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

This book has engaged a sliver of time from the thirteenth century to the first decade of the fourteenth century. In this brief era, historical memory places the composition of the Līḷācaritra in 1278 and the Jñāneśvarī in 1290. In part 1 I provided an overview of the cultural context for these two texts that helps to explain how and why they would emerge and become connected to the two figures—Chakradhar and Jnandev—who appear as the biographical metonyms of vernacularization in Marathi. I traced the outline of a public in Yadava-era inscriptions and the public memories of both figures within this context. Part 2 focused on Chakradhar, the early Mahanubhavs, and the Līḷācaritra primarily in order to understand how the lines of language, caste, gender, and everyday life merged and culminated in the composition of the Līḷācaritra. The text was concerned with historical accuracy in that it sought to portray the immediate past in as exact a way as possible through a kind of literary realism. Thus the text portrayed the proximate “prehistory” of vernacularization as a cultural form just before 1278. Part 3 accepted the Jñāneśvarī as a literary statement on the project of vernacularization that had passed its moment of origin, for this text looked forward to a “gold mine of literature” and a “City of Marathi” to come. As such, the Jñāneśvarī is a text situated at the precipice of the new vernacular millennium, rather than a text placed either before it or even during the historical shift to the literarization of Marathi.

My approach is to see how these two texts and contexts speak for a monumental shift in Indian culture. This is the “vernacular turn,” on the one hand, and the period that represents the completion of that turn toward a new vernacular future, on the other. I have made this divide in order to highlight the historical self-consciousness of these texts and the agents of their creation. Vernacularization was not an inadvertent consequence of a kind of cultural ecological shift, but rather it was the result of a purposeful and self-aware critique of culture. I have located this power within the field of Marathi literary vernacularization in everyday life, a field deeply inflected by religion. My point is that vernacularization is a process of empowerment itself, but an empowerment that negotiated the mores of everyday life and, in the process, valorized the image of the “everyday.” The driving core of vernacularization, I have argued, is the very quotidian social life it sought to emend. I have described the public debate about the common good that these texts represent as indicative of a nascent public sphere in Marathi.

Our two primary subjects evinced very different histories. As Jnandev and his text became absorbed into the largest devotional religion of the region, the Varkaris, the Jñāneśvarī and the public memory of Jnandev flourished over centuries at the heart of Marathi public culture. By contrast, the Mahanubhavs and the public memory of Chakradhar receded from the center of public culture through the centuries, while expanding to other areas of India, especially Punjab. The Mahanubhavs would return to the public sphere during the colonial period and after, when they became entangled in postcolonial political machinations. The quotidian revolution, like Raymond William’s “long revolution,”¹ is a moniker for a process that circles back upon itself, time and again, and yet advances. It is a revolution not only in the sense of this circularity but also in the sense of change over time. It is not a rebellion, but the pressure for emendation and progression met by the glacial transformation of normative world views. Though the quotidian revolution may begin in the time of Jnandev and Chakradhar, it is a process inherent in the present.

In the decades and centuries just after the Jñāneśvarī is said to have been composed, Jnandev would ascend to the pinnacle of Marathi public culture as the harbinger of Marathi literature where he stands today as an emblem of the region’s most enduring religious tradition, the Varkaris.² This was a significantly new trajectory in the public memory of Jnandev, for, as we have seen, there is no indication of devotion to the deity of the Varkaris within the Jñāneśvarī: no mention is made of Vitthal/Panduranga; nowhere do we hear of Pandharpur, the sacred site of the Varkaris, either. For devotion to Vitthal, we must turn to the songs or abhangs associated with Jnandev—on the authorship of which there is a long-standing debate that generally places their composition after the Jñāneśvarī was composed, perhaps by a few years or perhaps by centuries.³ Although the details of this debate are not germane here, what is relevant to note is how the Varkari religion, and in particular its hagiographic tradition, came to remember the place of Jnandev within the ambit of the Varkari world, a pluralistic world of people from diverse castes, and even religions, as well as both sexes. From the normative Varkari point of view, the lack of any mention of Vitthal or Pandharpur, or other sants or figures, in key texts such as the Jñāneśvarī is explained by means of hagiography.

