Ascetic Games

by Dhirendra K Jha

  In the early 1980s, Balasaheb Deoras, Golwalkar’s successor, gave the VHP a fresh impetus by providing it with 150 dharma pracharaks from the stock of RSS workers.3 In addition, the VHP began training its own dharma pracharaks, about 100 of whom were initiated as sadhus by Shaiva akharas of Haridwar in July 1982.4 These new operatives worked at the district, divisional and state levels, where they sought to bring together religious leaders to form regional margdarshak mandals.5

  The VHP’s prospects started looking up after 1984, when it was virtually relaunched with the Ram Janmabhoomi issue as its prime objective. Over the next few years, it mobilised the support of Hindus and Hindu religious groups through a series of mass ritual actions, use of religious imageries and conclaves of Hindu religious leaders. Without the VHP laying the ground in this manner, it is questionable whether the BJP could have survived politically after winning just two seats in the Lok Sabha elections of 1984.

  Researchers are unanimous that BJP leader L.K. Advani’s rath yatra in 1990—considered the party’s turning point—would not have been so successful had the VHP, along with its network of Hindu monastic orders, not worked with ever-increasing vigour to transform the saffron party into a major political force in the country. Professor Richard H. Davis, a noted Indologist, captures the VHP’s role in the BJP’s rath yatra quite vividly in his incisive essay, ‘The Iconography of Rama’s Chariot’:

  Yet the procession was planned jointly, with the VHP leadership setting the stage and offering strategic advice behind the scenes. What is most interesting from an iconographical point of view is the way in which this double agency engineered a two level message throughout the event. ‘Hard-core’ and ‘soft-core’ imagery occurred side by side.

  The hard-core imagery, for which the VHP and related groups were primarily responsible, was religious, allusive, militant, masculine, and anti-Muslim. Making much use of Rama as paradigm, it played out themes inherent in the primary terms of mobilisation. The BJP and Advani placed themselves often in the position of trying to reframe this imagery or put a softer spin on it. … The BJP … was able to disavow the more militant imagery as originating from the VHP and so attempt to maintain its electoral respectability, while at the same time profiting from the undoubted power and commitment that militant imagery evoked for some.6

  This pretence of separation between the BJP and VHP has continued rather openly ever since. A series of events, which were primarily political in nature and carried out jointly by the two affiliates of the RSS, culminated in the demolition of the Babri masjid on 6 December 1992. It shook the nation, but also set the ground for the BJP’s gradual political growth at the Centre.

  III

  The VHP’s strategy was formulated to allow sadhus to lend their support to RSS’s political project without being held back by moral concerns. The VHP picked up issues and movements that contained and projected multiple meanings rather than a single message. The sadhus were able to use explicitly Hindu rituals and symbols in the routine affairs of electoral politics claiming that it was merely a celebration of their religious symbols in the public sphere, that they were only propagating Hindu culture. Gods and goddesses revered by large numbers of people and whose characteristics best lent themselves to Hindu supremacist ideology—such as Ram and Durga—became the VHP’s chosen deities. Ram, the perfect Hindu king, is pre-eminent among them, and many sadhus were attracted to the idea of treating Ayodhya as the epicentre of not only Hindutva politics but also their own religious quest.

  ‘Ram-rajya’ has been long used by Hindutva ideologues to signify an ideal of good governance. While for Hindu supremacists this ideal generally means that India should be a Hindu state instead of a secular republic as established by the Constitution, for the sadhus it signifies the restoration of a socio-cosmic order predicated on kingship and sanctioned by Hindu mythology. The demolition of Babri masjid built by Muslim emperor Babur not only represented a triumph of political Hinduism but also—as most sadhus believe—the culmination of a long battle for supremacy between Hinduism and Islam in India.

  Part of the reason why the VHP so easily stormed these Hindu monastic orders was their own distorted understanding of their past; the sadhus I interacted with, especially those attached directly to akharas, believed that there was once a golden age when their fighting skills drove politics in India, and were unhappy that those contributions were not part of the nation’s consciousness. This perception further encouraged their overt participation in politics. In fact, every new entrant in the akharas gets indoctrinated with this revivalist message early on. This desire received an unusual push with the VHP’s entry on the scene and its promise of an elevated status for Hindu religious leaders and monastic orders in the ‘new India’.

