Monastic Wanderers: Nath Yogi Ascetics in Modern South Asia.
White, David Gordon
Monastic Wanderers: Nath Yogi Ascetics in Modern South Asia.
Monastic Wanderers: Nath Yogi Ascetics in Modern South Asia. By
VERONIQUE BOUILLIER. New Delhi: MANOHAR, 2017; London: ROUTLEDGE, 2018.
Pp. 351. Rs. 1395, [pounds sterling]105.00; eBook [pounds sterling]35.99
For the past eighty years, the sole comprehensive overview of the
religious order variously known as the Nath Yogis, the Nath Siddhas, the
Kanphata Yogis, or simply the Naths or the Yogis has been George Weston
Briggs's Gorakhnath and the Kanphata Yogis (original ed. 1938). A
trove of data on the Naths, Briggs's monograph was a work of
colonial ethnography, written in the style of the imperial gazetteers or
the "Tribes and Castes of India" series, and containing
chapters with titles like "Religion and Superstition." For the
past thirty years, Veronique Bouillier has been quietly assembling a
body of scholarship that has reprised, updated, and in many respects
supplanted Briggs's pioneering work. Trained in the tradition of
historical anthropology in which the French so excel, Bouillier's
earliest focus was on the centuries-long relationships the Naths have
maintained with royal power in Nepal. A series of seminal articles and
chapters on their relationships to the royal houses of Gorkha and Dang
culminated in a 1997 monograph, Ascites et rois: Un monastere des
Kanphata Yogis au Nepal (Paris: CNRS Editions). Following this,
Bouillier shifted her focus to India, where a decade of fieldwork and
archival research in Rajasthan, Karnataka, Haryana, the Punjab,
Uttarakhand, and Uttar Pradesh issued in hindrance et vie monastique:
Les ascites Nath Yogis en Inde contemporaine (Paris: Editions de la
FMSH, 2008). Hers has been a participatory anthropology: she has taken
part in Nath processions and interacted closely with the Naths in their
monastic and householder settings, with the upadesi initiation she
received in Nepal giving her inside knowledge of a tantric rite directed
to the goddess Yogmaya-Balasundari (pp. 44-45). Because very few of her
writings to date have appeared in English, Bouillier's scholarship
has been poorly known in the Anglophone world. The present work, a
mature reflection on a tradition whose transformations she has observed
and documented firsthand for over three decades, is a welcome remedy to
that situation.
The book is well structured and its arguments clearly presented,
albeit in a somewhat idiomatic form of English expression. Working from
Dumont's concept of "monastic community" as "an
essential mediating term between the solitary ascetic individual and
society" (p. 81), Bouillier suggests that "the Nath Yogis
offer a perfect example of this double movement, this fundamental
relationship between a tradition that emphasizes a personal approach to
asceticism and spiritual quest, and a collective organization anchored
to the monasteries which allows the sect to survive and adapt to the
multiple social-historical changes they face" (p. 83). This tension
plays itself out on a number of levels. Renouncers with no individual
possessions, Naths have often found themselves in the roles of landlords
and feudal rulers (p. 203); and whereas celibacy is a requirement for
being a Yogi, communities of married house-holders (grhastha), many
claiming a Yogi identity "and even using Yogi or the vernacular
form Jogi as a caste name" (p. 299), are found across north India
and Nepal.
An overview of Nath identity, part one surveys the terminology by
which the order defines itself, the mytho-history of its founding gurus,
its textual corpus, hatha yoga legacy, worship traditions, and formal
organization. While their founding guru Gorakhnath is universally
worshiped in Nath monasteries, both anthropomorphically and in the
abstract form of the mysterious amrtapdtra or patradevata (pp. 30-31,
132-33), the ubiquitous presence of Bhairava and various forms of the
goddess, as well as the mythology of Gorakhnath's lascivious guru
Matsyendranath, all attest to the order's tantric roots. After
surveying Nath ritual, including the distinctive--but perhaps not
particularly ancient (p. 43)--initiation rite of ear splitting,
Bouillier turns to matters of organization. Traditionally divided into
twelve orders (panths), the Nath organization (sampradaya) has, since
1906, been supervised by the Yogi Mahasabha ("Great Yogi
Assembly"), which "has been constantly increasing [in power],
up to the present day when it successfully manages the entire sect"
(p. 58). Boullier's insightful overview of the Mahasabha's
statutes, nomenclature, and organizational structure is followed by an
important observation on those Nath establishments that the Mahasabha
does not control. These are the niji maths ("personal
monasteries"), which, identified with their charismatic founders
and supported by local or regional patrons, are for the most part
self-managed (pp. 65-66). However, visitors to these monasteries will
often find them empty (p. 123), for, as the book's title indicates,
monasteries and the monastic life are but one aspect of Nath
self-identity, an aspect generally subordinated to the venerable
tradition of wandering asceticism. In the case of the Naths, the jamdt,
a "constituted group of itinerant ascetics," is organized and
formal, consisting of a core of about a hundred Yogis who continuously
travel together under the direction of two leaders (mahants) (pp.