Jnandev tells us very little about himself in the Jñāneśvarī, as noted in chapter 3. We know that at the time of the Jñāneśvarī’s composition he lived in the town of Nevase, that his guru was his brother Nivritti, that he was a Natha, that he lived during the reign of Ramachandra, and that he composed the Jñāneśvarī. Together these give us a sense of when he might have lived and tells us a little about him. The text also allows us to assume that he was fluent in Sanskrit, that he was most probably a Brahmin, and that he was relatively young when he composed his text. The many stories we associate with Jnandev in hagiography are the result of later composers, and chief among them was the figure of Namdev (1270–1350), a Shudra tailor or Shimpi, a resident of Pandharpur and deep devotee of Vitthal.⁴ Namdev and Jnandev are said to have been contemporaries, and it is Namdev who is said to have composed the first biographical texts we have for Jnandev. The essence of this biography is contained within three Marathi works called the “Ādi” or “Beginning,” the “Tīrthāvaḷī” or “The Journey,” and the “Samādhi” or “The Entombment.”⁵ The earliest manuscripts we have for these texts are from the middle of the sixteenth century, even though they are all attributed to the lifetime of Namdev. In other words, the biography of Jnandev by Namdev is remembered to have been composed either during the latter portion of Jnandev’s brief life, in the period after he composed the Jñāneśvarī, or just after the life of Jnandev, or within two centuries of Jnandev’s entombment. Put another way: Jnandev’s biography is later than the Jñāneśvarī, and so it purports to record not only his early life but also events subsequent to the composition of the Jñāneśvarī.

The three compositions attributed to Namdev give us rich details about Jnandev’s life, as well as the lives of his parents, grandparents, and siblings (brothers Nivritti and Sopan and sister Muktabai), details to which the Jñāneśvarī does not even allude. And in the latter two hagiographies—“The Journey” and the “The Entombment”—Namdev himself is present as a character, rendering these texts somewhere between biography and autobiography.

The “Ādi” begins with the story of Jnandev’s parents and concludes as Jnandev completes his Jñāneśvarī.⁶ Jnandev’s father had renounced worldly life prematurely—while his children were still young, before his obligations to them and his wife were concluded. As a punishment to Jnandev’s father, a Brahmin council in Paithan stripped them all—parents and children—of their caste status as Brahmins. In order to return to caste status, the council demanded that Jnandev’s parents commit ritual suicide by jumping into a river—which they did. The council then required that the siblings appear before the tribunal in Paithan to demonstrate their Brahminic learning.

The “Ādi” appears aware of the intellectual and ethical progress of its subject. Nivritti and Jnandev debate the rationale for returning to caste status. Nivritti argues that there is no point in having their caste reinstated because they are beyond such distinctions of caste. Here is Nvritti’s position expressed in the “Ādi,” verse 890:

It is at the meeting of the council that we have perhaps the most famous story from Jnandev’s life. This trial of Jnandev may have been inspired by the story of the trial of Chakradhar. They bear striking similarities and are located in the same place, Paithan. As the story goes, the council determines that nothing can be done for the children, and they recommend a life of abject devotion to God through bhakti. They imply that, as outcastes, this is the only option available to them. The children accept their fate, but the Brahmins are not yet done with them. When they learn of the lofty and peculiar names they each have,⁹ the Brahmins laugh at them and poke fun at their august names. The Brahmins point out that names mean nothing, for nearby there is a buffalo also named Jnana, just like Jnandev. To this Jnandev says that he and the buffalo are indeed the same—not only do names not matter but form itself does not matter. The Brahmins are astounded at this precocious young man, and they dare Jnandev to cause the “dumb” animal to recite the Vedas. And this the buffalo does—with exemplary intonation, it is noted.¹⁰ Jnandev’s miracle reinforces the idea that a linguistic medium, Sanskrit in this case, should not stand in for soteriological, social, or theological value. The reader will hear echoes in this story of the rejection of Vedic authority and Sanskritic elitism that we saw displayed in the Jñāneśvarī. Figure C.1 provides an illustration of this episode from a late nineteenth century publication.

This point seems to mark Jnandev’s turn toward embracing social equality. And this prepares Jnandev for a meeting with Namdev that will fully transform his social sphere. The “Ādi” ends as Jnandev completes his Jñāneśvarī, but before he has met Namdev and the many bhaktas who will fill his hagiography.

