Rapt in the Name: The Ramnamis, Ramnam, and Untouchable Religion in Central India
... A number of academic studies exist on the oral, performative, and written textual traditions of the Rāmāyan in South Asia (see, for instance, Hess 2006; Lamb 1991 Lamb , 2002 Flueckiger 1996; Flueckiger and Sears 1991; Richman 1991 Richman , 2000 Lutgendorf 1991a Lutgendorf , 1991b). In their emphases on the diversity, hybridity, and fluidity of the " Ram " tradition as a song, story, text, play, film, and so forth, scholars have contributed a rich swath of alternative literary and vernacular Rāmāyaṇas to the dominant (and orthodox) Sanskritic tradition and have expanded scholarly discourse on the Rāmāyan beyond this textual tradition. ...
... In their emphases on the diversity, hybridity, and fluidity of the " Ram " tradition as a song, story, text, play, film, and so forth, scholars have contributed a rich swath of alternative literary and vernacular Rāmāyaṇas to the dominant (and orthodox) Sanskritic tradition and have expanded scholarly discourse on the Rāmāyan beyond this textual tradition. With the exception of Ramdas Lamb's work on the Ramnami movement and by extension the Ramanandi sadhus of central India, many of whom are low-caste, the literature , however, does not conceptualize Rāmāyan performance in any form as a rhetorical strategy with which participants construct identity and religious experience (Lamb 1991Lamb , 1994Lamb , 2002Lamb , 2008). 9 As Lamb shows, through their practices, including textual recitation, Ramanandi sādhus create and participate in the larger (north Indian) tradition he characterizes as " Ram bhakti, " which, like the Rajasthani female sādhus' tradition of devotional asceticism that I discuss below, constitutes a non-orthodox alternative to the dominant, textual, and (mostly) gendered male model of Brahmanical asceticism. ...
... 9 As Lamb shows, through their practices, including textual recitation, Ramanandi sādhus create and participate in the larger (north Indian) tradition he characterizes as " Ram bhakti, " which, like the Rajasthani female sādhus' tradition of devotional asceticism that I discuss below, constitutes a non-orthodox alternative to the dominant, textual, and (mostly) gendered male model of Brahmanical asceticism. 10 Similarly, as with the Rajasthani sādhus, the Ramnamis whose lives and practices Lamb thoughtfully analyzes, performatively equate their oral tradition of rāmnām bhajan (lit., " songs of the divine name of Ram " ), and which is the movement's signal mantra, 9. As Lamb (2002 Lamb ( , 2008) describes, the Ramnamis are a Hindu sectarian movement consisting of both sādhus and householders, who worship the divine in the form of the deity Ram (or as Ram and his wife, Sita). The Ramnami sādhus, more specifically, are also part of the Ramanandi ascetic tradition, which is traced to the medieval, Vaiṣṇava bhakti saint, Ramanand, and which hence represents a Vaiṣṇava tradition of asceticism (a tradition in which Viṣ ̣ ṇu or his many " forms " are worshipped as primary. ...
AbstrAct The performance of the Rāmāyan, a popular, medieval Hindi text composed by the Indian poet/saint Tulsidas, constitutes an impor-tant genre in the "rhetoric of renunciation" for female Hindu ascet-ics (sādhus) in Rajasthan. It is used by them, along with the sing-ing of devotional songs (bhajans) and the telling of religious stories (kahānī), as integral to their daily practice of asceticism. This essay examines the performance and textual strategies by which non-and semi-literate female sādhus create themselves as "scriptural"—how they perform a relationship with the literate textual tradition of the Tulsi Rāmāyan—and thus engender female religious authority in the male-dominated institution of renunciation, in which men are often considered by Indian society as "the" experts in sacred texts. For these female sādhus, Rāmāyan performance functions as a rhe-torical strategy with which they construct their tradition of devo-tional asceticism as a non-orthodox and vernacular alternative to the dominant (and orthodox) Sanskritic textual model of Brahmanical asceticism. The sādhus' identification of Rāmāyan expressive tradi-tions with Tulsidas' written text contributes a new perspective on the concept of scripture, and their textual practices provide an alterna-tive model of scripturality to current analytical models which equate it with individuals' engagement with the written sacred text.
