufis, Hindus, and Sikhs.¹¹⁷

Some versions of the Līḷācaritra conclude as soldiers again arrive to apprehend Chakradhar and attempt to kill him.¹¹⁸ As above, these lilas are rejected by some Mahanubhavs. Yet all versions of the Līḷācaritra, to my knowledge, end as Chakradhar leaves for Ujjain in the region of modern-day Madhya Pradesh. On his way, he meets several people who are witness to Chakradhar’s survival—most importantly Sarang Pandit, his erstwhile friend, recent persecutor, and someone who has appeared alongside Chakradhar throughout the Līḷācaritra. Sarang Pandit tries to hide his face in shame, but Chakradhar engages Sarang Pandit. Then Sarang Pandit invites Chakradhar to his home; however, Chakradhar appears to slip away after bathing in a nearby river, and this is the last time he is seen in Maharashtra. One cannot help but feel that on Sarang Pandit’s shoulders rests the guilt of the Brahminic ecumene over the purported persecution of one of their brightest stars.