The “Tīrthāvaḷī” tells the story of how Jnandev, after composing the Jñāneśvarī, traveled to Pandharpur to meet Namdev because he had heard that Namdev represented the very best of bhakti—he was an exemplary bhakta. Jnandev’s intention, we learn, was to convert Namdev to a nirguni or abstract, theological position, but Jnandev undertook this effort under the pretext of a pilgrimage to sacred sites of northern India. During their travels together, Namdev and Jnandev became intimate friends, but also strident debaters. The story culminates with an irony: it is Namdev who convinces Jnandev to accept a saguni or nonabstract devotionalism. It is this moment of “conversion” through conversation that, for Varkaris, marks the turning point of Jnandev’s devotional attention toward Vitthal and Pandharpur, hence his inclusion within the genealogy of Varkari sants. The “Tīrthāvaḷī” is therefore not a story of pilgrimage but a story of a different journey: Jnandev’s transition to Vitthal devotee and Varkari who visits Pandharpur, all compelled by the figure of Namdev and Jnandev’s friendship with him.¹¹ The yearly Varkari pilgrimage marks this important story through ritual. It is usually the palanquin of Namdev that comes out to greet the palanquin of Jnandev when the procession of Varkaris arrive outside Pandharpur. That “reunion” is an explicit ritual memory of this story of Jnandev and Namdev’s friendship and Jnandev’s return to Pandharpur as a Vitthal devotee.

We also have here a turn toward an inclusive social ethics, for the “Tīrthāvaḷī,” as a story of friendship between a Brahmin Sanskrit philosopher and an illiterate Shimpi or Shudra tailor, is also a metaphor for the elision of social difference. It is bhakti as spiritual force that draws Jnandev to Namdev, but it is bhakti as social force that pulls Jnandev into the orbit of an eclectic social world. Figure C.2 provides another illustration from the late-nineteenth-century Bhaktavijay, which shows Jnandev together with a socially heterogeneous group. From left to right, we see the low-caste sant Savata Mali, the “Untouchable” sant Kurmadas, the deity Krishna, Namdev, and finally Jnandev. Here we can grasp that Jnandev’s sonic equality has transformed into a full-fledged social equality.

An important story accompanies the return of Jnandev and Namdev to Pandharpur in the “Tīrthāvaḷī”; indeed, the story is so important that it takes up half the text. Upon their return to Pandharpur, Vitthal insists that Namdev must perform the traditional rite that is incumbent upon someone who has completed a sacred pilgrimage: he must feed Brahmins. Namdev makes all the preparations for this feast and invites his Pandharpur Brahmin guests. Jnandev is, of course, among them, and Vitthal too appears, taking a luminous human form. The Brahmins gathered assume that Vitthal—so radiant—must be a Brahmin like them, for why else would he be at this feast as an honored guest? However, when Vitthal sits down to dine with Namdev, the Brahmins become highly agitated and they question Vitthal, still thinking him to be one of them. They demand he do various acts of purification, and Vitthal complies with them all in a good-natured way (as did Jnandev and his family to the demands of the Brahmin council). Though this story is in part a “comedy of manners,” it is also a critique of caste. It is a demonstration of another dual response to caste distinction in the vernacular context: resistance and accommodation at the same time. When the Brahmins eventually realize that they have been in the company not of a fellow Brahmin but of Vitthal himself, they plead for forgiveness, decry their ignorance and casteism, and ask that they forever remain in the company of Namdev.¹² This story carries many implications that we have seen already: associations with caste and commensality, assumptions about a person’s caste status, and an accommodation to social norms even in the midst of a critique of those norms.

The final text, the “Samādhi,” is a threnody or eulogy attributed to Namdev that recalls the moments leading up to Jnandev’s self-entombment in Alandi. More so than the “Tīrthāvaḷī,” the “Samādhi” also serves to solidify the deep connection between Namdev and Jnandev—the mutual bhakti they shared for the same deity and for each other. The text is a heartfelt farewell from Namdev, and all of Jnandev’s companions, directed to Jnandev as he entombs himself. This final text fully situates Jnandev in an entire community of devotees, the early Varkaris, that included women, low castes, and “Untouchables” as well. On a visit to modern-day Alandi and to Jnandev’s tomb, one meets with the stories of Jnandev’s many friends, across the quotidian spectrum.