... This article calls attention to the "textual" performances of male sadhus in Rajasthan in order to show how the performance strategies on which they draw enable them to create and establish their "scripturality" in the literate textual tradition of the Rāmāyan. 16 It fills a lacuna in the scholarship on sannyās in South Asia, as this literature represents sadhus' performing of texts as a way to transmit teachings, and does not consider performance as a rhetorical strategy by which sadhus construct a relationship with texts or gendered views of asceticism (Narayan 1989;Lamb 1991;2002;Gross 2001). This article examines Baldevgiri's Rāmāyan "textual" performance as a case study to illuminate the ways in which the male sadhus in my field study rework the idea of the text as bhajan and, in doing so, perform "texts" to craft sannyās in a gendered masculine way as a path of detachment and knowledge. ...
... Vaishnava (dualist) systems of thought in his representation of Rām as the divinity who doubly signifies the human incarnation of the "preserver-god Viṣ ṇ u," and the abstract "brahman of the Upanishads," which lacks any qualities and characteristics (Lutgendorf 1991, 7). For many North Indian Hindus, "the word Rām," Lutgendorf explains, "is the most commonly used nonsectarian designation for the Supreme Being" (Lutgendorf 1991, 4; see also Lamb 2002;Hess 1982). ...
... To that extent, this article emphasises the humanity of sannyās and of the sādhus who have renounced the world by calling attention to their personal narratives and, more precisely, to the ways that sādhus construct sannyās in gendered ways as they tell those life stories. While the excellent work of Meena Khandelwal (2004), Ramdas Lamb (2002), Robert Lewis Gross (2001Gross ( [1992) and Kirin Narayan (1989) has provided a compelling corrective to the mainstream imagination of sannyās as world-denying, this scholarship does not consider the telling of the life story as a means through which sādhus construct sannyās, and through those tellings, gendered worlds. This article analyses the sādhus' telling of their life stories, to use folklorist Elaine Lawless's (1988) words, as a 'narrative strategy' through which they interpret and experience their lives and, in doing so, give voice to the complexity of asceticism as practiced in north India. ...
... Through use of these themes, Baldev Giri consciously deflects the possibility of his own agency accounting for his renunciation (cf. Gross 2001Gross [1992; Lamb 2002). But apart from his soul being inundated with feelings of detachment, how did Baldev Giri know that the life of a mahātmā was written for him? ...
This article describes and analyses the personal narrative performances of male Hindu renouncers (sādhus) in the north Indian state of Rajasthan. Based on 10 years of ethnographic research with sādhus in three districts of Mewar, south Rajasthan, it considers the telling of life stories as a ‘narrative strategy’ through which male sādhus not only interpret and experience their lives, but also give voice to the complexity of asceticism as practiced in north India. To that extent, this article addresses the narrative strategies that male sādhus draw on in the telling of their life stories and the ways in which those rhetorical strategies are gendered. On the basis of the data presented, the article examines sādhus’ emphases on the interrelated themes of action, effort and practice as central to men’s experiences of renunciation. It further analyses male sādhus’ use of illness and healing as complementary narrative motifs with which they construct their renunciant authenticity and challenge common perceptions of sādhus as social vagabonds. SAGE Publications.
... Nor should it be surprising that, more than a 100 years before the BSP, the second Satnami Guru, cast as a conqueror, not only rode on an elephant but also wore a janeu (sacred thread) and affi rmed his authority through colonial writing. This underscores my point about the intermeshing of purity-pollution (janeu), ritual kinship (elephant), and colonial power (imperial writing), now expressed through the challenge to these formations of meaning and power (Dube 1992 Lorenzen 1995;Lamb (2002) and Burghart (1996). See also, Novetzke (2016) and Hess (2015). ...
