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

This book is about the moment in recorded history when literary Marathi appeared in medieval India. Situated in Maharashtra of the thirteenth century, the book traces this history by examining Marathi inscriptions and the first two extant texts of Marathi literature, the Līḷācaritra (c. 1278 CE) and the Jñāneśvarī (c. 1290 CE). This study also explores the lives of the two key figures associated with those texts, Chakradhar (c. 1194 [1273 departure from Maharashtra]),¹ the founder of the Mahanubhav religion, and Jnandev (c. 1271 [1296 entombment]),² who later becomes a key figure of the Varkari religion. The book presents these figures and texts as emblems of the process of vernacularization in Maharashtra, using them to argue that through this process public culture was invested with the idioms of the “everyday” and the quotidian became valorized in public and political expression. Vernacularization was compelled by a critique of social inequity as a result of this emphasis on ordinary life. This critique of social inequity, and the literary sphere engendered by vernacularization, inaugurated the first trace of a nascent public sphere in the region.

The book is divided into three parts, each composed of either two or three chapters, bounded by an introduction and a conclusion. The introduction presents the book’s key subjects and materials, and surveys the primary ideas, concepts, and debates the book engages. Part 1 provides a view of what I call the Yadava century, the period presided over by the Yadava dynasty in the region of Maharashtra from 1189 to 1317 CE. The primary textual and archival evidence for these three chapters is the Marathi inscriptional record of the Yadava state, as well as, secondarily, social, cultural, economic, and religious historical evidence that can be gleaned from the Līḷācaritra and the Jñāneśvarī.

Part 1 begins with chapter 1, which explores the sociopolitical world of the Yadava century that served as the context for Marathi literary vernacularization. The Yadavas, also called the Sevunas, were a non-Brahmin dynasty that helped stabilize their political territory by creating a clientelist Brahminic ecumene. Select members of that ecumene were awarded land and grants for temples, monasteries, and other institutions, given at the beneficence of the Yadava state as rewards for certain kinds of textual production and other services. The Brahminic ecumene of the Yadava century was primarily composed of Brahmin literary and ritual experts engaging in traditional Brahminic activities, though other high castes, such as Kayasthas and Guravs, also participated. The Yadavas, like many polities of the age, used these gifts of state to create distinct spheres of entitlements throughout their political geography. This nonthreatening, nonmilitarized Brahminic ecumene helped stabilize the political sphere in the Yadava century. As a system it served the political aims of the non-Brahmin Yadava state, displaying a downward flow of power from Kshatriya or “King” to Brahmin.

Chapter 2 uses the inscriptional record left by the Yadavas to counter a common assumption made by historians that Marathi vernacularization was underwritten by Yadava political support. I find no evidence for this widely held claim, but instead show how the inscriptional record and other aspects of the Yadava century suggest that the royal court, while it did not support Marathi literary production with official state funds, did appear to regard Marathi as a language of significant utility in accessing the vast quotidian “public” that surrounded and populated the Yadava realm. We will see that the indifference to Marathi displayed by the royal court and its Brahminic ecumene allowed greater freedom for new religious communities to adopt Marathi as a means to reach a nonelite population. At the same time, the social value of literacy, a feature of the Brahminic ecumene, led the Brahmin figures at the center of literary vernacularization (Chakradhar, the early Mahanubhavs, Jnandev) to compose a new literature in Marathi.

Chapter 3 provides a necessary prelude to the next two parts of the book through a survey of the social contexts and received biographies of Chakradhar and Jnandev. This chapter supplies the remembered biographical data and likely public memory of Chakradhar and Jnandev that help shape the context of the four chapters that follow. The chapter also argues that meaning coheres around these received biographies in a way that stabilizes their “value” in a particular kind of spiritual economy of the age. The three chapters of part 1 thus provide a vision of the preconditions of vernacularization in medieval western India.

Part 2 focuses on the Līḷācaritra, using the text primarily as a historical archive for the cultural sphere in which vernacularization emerged and a nascent Marathi public sphere formed in the thirteenth century. Though the Līḷācaritra is the first instance we have of Marathi literature, what it records is its own prehistory—it details the conditions for its own creation. I consider the Līḷācaritra to be an example of something like historical literary realism as it seeks to convey a high level of historicity and real-life encounters, even while it is a text of bhakti, of religious devotion to Chakradhar. Indeed, the authors of the Līḷācaritra took great pains to precisely recall the life of Chakradhar by drawing on their immediate memories of his life and teachings. So attentive to historical correctness were the compilers of the Līḷācaritra that they present recollections of their leader that display not only his glorious traits, but his peculiarities as well. If part 1 of the book described the preconditions for the vernacular turn by portraying the cultural and political landscape of the Yadava century, then part 2 is configured as a study of the portrayal of vernacularization, the cultural memory of this moment, as preserved in the Līḷācaritra.

Chapter 4 observes the attention to historical detail in the Līḷācaritra and this allows us some access to the social conditions that were arrayed around vernacularization in the decades just before the full advent of Marathi literature. In the Līḷācaritra, we learn that the greatest site of contention for this evolving vernacular sphere was not the literary-political world but rather a contention with the gurus and godmen who competed in a religious market for followers and patronage, often around the social economies of temples. Chakradhar is not only emblematic of a religious innovator, but is one of the most radical of his age, for he promoted a new religion that rejected caste and gender difference in principle. Chapter 4 studies the cultural practices of caste and gender that pervaded everyday life in the mid-thirteenth century and were recorded by the early Mahanubhavs in the Līḷācaritra. If vernacularization directly engaged caste and gender differences at least rhetorically, then attention to these questions of social ethics is vital for understanding the cultural politics at work at the core of a new literary world in Marathi. I show how the early Mahanubhavs grappled with these social issues, both within their community and outside in the ordinary world.