The stories that originate in these three texts attributed to Namdev come to populate the core ideas of Varkari hagiography and are canonized by the Varkari hagiographer Mahipati in the eighteenth century. Namdev’s early biographies of Jnandev clearly resituate the saint, drawing Jnandev into a new social context with a renewed social ethics. What we see happening in the biographies of Jnandev attributed to Namdev is a vernacularization of Jnandev’s legacy. Jnandev is reoriented within the world of everyday life. This draws in not only the saint and his public memory but also his text. Jnandev’s high place in Marathi public culture is directly tied to his inclusion within the Varkari religion as one of its four key figures—along with Namdev, Eknath (sixteenth century), and Tukaram (seventeenth century). As for the Jñāneśvarī, by the time of Eknath the text is fully within the ambit of the Varkari world and entirely subsumed under devotion to Vitthal. As mentioned earlier, Eknath is said to have edited the Jñāneśvarī and refurbished the site of Jnandev’s samādhi or entombment.¹³ Here again is a process that brought Jnandev within the Varkari context through an association with Eknath. A century later, a female sant named Bahinabai—commonly considered a contemporary and devotee of Tukaram of the seventeenth century—famously uses the metaphor of a temple to describe the genealogy of the Varkari religion’s key figures:

This passage “vernacularizes” Jnandev, as well as the other figures mentioned, through this grounding metaphor of place, a temple, an axis mundi, a key metaphor of location and institution. The aural temple of dharma, the dharma kirtan that Jnandev creates with the Jñāneśvarī, is here transposed into the new edifice of the Varkari religion itself. This metaphor is not random; the sense of structure and purposeful creation is, I think, intentional. I argued in Religion and Public Memory that around the figure of Namdev the collection of practices that make up bhakti (song-poems, performances, hagiography, pilgrimage, scholarship, expressions in multiple media, etc.) are not haphazard, but display a logic of remembrance and the craft of public presentation. People remember revered figures in social contexts with a purpose. The purpose we see in Namdev’s hagiography of Jnandev is a vernacular reconfiguration of Jnandev that aligns the salvational politics of his text with the social politics of his remembrance. In saying this, I do not mean to reject the truth claims inherent in Namdev’s biographies of Jnandev—in other words, I do not consider those texts “fictions.” But I do think—fact or fiction—narratives have intentions and effects, and the intention and effect of Namdev’s biographies of Jnandev were to bring his biography within the sphere of everyday life and transform his ethics of sonic equality into a display of social equality exemplified in the worlds of bhakti associated with the Varkaris.

Through the intermingling of hagiography and literature, Jnandev emerges from the thirteenth century as the figure we know today—Marathi literary innovator and social reformer who championed the plight of the “common man.” Indeed, the place of Jnandev in Maharashtra’s self-understanding is enormously significant. One of the most beloved films of Marathi cinema is the 1940 depiction of Jnandev’s life, Sant Dnyaneshwar, made by the famous Prabhat Studios and directed by V. G. Damle and Sheikh Fattelal, who also made Sant Tukaram four years earlier. In figure C.3, we see a still of the scene where young Jnandev causes a buffalo to recite the Vedas.

Jnandev was not only a subject at the heart of Marathi public culture, as this film epitomizes, but he received particular attention as a figure of nationalist and subnationalist importance. A postage stamp issued by the Government of India memorialized the sant on the occasion of the seven hundredth anniversary of his entombment in 1997, for example (see figure C.4).

Like Jnandev, a host of other sants and devotional figures across Indian history have received such memorialization as heroes of “national integration” preceding Indian independence. However, Jnandev is perhaps unique in that the Government of India devoted a separate stamp to commemorating his Jñāneśvarī as well, as if to underscore that author and text are separable and follow their own trajectories and routes of vernacularization in history (see figure C.5).