This essay revisits earlier ethnographic writing and anthropological assumption in the manner of an "archive" -- as well as draws upon recent historical scholarship -- in order to reconsider thorny questions of Dalit "religions". Rather than a bounded and a priori realm of the sacral, an innate and static repository of the metaphysical, I understand religions as entailing experiential and historical meanings and motivations, perception and practices, symbols and rituals. These are intimately bound to formations of power and its negotiations. Defined by such processual-meaningful, substantive-symbolic, and dominant-dissonant attributes, religions lie at the core of social worlds and their transformations, simultaneously shaped by as well as shaping these historical terrains. Alongside, the essay approaches archives as ongoing, unfinished, open-ended procedures; articulates identities as often contradictory and contingent processes-of meaning and power-at the core of modernity; and explores politics as intimating relations of authority and alterity, dispersed yet intimate, which access and exceed governmental commands and conceits. Combining such emphases, I unravel critical attributes of Dalit religions, exploring especially: the nature of power in the caste order when viewed both from Dalit perspectives and from the Dalit position; the historical (political-economic and cultural-discursive) construction of caste under colonial dominance and imperial rule; the terms not only of the Dalits' absolute exclusion from but their unequal inclusion in the social order; Dalit responses to hierarchy and authority, which look further than their endeavors exclusively within institutionalized power relations turning on state and governance; and, finally, the intimate intermeshing of religion and politics, each broadly understood.
... I conducted research mostly with Śaiva sādhus who took initiation into the Daśanāmī and Nāth-Yogī orders, but also with Tyāgi and Sītā Rām Vaiṣṇava sādhus. For a detailed description of the history and development of these two renouncer traditions in India, see the work of Gross (2001) and Bayly (1999) and Burghart (1983a); for detailed information on the Rāmānandīs, see Lamb (2002) and Burghart (1983b). 13 Some of the Brahmanical texts prescribe the practice of adopting a peripatetic way of life, according to which the renouncer moves from place-to-place, staying no more than two weeks in any single location. ...
This article advances a conceptual shift in the ways that scholars think and teach about the established categories of religion, renunciation, and the modern in religious studies, anthropology, and Asian studies through the use of the concept of “experimental Hinduism.” Drawing on an analytical model of “experimental religion” developed by the anthropologist John Nelson, a contributor to this volume, and based on fifteen years of ethnographic fieldwork with Hindu renouncers (sādhus) in North India, the article examines the sādhus’ views, experiences, and practices of the modern technological as an empirical –and underrepresented– context for reconfiguring Hinduism in the 21st century. It shows that they revision the dominant definitional boundaries of Hinduism by theologizing what is called "the forms of the modern," like communication technologies, in the context of their public teaching events (dharm-kathās). Thus, this article calls attention to the creative—and experimental—thinking taking place in vernacular asceticism (sannyās) among sādhus from different renunciant traditions, and who want to make sense of the vast technological changes shaping their lives and those of the communities whom they serve. The theologizing of technology is seen in their drawing on a synthesis of Hindu ideological frameworks through which the sādhus emphasize by means of storytelling three narrative motifs that articulate the divinity of technology. These are: Sannyās represents the “original technology" and the "original science”; technology manifests the properties of creativity and change that characterize what the sādhus associate with “the nature of Brahman” and “the rule of dharm”; and, finally, the apocalyptic Kalki avatār concept offers a redemptive metaphor for the evolving human-technology interface in the current global milieu.
... Stein (2004) describes the failed attempts of Çr vai‚~avas in allowing 'untouchables' into their temples in medieval times. Perhaps the closest thing we have to a success story in bhakti-related social reform and rejection of caste is the Råmnåm s of central India, who are discussed in detail in Lamb (2002). ...
Bhakti has often been praised as a form of religion based on loving devotion that transcends social class, caste, and gender. Since at least the early twentieth century, the history of bhakti has generally been told in terms of “the bhakti movement,” a single coherent “wave” of devotional sentiment and egalitarian social reform that spread across the entire Indian subcontinent. According to the commonly accepted narrative, this “movement” began in the Tamil South between the sixth and ninth centuries CE with the Çaiva Nåya~års and Vai‚~ava Ŭvårs. These poet-saints, according to one scholarly rendition of the trope, “produced a transformatory avalanche in terms of devotion and social reform that is now known as the Bhakti Movement” (Nandakumar 2003: 794; emphasis added). The concept of a single, coherent and socially progressive “bhakti movement” grew in large part out of the context of early twentieth century Indian nationalist agendas which sought to create a sense of national identity by propagating the notion of a shared pan-Indian bhakti religious heritage. Early and mid-twentieth century North Indian nationalist scholars such as Ramcandra Sukla and Hazariprasad Dvivedi sought to construct a nationalist history of India through the medium of bhakti and thus spoke of a pan-Indian bhakti “movement,” or åndolan (in Hindi), sweeping across and uniting the subcontinent in shared values of love, progress, and social egalitarianism that reached deep into the past.