  However, the sadhus’ armed ancestors were motivated by other ambitions, unlike what their descendants believe. Early records of militant nagas show that, during the medieval period, they behaved like any other group of professional fighters—driven by money rather than any grand political agenda. They frequently took up assignments as mercenaries and worked like small-scale guerrilla armies during the seventeenth, eighteenth and even early nineteenth centuries. Their organisational structure was based on bonds of loyalty that tied chelas to their gurus. The gradations of discipleship evolved seamlessly into a military hierarchy of soldiers, field officers and commanders, and enabled smaller armed groups to grow into larger and institutionally complex naga regiments.

  These armed bands of ascetics were valued in the military economy of northern India during the chaotic period between the collapse of the Mughal empire and the advent of the British rule. Sir Jadunath Sarkar records the number of naga bands of Shaiva and Vaishnava sadhus who fought in numerous battles for the rajas of Rajputana, Gujarat and other regions—both defensive and aggressive—and in turn were rewarded with grants of land and annual allowances.7 During all of eighteenth century, they were employed in service to the maharajas of Udaipur, Jaipur, Jaisalmer, Jodhpur, Bikaner, Baroda, Marwar, Bhuj and many other kingdoms, and in many instances were part of a regularly paid standing army.

  As the need for the warrior ascetics’ military skills increased, a handful of the nagas developed political ambitions. Sarkar records such political exploits of three famous eighteenth-century Dasanami nagas—Rajendra Giri Gosain and the brothers Anup Giri Gosain and Umrao Giri Gosain, who were both Rajendra Giri’s chelas.8 Sarkar’s work reveals the extent of these naga warlords’ power, wealth, influence and duplicity. At the height of their careers, the brothers commanded a force of up to 40,000 horse and foot soldiers. Between 1751 and 1753, Rajendra Giri remained ‘the moving spirit’ behind all the military enterprises of Safdar Jang, the wazir of Mughal emperor Ahmad Shah and ruler of the Mughal province of Awadh. After Rajendra Giri’s death in 1753, his disciples Anup Giri and Umrao Giri continued to render service to Safdar Jang and then his successor, Shuja-ud-Daulah. They proved their loyalty to their Mughal patron against the Hindu raja of Banaras, Balwant Singh. When Shuja-ud-Daulah joined forces with Afghans, the nagas also fought against the Marathas. Sarkar describes how, before the Battle of Panipat in 1761, an assembly of Afghans were ‘most upset’ at the sight of the naked army of Shuja-ud-Daulah, ‘with their things and buttocks exposed’.9

  The naga force of Anup Giri and Umrao Giri was part of a combined army, which also included Mughals, Pathans, Ruhelas, Rajputs and others, who together fought the British in battles at Patna and Buxar in 1764. However, the British with their superior firepower repelled the attackers.10 During 1764–65, the brothers continued their mercenary activities under other patrons, including the Jat ruler Jawahir Singh. In 1767, the two nagas served under the Maratha ruler, Raghunath Rao, and, during their patron’s absence in Deccan, they plundered Bundelkhand.11 Between 1767 and 1775, they were re-employed by Shuja-ud-Daulah. For the next fifteen years, they served a series of regimes in Delhi, interspersed by periods of sanctioned plunder.12

  Between 1789 and 1802, the Mar
atha, Ali Bahadur, was the patron of Anup Giri and Umrao Giri, who helped him conquer Bundelkhand, in return for which the nagas were awarded 1,300,000 rupees.13 Later, Anup Giri, who had been honoured with the title of Himmat Bahadur by Shuja-ud-Daulah, aided the British in the suppression of the Maratha chief Shamsher Bahadur II, son and successor of Ali Bahadur, and ended his long career as the de facto ruler of a large part of Bundelkhand.