In the seven centuries between the composition of the Jñāneśvarī and today, Jnandev and his public memory burgeon and become fixed within public culture. Jnandev and his Jñāneśvarī also come to flesh out a significant form in the emergent and later modern public sphere as a key referenent in the public construction of Marathi, Maharashtra, and being Maharashtrian. The legacies I have briefly traced here—text, scholarship, film, stamps—all attest to how Jnandev and his text are not only embedded in the modern Marathi public sphere but are also iconic of some of its chief debates about caste, gender, social equality, and the past. A government-issued stamp that memorizes a text is a symbol that insists upon textuality within the field of the modern public. And it points toward a politics of social inclusion within a shared literary sphere. The process that drives these changes is the vernacularization of Jnandev and his public memory, and the effect of this vernacularization is to situate Jnandev in everyday life as a champion of the common person. We can see the rudiments of this idea in the Jñāneśvarī, but it is the force of vernacular culture that fully shapes the form of Jnandev we receive today. He is absorbed into a particular debate within the Marathi public sphere: about social equality, language, literature, and history. And Jnandev’s genealogical relationship to this present moment is not simply the co-option of his legacy and literature over the last two centuries but reaches deeply into the inaugural moments of Marathi literary vernacularization itself.

Shortly before Chakradhar’s departure for northern India around 1273, as we saw, he ordered his followers to remain in Maharashtra. After the transition from the first generation of Mahanubhavs to subsequent generations, the locus of Chakradhar’s followers grew more diffuse, with evidence of Mahanubhav communities in Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Punjab by the sixteenth century,¹⁷ and even as far as Kabul in Afghanistan.¹⁸ In Maharashtra over many centuries, Mahanubhavs appear to have moved out of large urban areas and into rural areas until the modern period. To my knowledge, no one has yet reconstructed the historical migration of Mahanubhav religious cultures throughout India, and this is not my goal here. As a religious community of lay people and ascetics who rejected the worlds of temple and court, their historical trace is confined to those few Mahanubhav institutional contexts that retained archives and organizational memory. These texts largely ceased to record the religion’s history, devoting ever more attention to theological matters. The literary realism of the Līḷācaritra and the Smṛtisthaḷa yielded to a literature of timeless theological commentary.

In the centuries after Chakradhar’s life, the Mahanubhavs continued to produce texts—largely in Marathi and Sanskrit—that elaborated or commented primarily upon the Līḷācaritra or other core texts. We also find several genres of literature that are not idiosyncratic to the Mahanubhav sphere, especially commentaries on the Bhagavad Gītā (in Sanskrit and Marathi) and retellings of the marriage choice or svayamvara of Rukmini, Krishna’s wife.¹⁹ The extent of Mahanubhav literary production shows us that the group flourished (if literary production is a sign of flourishing) from the thirteenth century well into the mid-nineteenth century. In other words, we have an unbroken record of Mahanubhav literary production until the modern colonial period, which suggests the continuous existence of this group, as well as its spread to northern India, but its own history becomes obscured.

Despite this plethora of textual production and geographic diffusion, by the colonial period we find that the Mahanubhavs were largely unknown in the public sphere of western India, including in scholarship and other contexts in Marathi and English. They register hardly at all within the massive efforts of colonial ethnology, for example. The one exception is an entry in the colonial Imperial Gazetteer of India in 1887, and, to my knowledge, this is the only mention of the Mahanubhavs in any prominent government publication of the colonial period. My discussion of the Mahanubhav’s entry into the modern Indian public sphere draws solely from publicly available documents and relies on no informant input or data other than publically available materials such as colonial publications, news media, and government documents.

Prompted by new data collected by the 1881 census that shows a population of Mahanubhavs in Maharashtra, the 1887 Gazetteer provides an entry for the religion that displays a curious mixture of historical confusion and ethnographic observation about the Mahanubhavs. In a section of the Gazetteer on the district of Ritpur (Riddhapur), William Wilson Hunter refers to the Mahanubhavs as “Manbhau” and states that the religious community derived its name from “Mang-Bhau” or “the Brothers of the Mangs,” a title Hunter said was applied to the sect because of the fact that their purported founder, one Kishen Bhat, had married a Matang or Mang woman, that is, a woman of an “Untouchable” jati.²⁰ No mention is made of any text, such as the Līḷācaritra, much less do we hear of Chakradhar or any other key figure. Hunter places the origin of the “Manbhaus” in the middle of the fourteenth century, and Kishen Bhat is described as the “spiritual advisor of a Raja who ruled at Paithan.”