Merchants of Virtue explores the question of what it meant to be Hindu in precolonial South Asia. Divya Cherian presents a fine-grained study of everyday life and local politics in the kingdom of Marwar in eighteenth-century western India to uncover how merchants enforced their caste ideals of vegetarianism and bodily austerity as universal markers of Hindu identity. Using legal strategies and alliances with elites, these merchants successfully remade the category of “Hindu,” setting it in contrast to “Untouchable” in a process that reconfigured Hinduism in caste terms. In a history pertinent to understanding India today, Cherian establishes the centrality of caste to the early-modern Hindu self and to its imagination of inadmissible others.
A reckoning with the question of Dalit religion is overdue. The religious worlds of that swath of the population of South Asia subject to the structural violence of “untouchability” have long been misapprehended—a consequence, in large part, of classificatory practices of the colonial and postcolonial state—as a kind of unlettered adjunct to Hinduism. This article assembles scholarly findings of recent years to foreground how Dalits themselves have constructed religious community across time and space. Dalit religion, we argue, is better understood not as a variant of Hinduism but as a critical provocation to all religion in South Asia, as well as a congeries of autonomous regional traditions that, too long obfuscated under colonial and brahminical taxonomies of religion, call out for study on their own terms.
Across time and place, the idea of prasāda, translated provisionally here as 'grace,' connects a vast range of intangible and material things that, in Hindu terms, are deemed to be beneficent, superabundant, and endowed with blessing. In this chapter, I explore one of the most significant subsets of prasāda, ‘grace as sustenance’, in Hindu food systems, paradigmatically understood as blessed, sacred food. I begin by introducing the contexts that give prasāda its meaning, the rules that govern its creation, times when food may be considered prasāda, and times when it is not. In exchanges between people, saints, and gods, prasāda as sustenance is a charismatic medium found at the centre of Hindu doctrines and customary practices worldwide. Within ritual structures and Hindu social conventions, recognition (or rejection) of prasāda is an important mode of self‐expression that can declare social distance and, conversely, affirm and renew one's self in relation to others.
In his now classic novel Untouchable, Mulk Raj Anand portrays the life of a sweeper named Bakha. Bakha works cleaning latrines at the Cantonment, imitates the British "tommies" in his attire, and negotiates the differing spaces in which is Untouchability is defined. After an incident during which Bakha inadvertently touches a caste Hindu in the street, Bakha wanders through town. During his wanderings, he first meets a Christian missionary who speaks almost incomprehensibly about Jesus. Bakha then listens to a speech by Mahatma Gandhi and while he finds the Mahatma's vision compelling, his mind turns to reflecting upon how flush toilets might be the real answer to his plight. As Anand portrays him, Bakha the sweeper is neither Hindu nor can he somehow become a Christian, for as an Untouchable he remains trapped in a wholly other spacial domain.
Grace Jantzen's exploration of the genealogy of Western mysticism illuminates the ways in which relations of power and gender have shaped the production of discourse about ‘mysticism.’ Jantzen's work evokes questions of how mysticism is constructed in the Hindu traditions and how gender and power interface in its production. If there is any term that functions like mysticism it is nirgu&ndotu;ī bhakti for female sādhus in Rajasthan. There are several features that make these terms analogous and invite comparison: a focus on divine visions, love, divine union, and liberation. The case of the female sādhus, however, also challenges Jantzen's thesis about the relationship between gender and power in Christian-based genealogies of mysticism. The female sādhus' constructions of nirgu&ndotu;ī bhakti through their everyday renunciant practices suggest that power may also be gendered female. Through analysis of their performances of devotional songs and personal narratives, this article demonstrates how Rajasthani female sādhus exert agency in the construction of nirgu&ndotu;ī bhakti as a category of religious experience that carries authority in the male-dominated traditions of Hindu renunciation. Moreover, it suggests a model for theorising about gendered agency and power in traditions of Christian mysticism.
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