  Around the time Anup Giri and Umrao Giri were running amok in the vast swathes of northern India, other armed sanyasis—sometimes in their own bands and at other times in league with Muslim fakirs and the impoverished peasantry of Bengal—locked horns with the region’s new master, the East India Company. The raids the sanyasis carried out—after the Company’s formal acquisition of diwani rights to collect revenue over Bengal in 1765—have been described as everything from a precocious guerrilla war for India’s independence to a haphazard outbreak of banditry.14 Company records contain numerous reports of incursions by these ‘marauding’ and frequently armed groups.15 The British version of events, wherein the ash-clad, bhang-drinking sanyasis and fakirs are presented as marauder-bandits, has been challenged by many historians, who assert that the disturbances of the period was part of a larger movement of peasant unrest and rebellion against colonial repression and excessive taxation, which sometimes caused starvation, and that the sanyasis and fakirs frequently spearheaded these movements.16

  David N. Lorenzen also writes on the series of events referred to as the Sanyasi Rebellion, describing the Dasanami nagas’ involvement in the struggle for succession to the throne of Cooch Behar in northeastern Bengal. In this dispute, which flared up periodically between 1765 and 1790, the sanyasis were usually on one side and the English on the other.17

  The Company’s forces, under orders from Warren Hastings, made strenuous efforts to suppress sanyasis and fakirs and stop them from entering Bengal. In 1773, a law was passed to prohibit the sanyasis and fakirs from carrying arms, and from entering and traversing the province of Bengal.18 No less than four battalions of the Company’s army were actively engaged against the sanyasis and fakirs.19 It was only by 1800 that the rebellion, which had continued for thirty-five years, was finally suppressed.20

  By the beginning of the nineteenth century, armed ascetic activity started declining fast. The few militant nagas who remained in eastern India in 1809–10 were reported to have abandoned arms.21 The heirs of Anup Giri and Umrao Giri and other armed bands of sanyasis and vairagis in central and western parts of northern India were taking their last breaths. British rule meant that there was less and less scope for warrior ascetics to operate as they used to. Opportunities in the armies of princely states also declined due to strained finances and because they often had British representatives posted in their court. Eventually, the akharas of warrior ascetics deteriorated and lost all except ceremonial functions, the centralised state established by the British having neither the need nor the desire for their services.

  The akharas were quick to read the writing on the wall. Out of ideas and beaten by the superior British forces, in a matter of just years rather than decades, the armed naga bands mutated completely. They adapted to the changing political environment and economic pattern in northern India and diversified, in no time, into urban-property ownership and money lending, post 1802.22 It has been estimated that around 250,000 acres of land is owned by Dasanami akharas, and that the entire Girnar hills area in Gujarat was under the control of the nagas of Juna akhara for a while.23 Even today, almost half of Ayodhya and Haridwar is owned by Vaishnava and Shaiva akharas, respectively. Acquisition of property at such a large scale changed everything for the nagas—their world view, their eagerness to participate in politics, their very way of life. Armed battles were replaced by the urgent need to manage akhara properties and to keep alive the symbols of their mercenary past to be showcased during Kumbh Melas.

  IV

  As generations passed, the history of the nagas underwent a metamorphosis and gave birth to a firmly embedded myth. This myth-history goes that the nagas took up arms to protect the Hindu religion and that they were the last line of defence against foreign invaders, both Muslim and British. The truth, however, is that the armed ancestors of present-day sadhus were mercenaries who served transient masters of any shade of faith.

  In 1925, incidentally the same year the RSS was founded, this myth was recorded as history. J.N. Farquhar, the Scottish missionary and scholar who is credited with the first scholarly attempt to study the warrior ascetics in India, authored two articles that year.24 These articles—‘The Fighting Ascetics of India’ and ‘The Organisation of the Sannyasis of the Vedanta’—still have innumerable takers, not only in the world of akharas but also among a significant part of the general intelligentsia. The communalist explanation of Hindu warrior asceticism he inaugurated through these articles, though it was based on the contemporary belief of nagas and monastic establishments, ended up further strengthening Hindu monasticism’s distorted perception of its past. In ‘The Organisation of the Sannyasis of the Vedanta’, he writes:

  In the sixteenth century there were in North India thousands of Muslim faqirs who went about armed, took part in the wars of the time, and, when there was no regular war, fought for their own hand. One of their practices, as good Muslims, was to attack and kill sannyasis as representatives of Hinduism. As ascetics, these faqirs held a privileged position, and were thus protected from mob violence and also from interference on the part of the government, which was then Muhammadan. Thus, when sannyasis were killed, no one was punished, while sannyasis themselves were prevented from taking violent measures against their enemies by their vow of ahimsa.

