iii Unforgetting Chaitanya Vaishnavism and Cultures of Devotion in Colonial Bengal z VARUNI BHATIA 1 iv 1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bhatia, Varuni, 1975– author. Title: Unforgetting Chaitanya : Vaishnavism and cultures of devotion in colonial Bengal / Varuni Bhatia. Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identiiers: LCCN 2016055374 (print) | LCCN 2017025295 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190686253 (updf) | ISBN 9780190686260 (epub) | ISBN 9780190686277 (online content) | ISBN 9780190686246 (cloth) Subjects: LCSH: Vaishnavism—India—West Bengal—History. | Vaishnavism—India—Bengal—History. | Chaitanya, 1486–1534. Classiication: LCC BL1285.332.B43 (ebook) | LCC BL1285.332.B43 B43 2017 (print) | DDC 294.5/512095414—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016055374 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America v Contents Acknowledgments vii Note on Transliteration, Spelling, and Diacritics xi Introduction 1 1. A Religion in Decline in an Age of Progress 21 2. Untidy Realms 53 3. A Swadeshi Chaitanya 90 4. Recovering Bishnupriya’s Loss 124 5. Utopia and a Birthplace 161 Epilogue 200 Notes 207 Glossary 253 Bibliography 259 Index 281 1 Introduction Unforgetting Loss, Recovery, and the Politics of Selfhood On September 16, 2013, the Ananda Bazar Patrika—a leading Bengali daily published from Calcutta—carried a provocatively titled piece in its op-ed pages. The piece was called “Shri Chaitanya: Our Fathomless SelfForgetting,”1 and it attempted to draw its readers into the realization that they—the Bengali people, as it were—had been complicit in a collective performance of amnesia. Otherwise, the sixteenth-century mystic Shri Chaitanya could not have been condemned to such a degree of apathy and disinterest as he has been in contemporary times. The author of the piece—a scholar of Vaishnavism and the Hindu Puranas, and a public intellectual—Nrisingha Prasad Bhaduri, urged his readership to engage anew with Chaitanya and Bengali Vaishnavism. This would, he claimed, help them recognize the epochal role played by Chaitanya as a “cultural mediator,” for it was none other than Chaitanya who forged the very essence of Bengali cultural life—the “middle way” that lay in between the scholasticism of Vedanta and folk traditions of the Bengali mangalkabyas.2 According to Bhaduri, the impending inauguration of a museum dedicated to Chaitanya under the aegis of the Gaudiya Math—the immediate context that occasioned the article—provided Bengalis with a unique opportunity to fulill the urgent task of rediscovering Chaitanya as a key historical and iconic igure from Bengal. He wagered that this would surely lead Bengalis to discover their own authentic selves. Bhaduri’s wager is, however, not a new one. It is a twenty-irst-century re-articulation of a late nineteenth-century anxiety and inspiration. 2 2 unforgeTTing chaiTanya For instance, more than a hundred years prior, in 1898, the founders of a Bengali Vaishnava journal, Shri Bishnupriya Patrika, had also issued a similar call to excavate Chaitanya and Bengali Vaishnavism from beneath the layers of amnesia that had fallen over them. The program initiated by this journal consisted of discovering, publishing, publicizing, protecting, and spreading the life and teachings of Chaitanya and his primary associates and disciples. What spurred the editors and readers of the journal, all devoted Vaishnavas, to engage in such a project? And how were their eforts related to other kinds of recoveries taking place at the same time, in other contexts? This book shows that these endeavors were born out of anxieties relating to the “disappearance” of Vaishnava traditions from genteel Bengali consciousness. They were spurred by the necessity, perceived by these very genteel Bengalis, of weeding out “deviant” forms of Vaishnavism in the region. The call of recovery made by this journal was but one of the many diferent platforms whereby educated, upper-caste Hindu Bengalis—a “class” collectively known by the term bhadralok— evinced a sudden increase in interest in Vaishnavism, particularly of the kind associated with Chaitanya, in the period just before and after the Swadeshi Movement in Bengal (1903–1908). And their interest was, almost habitually, articulated through expressions of loss and the urgency of unforgetting. Hence, this is a book about unforgetting Chaitanya and recovering Vaishnavism in colonial Bengal. It deals with the cultural memory of Chaitanya—and through him, of the Bengali Vaishnava devotional complex—and its uses, particularly in the context of British colonialism and the beginnings of anticolonial nationalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Bengal, Chaitanya enjoyed a remarkable and widespread popularity in the centuries after his death in 1533, particularly as a deity who was worshipped as well as a guru. And yet, the educated Hindu Bengalis of the late nineteenth century—the bhadralok—were unable to stop bemoaning the loss and disappearance, the dissipation and corruption, and the near destruction of Vaishnava traditions in a variety of written and printed