Chapter 5 tracks how this rejection of social inequity inspired, or even compelled, the use of Marathi as the medium of communication for the early Mahanubhav community. I give several reasons for the use of Marathi to record the life of Chakradhar in the Līḷācaritra. In writing a historical text, the early Mahanubhavs wished to preserve the language their founder was remembered to have used, which was Marathi. This was a language understood as feminine and “imperfect” in the taxonomies of Sanskritic linguistic hierarchy, yet it perfectly suited his audience, especially the female followers whom the early Mahanubhavs wished not to alienate. The choice of Marathi for the preservation of the key text of the Mahanubhav religion was a practical one made around the ethical conviction to leave a text intelligible to the larger quotidian world that did not know Sanskrit. However, Chakradhar’s ethical urge toward inclusiveness—of women, low castes, and those deemed “Untouchable”—led him afoul of the Brahminic elite of the Yadava century, according to the Līḷācaritra. His story ends with a purported public trial and his own exit from the region of Maharashtra and also from recorded human history.

The two chapters of part 2 demonstrate that the cultural origin of vernacularization was not at the nexus of literature and royal power. Instead, the materials examined here proclaim a desire to communicate as widely as possible the teachings of a new spiritual figure in the Yadava domains. The early Mahanubhavs created the first work of Marathi literature as an extension of the radical social ideals of their founder, not as a project to create a new literary idiom in Marathi.

Part 3 of the book turns to Jnandev and his Jñāneśvarī. The two chapters in this part of the book use the Jñāneśvarī to see how, in the contexts described in parts 1 and 2 of the book, a work arises in Marathi that evinces a high self-consciousness about its literary, religious, and social aims. In chapter 6 I discuss the rationale that Jnandev gives in his text for the innovative use of Marathi rather than Sanskrit as his medium. Contrary to the intentions of the Mahanubhavs, Jnandev takes the language Krishna is said to have spoken, which is Sanskrit, and shifts Krishna’s religious and ethical message into a new linguistic medium, Marathi. Jnandev claims that he uses Marathi for the sake of “women, low castes, and others,” which is the constituency he believes the Bhagavad Gītā also exists to serve. I take this social formulation of “women, low castes, and others” not only to indicate those who did not have access to Sanskrit but also as a phrase that points toward public culture in quotidian life. While it may seem like a description of the “downtrodden” it was in fact a description of the vast majority of the population.³ Jnandev believed that the mission of the Bhagavad Gītā and of Krishna was to address all people, not just high-caste males. Transferring the salvational promise of the Bhagavad Gītā into everyday language furthered the Bhagavad Gītā’s own ethics according to Jnandev. He often imagines his text situated at the “crossroads” of towns and cities, that is, in the public square where the creation of the Jñāneśvarī is the re-creation of the social conditions for public expression itself. In this chapter I observe how the Jñāneśvarī serves as a manifesto for a very particular ethics around society and literature.

In chapter 7 I draw out the contours of this social ethics in the Jñāneśvarī by tracking the relationship between statements about social equality and idioms of social inequality that were endemic to thirteenth-century Marathi. I follow how the Jñāneśvarī rejects social distinction by recourse to “cosmic reality” where all social and physical differences are dissolved. This ethics of transcendence occurs primarily in the first nine chapters of the Jñāneśvarī and tracks a similar argument in the first nine chapters of the Bhagavad Gītā. However, in the latter half of the Jñāneśvarī, Jnandev draws in colloquial Marathi that reveals the quotidian social prejudices of his age, though they are not his own prejudices. The Jñāneśvarī reveals a paradox, for the radical nature of putting this classic Sanskrit text in Marathi for all to access also means importing the language, colloquialisms, idioms, and other registers of social inequity that mark all languages. Vernacularization, located within the field of everyday life, simultaneously presses for greater social equity and reinforces other means of social difference. The Jñāneśvarī both explicitly rejects caste and gender difference in the context of cosmic reality, yet also testifies to distinctions passively through the colloquial use of Marathi. Vernacularization thus reveals a dual function: to expand the scope of social access by valorizing everyday life, yet also to circumscribe such access by rehearsing the deeper habitus of social distinction in the quotidian world. The Jñāneśvarī reveals a sonic equality that existed in a world of deep social inequality.

The structure of these latter two parts of the book creates a mirrored dialectic. Part 2 moves from a discussion of an unequivocal social ethics of egalitarianism among the Mahanubhavs (chapter 4) to an ethical rationale for the use of Marathi and hence for the creation of literary Marathi (chapter 5). Part 3, conversely, begins with a discussion of an unequivocal valorization of a new literary Marathi sphere inaugurated by the Jñāneśvarī (chapter 6), but returns to the question of social ethics to find that a sonic equality precedes social equality in the early world of Marathi literary vernacularization (chapter 7).

The book’s conclusion reflects on the quotidian politics of vernacularization in the centuries that followed the narrow band of decades that consumes the majority of the book. From the fourteenth century onward, Jnandev’s sonic equality was transformed into a vision of social equality. His key hagiographer, the Marathi sant Namdev (1270–1350), is said to have composed sacred biographies in which Jnandev is portrayed in the company of low-caste people and women despite the fact that the Jñāneśvarī does not explicitly state that this social world surrounded Jnandev. This displays the vernacularization of Jnandev’s public memory after his life, and thus the force of the “quotidian revolution” to draw its subjects into the gravity of its conceptualization of the “ordinary.” Conversely, I discuss how the Mahanubhavs receded in the centuries after their founding, precisely because they increasingly rejected the quotidian world to become an ascetical sect, a kind of antivernacularization. The book ends with a reflection on how these ideas, formulated with materials from the thirteenth century, might accompany an analysis of the vernacularization of democracy and of the public sphere in India today.