The reader will see that some of what Hunter reports echoes what we know of the Mahanubhavs from other sources: a kind of qualified monotheism, the worship of Krishna, rejection of the “ties of caste and religion,” a life of asceticism, etc. Yet we also hear of a mysterious “magic cap” that would make Kishen Bhat appear in the likeness of Krishna! What this report of 1887 makes clear is that although the Mahanubhavs existed at this point in Maharashtra and are registered in the ethnological surveillance of the colonial state in this one instance, they remained opaque in the view of colonial-era scholarship and in Indian public media. The confabulation Hunter’s report gives us—the odd reconfiguration of the Mahanubhav name, mixing perhaps the title bhaṭa or Brahmin with the name Krishna, the invention of a magic cap, and so on—shows but the shadows of an awareness of the Mahanubhavs in the former heartland of their community, Riddhapur in Maharashtra.

The report does give us interesting demographic data culled from the 1881 census, however. The census reported 4,111 “Manbhaus” in Berar—2,193 men and 1,918 women—a majority of whom reported their occupation as “beggar,” by which we must assume they declared to inquisitive colonial officials that they were initiated mendicants.²¹ Of those few who reported an occupation, the list included moneylending, agricultural labor, carpentry, and textile work, suggesting that the Mahanubhav order was confined to no single caste or occupation. The community comprised both those who were integrated within the political economy and culture of the region and others who retained their ascetic orders, as is the case today. The Mahanubhavs continued to straddle the space between everyday life and the renunciation of everyday life during the period of Hunter’s report, it seems.

In part, the reason for this striking ignorance about the Mahanubhavs among colonial-era experts in ethnology, history, and literature is the fact that for centuries the Mahanubhavs had preserved their texts in a secret cipher (lipi) and kept the history and practices of their religion a secret from non-Mahanubhavs, that is, from the general public.²² The rationale for this seclusion is not clear as we have no firsthand statement by any Mahanubhav figure, to my knowledge, that addresses either the use of the cipher or the sense of persecution that might have compelled the Mahanubhavs to resort to such secretive measures. In the Gazetteer of 1887, Hunter tells us that the “Manbhaus” were persecuted because their “doctrines repudiated a multiplicity of gods” and that the “hatred and contempt” endured by the religion “arose from…[the group’s] endeavors to restore the monotheistic principle of Brahmanism as taught in the Vedas.” However, in the correction to this entry in volume 21 of the Gazetteer in 1908, we learn instead that the entire “Mang-brother” appellation was an “absurd Brahminic derivation,” which has the disingenuous effect of exculpating Hunter but also drawing out the colonial suspicion of the Brahmin pandit.²³ What changed between these two entries in the Gazetteer with two very different conclusions, particularly regarding “Brahminism”?

In the Times of India, the “paper of record” during this period, on Friday, November 15, 1907, the famous Indian scholar R. G. Bhandarkar composed a critical intervention regarding the public’s knowledge of the Mahanubhavs.²⁴ In a short piece titled “The Manbhav Sect: The Gazetteer Trips,” Bhandarkar sought to correct Hunter’s statements in the Gazetteer of 1887 about the Mahanubhavs because “two learned mahants or spiritual heads of the sect” from Ludhiana (contemporary Indian Punjab) and Peshawar (contemporary Pakistan) had approached him with evidence of their history.²⁵ It is largely in response to Bhandarkar that the Gazetteer retracted and corrected its previous text.

Following Bhandarkar’s article an argument emerged that claimed that opposition from Brahminic authorities had pushed Mahanubhavs out of mainstream Maharashtrian public culture and toward the fringes of society, and this had also compelled them to transcribe their texts in lipi as a means of avoiding perceived Brahminic surveillance. The source for this idea is composite. The story of the Līḷācaritra, as outlined in chapters 4 and 5, does suggest that while most of the Mahanubhavs, including Chakradhar, were Brahmins, a significant opposition to the Mahanubhavs was mounted at the nexus of the state and the Brahminic ecumene in the Yadava era. Similarly, it would appear that a majority of the Mahanubhav texts from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century were composed by Brahmins—judging from the samples given in Raeside’s bibliography of Mahanubhav literature.²⁶ Yet we notice that non-Brahmin names (i.e., those that do not contain common markers such as vyāsa or bhaṭa or some variation) appear to increase in number as we move closer to the modern era. One can imagine that the “Mang-bhau” (“Brothers of the Mangs”) appellation also registers a social reality and a social ethics—for Chakradhar taught exactly such “brotherhood” within the social ethics of his community.