73-78). Bouillier's detailed account of jamdt organization,
itineraries, and traditions is most revealing, reflecting a marriage of
the old (the portable dhunl fireplace, industrial consumption of
cannabis, the wild playing of drums, horns, and whistles) and the new
(walking has been replaced by travel in jeeps, trucks, and land
cruisers) (pp. 74-76).
In part two, on the order's "collective" (pancdyatl)
monasteries, we find ourselves on Bouillier's "home
turf," at Kadri in the coastal town of Mangalore (Karnataka) and
Caughera in the Dang Valley of Nepal. In these, the richest and most
compelling chapters in the monograph, she draws upon local mahatmya
literature, regional and trans-national purdna-itihdsa, iconographical
and epigraphical data, land grant documents, traveler's accounts,
and colonial and post-colonial ethnography to present an extensive
overview of the history of the Kadri monastery and the adjoining
Manjunath temple, which passed through Buddhist and Saiva (including
Nath) hands, before falling under the control of its present Vaisnava
Madhava Brahman custodians.
A recurring theme throughout the book, the deep historical links
between the Naths and royal power is reflected in the order's
relationship to the goddess as the divine embodiment of royal
sovereignty; the symbolic importance of the gaddi, the Nath mahants (1)
cushion cum throne; the hagiographies of its founders as renouncer
princes and royal power-brokers; and, most significantly, the
order's rituals of "royal consecration." This is
highlighted at Kadri, which, in spite of its geographical isolation from
the Naths' north Indian and Nepalese power bases, retains an
outsized importance for the order, which, as Bouillier surmises, is
grounded in a not so distant past history, when Kadri was
"ruled" by a yogi-raja. The glories of that past, recaptured
once every twelve years at the time of the Nasik kumbh meld in "the
pilgrimage and coronation of the raja ... enact a symbolic process of
the territorial reconquest of their lost supremacy" (p. 116). A
mobile gathering (jhundl) of over two thousand Yogis subject to a
rigorous itinerary and massive logistical challenges, and punctuated by
remarkably democratic election of the new Kadri raja and an elaborate
installation and coronation ceremony, this six-month-long pilgrimage
encapsulates the Nath Mahasabha's strategy for the modernization of
tradition. In a most intriguing albeit questionable aside, Bouillier
likens this ritual process to what Jan Heesterman termed the
"pre-classical" situation of Vedic royal consecration, which
was broken into two parts by a "symbolic war expedition" (pp.
140, 162).
In counterpoint to the Kadri monastery's elevation of its
mahant to royal status, Nepal's Caughera monastery exemplifies
another leitmotif of Nath mytho-history. the elevation by a Nath Yogi of
an untested prince to the royal throne, and the subsequent royal land
grants that founded and have since maintained the math. Bouillier's
detailed account of the monastery's history, organization, and
daily ritual program is colored throughout by its legendary
founder's dual identity. Ratannath, also identified as Ratan Pir,
Hajjl Ratan--and, most recently, as Kanipa--is a figure who embodies the
Naths' intertwined identities as Siddhas and Sufis, Hindus and
Muslims. Here, as Bouillier notes, the Sufi title of pir, attributed to
the monastic heads of every pahcayati monastery, is considered by the
Caughera Yogis to be specific to their place (p. 192). Nath ties to Sufi
Islam are also evidenced in the dargahstyle appearance of the samadhi
mandir of Amritnath, the Fatehpur monastery's founding guru (pp.
252-53), and the celebration of the death anniversaries (comparable to
the Muslim 'urs) of a number of monastic founders.
The book's part three, devoted to personal monasteries (niji
maths), is the least compelling portion of the book, comprising an
overview of what Bouillier typologizes as "charismatic"
(Fatehpur) and "political" (Gorakhpur) monasteries, with the
Asthal Bohar monastery standing as a synthesis of the two types. The
great bulk of these chapters being devoted to the foundation, history,
and current patronage and management styles of Fatehpur and Asthal
Bohar, the reader is left to wonder why the Gorakhpur monastery--whose
current mahant, Yogi Adityanath, is also the highly controversial
right-wing Chief Minister of the state of Uttar Pradesh--receives such
scant attention. A more serious shortcoming of this otherwise
wonderfully rich and insightful book lies in Boullier's seemingly
interchangeable references to the Naths as a "religious order"
and a "sect." This reader would have appreciated more clarity
on her understanding and usage of these terms.
DAVID GORDON WHITE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA BARBARA
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