documents. I see these writings and their authors as participating in collective anamnesis—simultaneously upbraiding their own community for forgetting its constitutive selves as inscribed in and through the devotional complex around Bengali Vaishnavism, and making a call for self-regeneration in and through urgent programs put in place for recovery. In the constant repetition of the aliction of forgetting and its gloomy aftermath, the purveyors of Vaishnava recovery engage in a process 3 Introduction 3 of what I call unforgetting. I use this term to refer to the range of programs that our authors and actors initiated to counter the fateful lapses of collective memory with regard to Vaishnavism, to reverse its forgetting—“[that] disturbing threat [which] lurks in the background of the phenomenology of memory and the epistemology of history,” in the words of Paul Ricouer.3 My conceptualization of the (late nineteenth-century cultural and historical) memory of Chaitanya and Bengali Vaishnavism in the terms of unforgetting or anamnesis allows me to foreground the question of epistemological, civilizational, even personal crisis that colonialism variously posed for many of the authors whom I discuss in this book.4 Simultaneously, unforgetting helps us to meaningfully engage with the soteriology of loss in the form of viraha (love in separation) that lies at the heart of Gaudiya Vaishnava doctrine and theology. Viraha animates Bengali Vaishnava aesthetics and, through it, a vast range of Vaishnava praxis and subjectivities.5 Hence, it is neither surprising nor novel that in the context of this particular devotional complex, loss would emerge as the primary trope to represent its present condition—admittedly dismal from some perspectives, but full of possibilities from many others. An enactment of viraha involves a constant participation in smarana, or remembering. The ideal virahini (embodying a tortured feminine subjectivity in various forms of Vaishnavism) is constantly bemoaning the loss of her Lord and lover, Krishna, and thereby remembering Him. Similar to the gopis’ lamentations of Krishna’s absence, bhadralok expressions of castigating themselves for forgetting their pasts, of the kind encapsulated by the Ananda Bazar Patrika’s use of the term atma-bismriti or self-forgetting are, paradoxically, tropes of unforgetting, characterized not by the physicalmaterial absence of the object of desire, but by anxieties around the disappearing signiicance of this complex. Such anxieties are kept at bay precisely in the act of expressing those fears. What marks loss as a key discursive category for me in this book, apart from the fact that incantations of loss appear all too often in bhadralok writings on Vaishnavism, is that loss is able to subsume within itself certain nondoctrinal aspects that were themselves products of Western Enlightenment and its secular-humanist approach to understanding the world. The soteriological category of Vaishnava loss thus makes itself available to secular interpretations, thereby allowing the writing of humanist histories of social transformations, literary greatness, and religious reform. Loss further stokes a Romantic imagination in our period, thereby invoking nostalgia and a yearning for that almost-forgotten past. And in 4 4 unforgeTTing chaiTanya producing an immensely variegated and voluminous body of discourse— from scholarly deliberations on Bengali language to secular-humanist narratives of Bengali history, from didactic treatises on Vaishnavism to polemical tracts on civilizational greatness, from Vaishnava journals to biographical sketches and autobiographical memoirs—they all draw upon both historical and mythical aspects of Chaitanya and Bengali Vaishnavism to repurpose them for their own ends. The process of anamnesis that is thus put in place to compensate for the collective amnesia of a generation goes beyond the question of remembrance to invoke the “materiality of the past” in the form of texts, poetry, people, histories, and sacred spaces.6 While there has been a plethora of scholarship on religion and colonialism in Bengal and South Asia, in general, the vast body of sources dealing with Chaitanya and Bengali Vaishnavism has found surprisingly few takers.7 A close examination of this body of material allows us to revisit some of the key conclusions made by scholarship on religion and colonial modernity in South Asia. It allows us to reconceptualize the relationship between regional religious traditions and the emergence of nationalized Hinduism, for instance, in a dramatic fashion.8 By placing the question of bhakti traditions at the center of our enquiry, we are able to chart the signiicance of literary histories in the making of modern regional cultures.9 And in focusing on the igure of Chaitanya, we are able to demonstrate the uneasy compromise between a “neo”-Vedantic constitution of modern textual Hinduism, preferred by Orientalists and key Hindu representatives, and its devotion-centric, ritual-based, image-worshipping adherents.10 My focus on the colonial encounter and its consequences in producing a new kind of cultural memory around