We may speculate based on this admittedly light archive that Brahminic involvement in the Mahanubhav religion declined over time in Maharashtra. Today most Mahanubhavs I have met are not Brahmins, but (in Maharashtra in any case) belong to one of the many Maratha jatis. Yet we can also see the same familiar fuzziness with regard to the role of Brahmins and “Brahminism” in the public and private affairs of the Mahanubhav religion. In the first Gazetteer article, it is a return to a pure “Brahminic” monotheism of the Vedas that is cited as the source of conflict for the Mahanubhavs, perhaps evincing the influence of socio-religious movements of the colonial era, such as the Arya Samaj. And in the second issue of the Gazetteer it is implied that Brahmins were at the heart of “maligning” the Mahanubhav religion. This odd contradiction reveals much misunderstanding. But it does appear that the representation of Brahmins within the religion of the Mahanubhavs declined in leadership contexts in any case. This is likely the result of the fact that Mahanubhavs are not an endogamous group; they usually marry people by the rules of caste endogamy within their given region rather than choose other Mahanubhavs for marriage. Caste endogamy, in this case, is perhaps perceived as contrary to the social egalitarianism of the religion itself. Yet this reduction in the representation of Brahmins within this religious order does not indicate a conflict, to my mind.

The Mahanubhav religion’s reentry into public culture in western India bears echoes of the purported trial of Chakradhar, a trial based on processes of vernacularization located through the vicissitudes of everyday life and presented within public culture. Here we see this within the modern public sphere, itself epitomized by the Times of India and the Gazetteer as the palimpsests of our inquiry. The Brahminic ecumene’s supposed persecution of Chakradhar becomes a story of a general Brahminic persecution of Mahanubhavs. And the resonance with the trial and narrative movements of the Līḷācaritra around gender, caste, and society return us to one of the key problems of vernacularization—the accommodation of “everyday life” at the core of public culture. The Mahanubhavs had removed their literary and historical record from the public field, even while they continued to live in and alongside the flow of everyday life, both as “householders” and as ascetics.

The theme of a trial would continue in this modern record of the Mahanubhavs. By the early 1980s, court cases and political controversy would envelop the reentry of the Mahanubhavs into Indian public life. V. B. Kolte was an eminent scholar of Marathi literature and history and especially of the Mahanubhavs. His work on the Līḷācaritra in 1978 and on the early history of the Mahanubhavs became the subject of legal, political, and civil action. In the district court of Amravati in January 1982, the Association (Mandal) of Mahanubhavs in Nagpur filed a civil suit against Kolte and the Government of Maharashtra, which had published his edition of the Līḷācaritra, in an effort to suspend the publication of Kolte’s edition. The petition was rejected, as was another petition in October of that year.²⁷ The story of this conflict is an important instance of the complex negotiations of the quotidian revolution in public culture and the public sphere of Indian democracy.

The nature of the allegations against Kolte’s work by the Nagpur Mandal involved the inclusion of stories from the life of Chakradhar that they believed were either spurious or defamatory. In particular, they claimed that including certain lilas would create “hatred between the Hindu and Mahanubhav religions.”²⁸ They argued that Kolte’s work, especially his critical edition of the Līḷācaritra published by the Government of Maharashtra, contravened the protections of section 295a of the Indian Penal Code, which protects Indian citizens from “deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings of any class by insulting its religion or religious beliefs.” In other words, the Nagpur Mandal feared that the Līḷācaritra would insult some Hindus, and, given that Kolte had edited the Līḷācaritra and the Government of Maharashtra had published the text, Kolte and the government were liable for any potential defamation. The particular fear of the Nagpur group of Mahanubhavs involved a certain lila within the Līḷācaritra that I need not repeat here. They worried that the publication of this lila would inflame Hindu anger in some general sense.