  Madhusudana Sarasvati, a well known sannyasi scholar of the Sarasvati sub-order [of Dasanamis], who lived in Benares in the middle of the century, at last went to Akbar to see whether anything could be done for the protection of the ancient order to which he belonged. Raja Birbal was present at the interview and suggested the way out of the difficulty. He advised Madhusudan to initiate large numbers of non-Brahmans into the sannyasi order and arm them for the protection of Brahman sannyasis. The Emperor agreed that armed sannyasis should be protected by their sacred character from government interference. Madhusudan, therefore, went and initiated large numbers of Kshatriyas and Vaishyas into seven of the [ten Dasanami] sub-orders.25

  In the same article, Farquhar conceded that his theory on the origin of Dasanami akharas was based on a legend he had recorded from oral reports obtained at a monastery of the Saraswati order in Banaras and at another monastery of the Giri order near Allahabad.26 In another article (‘The Fighting Ascetics of India’), he also admitted that he had not found any mention of a meeting between Madhusudan Sarasvati and the Mughal emperor in any of the written records of Akbar’s reign, and yet he believed that ‘there can be no doubt about its truth’ since all the ascetics in north India ‘hold the tradition’ and because ‘we may also be certain that the Emperor who had given the Hindu an equal place with the Muslim in his empire would at once recognise the justice of Madhusudan’s appeal and would respond to it’.27

  Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Farquhar’s explanation is not that he shaped a popular myth into history, but that the story he fished out from the legend conflicts directly with another version of Akbar’s encounter with the sanyasis, where the emperor was asked to intervene in a clash between two groups of nagas, rather than between nagas and fakirs.

  The record of this clash—by all means, the earliest documented armed clash between two groups of armed nagas—can be found in Nizamuddin Ahmad’s Tabaqat-i-Akbari and Abul Fazl’s Akbarnama, and it occurred around the same time Madhusudhan Sarasvati is said to have met Akbar. While Ahmad calls the two groups of warring ascetics ‘Sanyasis’ and ‘Yogis’, Fazl refers to them as ‘Gurs’ and ‘Puris’. These latter two names have been identified as Giris and Puris, two of the ten lineages of the Dasanamis.28 Each side was claiming for itself a choice location for
the collection of silver and gold coins being distributed by wealthy pilgrims who had gathered for a bath in one of the sacred tanks in the wake of an eclipse. Of the two, ‘Sanyasis’ were less than half the size of the ‘Yogis’. Before the clash, the issue reached Akbar, who first tried to reason with the disputants, but when they seemed adamant, he granted them permission to settle the dispute through combat.29 This record also suggests that militant Hindu orders were already in existence during the reign of the Mughal emperor. And if it was so, Farquhar’s claim that the idea of an armed akhara was born around the middle of the sixteenth century when Madhusudan Sarasvati met with Akbar and Birbal cannot—and should not—be taken seriously.

  Vaishnava legends too maintain that their military organisation was in response to the aggressive activities of Shaiva nagas. Similarly, most historical references related to Vaishnava akharas mention clashes with Shaiva ascetics rather than with Muslims. The disputes were frequently ‘over the policing of the great religious fairs, and the collection of pilgrim dues’.30

  V

  Yet, the myth persisted and could not be cut away by the truth. It gave nagas an unshakeable belief in their destiny to guide the future of politics in India. This myth also made it easier for a section of Hindu monasticism to falsely claim that its interests were synonymous with the interests of all Hindus. Most of the monastic orders, obsessed with what they saw as their duty to the Hindu religion, did not realise that their role in politicising Hinduism would only benefit the politics of Hindutva, and also cause immense disruptions in their own world.

  While the change brought about by this new relationship between sadhus and the Hindu Right was reflected in the rise of the BJP’s strength in the Lok Sabha from two seats in 1984 to 282 seats in 2014, the impact it had on the sadhus and their akharas has remained unexplored. Whatever knowledge exists is anecdotal at best.