Chaitanya and his devotional legacies in Bengal, rather than on community building within modern Gaudiya Vaishnavism, allows me to foreground issues of a modern and authentic Bengali selfhood and identity that lie at the heart of this study.11 For the concern over the loss of Vaishnavism from the lives of educated Bengalis was being felt at the time not only by believing and practicing Vaishnavas, but by a host of other public intellectuals in late nineteenth-century Bengal. My method in this book will be to pry out relevant pieces of information regarding Bengali Vaishnava traditions, which hold the igure of Chaitanya at their center, from a number of didactic, descriptive, or informative writings circulating in print about Bengali literature, history, society, and religion in our period. This will allow me to locate a diferent “world picture”—one of Vaishnava recovery and its relationship to the yoking together of culture, religion, and history in colonial Bengal. 5 Introduction 5 My intention is to make apparent through this deconstructive and reconstructive exercise the recovery of Vaishnava traditions and its contributions to the forging of a Bengali colonial subjectivity. A rich and plural devotional complex is thus enframed through the related processes of objectiication, technologization, mechanical reproduction, and representation in a manner that allows the holder of the gaze (the bhadralok, in our case) to gain complete control of the object on the one hand and abet a subjective approach to it on the other.12 This approach will demonstrate that Bengali Vaishnava traditions do not simply come together to result in the modern apparatus of institutionalized Gaudiya Vaishnavism. They are equally a part of other kinds of endeavors of self-constitution by the Bengali bhadralok where “religion” and “culture” work as two sides of the same coin. Chaitanya and Bengali Vaishnavism We leave it to our readers to decide how to deal with Mahaprabhu. The vaishnavas have accepted him as the great Lord Krishna himself. Others have regarded Him as a bhakti-avatar… . Those who are not prepared to go with them, may accept Nimai pandit as a noble and holy teacher. That is all we want our readers to believe. kedarnaTh daTTa bhakTivinoda, Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu (1896)13 Who is Chaitanya? What is his relationship to the growth and spread of Vaishnava devotion in Bengal? What impact does Vaishnavism of the kind preached by Chaitanya have on the religious and cultural worlds of precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial Bengal? At irst glance, these are obvious questions to pose. However, as the forthcoming pages will demonstrate, they have no straightforward answers. Or, more appropriately, these questions have many answers, depending upon the perspective of the inquirer. A devoted Vaishnava, a modern follower of Gaudiya Vaishnavism, may well declare that Chaitanya is a saint whose life is a model to be imitated, as well as a deity who must be worshipped. Kedarnath Datta Bhaktivinoda sums up this perspective in the above epigraph. A modern scholar of Chaitanya’s biographies, on the other hand, is likely to discuss him as a saint and a holy man, whose image undergoes a long and complex process 6 6 unforgeTTing chaiTanya of deiication in and through his multiple hagiographies.14 Rationalist scholars may consider him to be given to public acts of behavioral excess. Social scientists are inclined to see Chaitanya as a religious leader whose devotional practices open up opportunities for social transformation in the Bengali-speaking part of the world. Public intellectuals who are interested in excavating an indigenous history of social and religious reform in Bengal tend to see Chaitanya as a reformer who challenged caste and religious identities, thereby propagating an egalitarian form of devotion.15 Literary historians of Bengali are likely to pay most attention to the importance of Vaishnava devotional literature around the igure of Chaitanya in the growth and development of this eastern vernacular.16 A Baul singer may sing of a Chaitanya who is neither human nor deity but a mystical ideal to be strived for. One can, in this vein, keep multiplying the answers to the questions posed above. In the period that I am concerned with here, devotees and secular biographers, public intellectuals and reformists, rub shoulders with one another. At times, more than one of these perspectives can be found lurking in the same individual. This makes for a remarkably complex image of Chaitanya and Bengali Vaishnavism to emerge from contemporary sources, while highlighting the richness of the sources themselves. Indeed, the latter are signiicant on both historical and historiographical registers. They tell us not only about a ifteenth-century saint and his later legacies; they also reveal the concerns pressing upon Chaitanya’s late nineteenth-century interpreters and the frameworks of their interpretations. Moreover, they allow us to chart a social and intellectual history of the class of Bengalis who were most involved in authoring and publishing this literature. And, increasingly, we