A third attempt to halt the government’s publication of Kolte’s Līḷācaritra, spearheaded by the Nagpur Mandal, was initiated on November 29, 1991. This time the government agreed, but then lifted the ban on May 6, 1992, only to reinstate it again in August.²⁹ Two years later, in 1994, a political figure of India’s primary “Hindu Nationalist” political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), renewed calls for action, this time against Professor Kolte himself, then an eighty-seven-year-old retiree.³⁰ Kolte defended himself in all these cases by arguing that the offending lilas were not endorsed by him; rather he merely had transcribed whatever lilas he found in old manuscripts given to him by, among others, Mahanubhavs who had held those texts for hundreds of years, albeit in relative secrecy.³¹

Yet the more significant contest appeared to take place within the community of Mahanubhavs. While the Nagpur Mandal had initiated a decade of legal and political efforts to oppose Kolte’s work, simultaneously other key leaders of the Mahanubhavs defended Kolte and advocated for his text. In particular, a key scholar and mahant of the Mahanubhav order, according to the Times of India, declared that “the move of the government [to withhold publication of Kolte’s Līḷācaritra] was politically motivated” and that “all the allegations made by the Nagpur Mandal were baseless.”³² This debate, playing out in the public sphere in the early 1990s, was both between Mahanubhavs and a sense of a general “Hindu” community and also within the Mahanubhav order itself.

I should strenuously state here that I take no position on this issue whatsoever and endeavor to relay only details available in the public record. Indeed, whatever one’s position on this issue or on the larger question of the effectiveness of a penal code such as the one invoked by the Nagpur Mandal (and many other groups before and after), this legal and public tussle over the place and pronouncements of the Mahanubhavs highlights a key feature of vernacularization, as I have described it in this book.

As we have seen, the first small group of Mahanubhavs that surrounded Chakradhar did not agree on everything—they debated and struggled with one another and with their founder. We see in the Nagpur Mandal’s complaint some remnant of Chakradhar’s injunctions to his followers to respect the cultures in which they exist—to minimize offense and discord, even while remaining true to their own egalitarian ethos. The fault lines between a life in public and the private vows of Mahanubhavs were issues ever present in the foundation of the community, and these struggles appear to have endured. And in Nagaraja’s reactions to the Nagpur Mandal’s efforts, we hear not only a countervailing voice but also the direct outcome of the egalitarianism of the Mahanubhavs—a world conditioned by debate rather than orthodoxy, a key feature, at least in principle, of any configuration of the public sphere. In both cases, contemporary Mahanubhavs remained attentive to their founder’s ethics and inspiration.

For scholars who explore the contemporary life of Indian politics, the deepening of the core of political participation is much more than the localizing or regionalizing of a political idiom—like changing the name of a city from Bombay to Mumbai, as happened in 1995. Instead, this vernacularization is rooted in the valorization of the “common man,” a stock figure at the core of the contemporary political sphere in India. The rise of the political Aam Aadmi Party—the “Common Man Party”—is but one recent, though crucial, example. The longest-running political cartoon in the Times of India, drawn daily by R. K. Laxman (1921–2015) from 1951 until shortly before his death, follows the bewilderment of the “common man” as he encounters the enigmas of Indian politics and the Indian state. And in Maharashtra, in particular, all political parties vie to represent the “Marathi māṇūs,” the Marathi man.³³ The common person (configured variously by class, gender, and region) remains at the heart of the discourse of Indian democracy, represented anew each election cycle.

In this book I have argued that the process of vernacularization, the quotidian revolution, has distinct social and political origins in any given context, yet it has no distinct concluding point—it is a process begun but not finished. What Christophe Jaffrelot has eloquently called “India’s silent revolution” is part of the long process I have outlined here, though marked in the modern period by recourse to the democratic power of majoritarian politics.³⁴ We can trace its historical origins to particular places, times, and languages in South Asia, but we should also attend to forces enacted upon public culture that are self-replicating and perpetual. There is no doubt that the process of vernacularization in many parts of South Asia drew from the elite literary and royal spheres of the older cosmopolitan world, embodied in Sanskrit literary theory and text. However, this book has sought to show that this location for vernacularization was joined by another: in Maharashtra—as perhaps in most linguistic regions of the subcontinent—the process of vernacularization mediated between the royal-elite and the quotidian, and between institutional religion and religious innovation, by occupying, at least discursively, the position of the “everyday.” Regardless of the location from which it is inaugurated or the direction from which it arrives, I argue that all processes of vernacularization share that same epicenter in the discourse of everyday life. In contemporary India, vernacularization continues to thrive in the interstices of state and society, of the secular and sacred, all focused upon the vast sphere of everyday life that has a renewed political valence in the context of a secular democracy of voters and individual rights.