ind inhering in them new frameworks that, pastiche-like, add upon earlier concerns coalescing around community building and the establishment of religious authority. What are some of these new frameworks of interpretation? In this book, I identify three that animate Chaitanya’s bhadralok expounders: history, literary cultures, and religious reform. Following Sheldon Pollock, I understand literary cultures to mean the manner in which Bengalis themselves understand and inscribe their own literary pasts and the kind of uses they put their own texts to in the late nineteenth century.17 Historical consciousness, both of the popular and emergent professional kind, is key to how Chaitanya and other key leaders of Bengali Vaishnavism were remembered in Bengal and the rest of India in our period.18 Chaitanya’s historicity emerged as signiicant not only to his secular-humanist admirers but also 7 Introduction 7 those who were interested in advocating his status as a divinity, thereby producing “visions of the past … through frequent debate, and generated through scholarly writings as well as … amateur biographies, historical iction and poetry, performance, ilm, and polemical tracts.”19 I understand religious reform primarily as a semiotic exercise, which seeks to reinterpret myth, ritual, scripture, and religious practices through what Robert A. Yelle has called the “language of disenchantment,” thereby ixing their meaning within a tradition of “Protestant literalism.”20 Reading reform backwards into lives of devotionally inspired actors from the past requires acts of secular translation—an adoption of rational and humanist frameworks to interpret past acts of devotion that, by their very nature, sought to extend beyond an ordinary life into the realm of excess. Reform helps to discipline these (devotional and mystical) excesses while simultaneously turning them into moments of didacticism around religioussocial transformations. These interpretative frameworks gain traction in the mid- to late nineteenth century speciically as a result of the colonial encounter. The colonial encounter works as a shorthand in this book to refer to a range of transformations associated with the establishment of British colonialism in the South Asian subcontinent. It includes decades of engagements with Christian missionaries, the spread of Western education, and the range of ideologies that informed the colonial administration in its efort to discipline, deine, and govern native populations.21 Hence, in order to fully understand Gaudiya theologian Kedarnath Datta Bhaktivinoda’s concern with locating Chaitanya’s exact birthplace as a corrective to the dismal situation of devotion in the town of Nabadwip, or to comprehend the urge behind Haridas Goswami’s exhortation that the life of Shri Chaitanya was the national history of the Bengali people, we must turn in the irst instance to the colonial encounter. For it is only by unraveling the entanglements between the colonized subjectivities of the literate Bengalis, their concomitant anxieties around deracination and subjection, and their aspirations to an indigenously deined selfhood, that we can clear the ground necessary for approaching the problematics addressed in this book. The new interpretative frames that emerge out of the colonial encounter worked alongside and in tandem with older concerns. At times, the devotional impulse was so tightly woven with the positivist historian’s or the literary critic’s approach that it becomes virtually impossible to extricate one from the other. Dinesh Chandra Sen’s substantial work on Bengali Vaishnava literature illustrates precisely such an entanglement. And at 8 8 unforgeTTing chaiTanya other times, the secular-humanist impulse triumphed over an underlying devotional current to represent Chaitanya and Bengali Vaishnavism in terms of a people’s “movement,” such as in the writings of Bipin Chandra Pal. Alternately, in the writings of Romesh Chunder Dutt, for instance, we discern no hint of the devotional sentiment; and yet there was an undeniable fascination with Bengali Vaishnavism and its literary legacies. I understand these new frameworks of history, literary cultures, and religious reform to be disciplinary tactics in the irst instance that sought to reorganize, repurpose, and channelize the devotional energies of Bengali Vaishnavism toward a goal that was diferent from forging a community of devotees. This goal was one of seeking and inding an authentic Bengali subjectivity, at once related to the land, its people, its language, and its iconic igures from its own (upper-caste and Hindu) past. Hence, if there could be a Chaitanya comparable to Martin Luther, there was also a Chaitanya who served as the archetype for a mystic like Ramkrishna to imitate.22 This signifying malleability of “Chaitanya” was not enabled by any profound discrepancy within the established sacred biographic corpus (though there is some, especially with regard to Chaitanya’s early life and his emergence as a deity).23 Rather, it was the aforementioned interpretative frameworks that served to forge new kinds of cultural memories of Chaitanya in the modern period. They added novel dimensions to the already-existing body of sacred and devotional memory associated with this saint, reproduced in traditional sacred biographies. It is not unusual for iconic igures to operate in excess of their biographies. Nonetheless, despite being concerned with biographical excesses in this book, it is necessary for me to acknowledge certain aspects of Chaitanya’s life as biographical truths that serve an important function in the traditional memory of this saintly igure in this region.24 For as Karen Pechilis reminds us in her study of the diferent ways in which the Tamil devotee of Shiva, Karaikkal Ammaiyyar, has been represented across historical periods, religious texts, and devotional practices, every scholarly endeavor is as much an exercise in interpretation as the object(s) of the scholar’s study.25 Chaitanya was born as Vishvambhar Mishra in the town of Nabadwip in Bengal in 1486 to a Sanskrit teacher, Jagannath Mishra, and his wife, Shachi. Vishvambhar had an ordinary childhood. But as he grew older, the painful departure of his older brother, Vishvarupa—who took vows of monasticism—marked his life. As Vishvambhar attained youth, he was married to Lakshmipriya and started a Sanskrit school in his native town 9 Introduction 9 of Nabadwip. After the death of his irst wife from a snake bite, he married a young woman named Bishnupriya. After a visit to the sacred town of Gaya to carry out ancestral rites for his father left him transformed, Vishvambhar embarked upon a controversial and public career as the leader of a devotional sankirtan circle in the town of Nabadwip. He gathered around him a bunch of local residents, and occasional passersby— the elderly devotee, Advaita, the wandering and iconoclastic avadhut, Nityananda, and two young enthusiasts, Sribas and Gadadhar. Soon thereafter, Vishvambhar, too, accepted renunciation and became a sannyasi in the Dashanami order of ascetics. As a monk, he was now called Krishna Chaitanya—one who would spread the consciousness of Krishna in the world. Chaitanya made several long- and short-distance journeys during his remaining years. He irst traveled to Puri and from there to the southern tip of India. His next journey was to Vrindavan. And from there, he returned to Puri to spend the last few years of his life in the vicinity of the temple of Jagannath. Over the course of these travels, his sacred biographers tell us, he made some important associations that would ensure the continuation of his lineage and establish his status as a deity. Chaitanya died in Puri in 1533. Chaitanya is widely, albeit incorrectly, acknowledged to be the “founder” of Vaishnavism in Bengal. The term “founder” operates as an insuicient English translation for a variety of positions that Chaitanya enjoys within Gaudiya and Bengali Vaishnavism. Within the doctrinal framework of Gaudiya Vaishnavism, Chaitanya’s position is that of a dual incarnation of Krishna and Radha, an avatara of the Supreme God. In Bengal, Chaitanya is also the Mahaprabhu—the Great Master. The radical newness of his large, public, and procession-like sankirtan soirees places him at the origin of a new kind of devotional collective. As Mahaprabhu, Chaitanya lies at the point of origin of a staggering number of popular devotional lineages in the Bengali-speaking region—the so-called obscure religious cults rooted in sahajiya practices and often lying at the cusp of Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim in this region.26 For several observers and scholars, these subsidiary branches and capillaries cannot be considered the true inheritors of Chaitanya’s teachings.27 Nonetheless, there is no gainsaying that numerous religious groups in Bengal claim Chaitanya as their original guru.28 Chaitanya’s place in the story of India’s Bhakti Movement is paradoxical: he is at once representative of Brahmanical orthodoxy (as a Brahmin boy, a Sanskrit scholar, and teacher in Nabadwip) and orthopraxy (through 10 10 unforgeTTing chaiTanya the highly specialized world of Gaudiya ritual and theology as developed by the Vrindavan gosvamis) as well as the Sanskrit cosmopolitan.29 The institutional history of Gaudiya Vaishnavism, up until the present, builds upon this scholastic, doctrinal, and cultural foundation.30 On the other hand, if we shift our perspective from Vrindavan to Bengal, Chaitanya occupies other spaces too—he is remembered as the one who rejected Sanskrit scholasticism and its attendant elitism to follow the devotional stirrings of his heart. He is placed alongside other bhakti protagonists who turned devotion into an open and egalitarian form of religious expression. And he is recalled as a reformer who was famously dismissive of ritual purity or social distinctions. In this reading, he is placed strictly and identiiably in the realm of vernacular cultures.31 Unlike other protagonists of bhakti, however, Chaitanya is not known to have authored any devotional songs himself. Certainly nothing that is attributed to him as an author is in his mother tongue, Bengali. The Bengali devotional corpus as it stands today is hugely indebted to Chaitanya—but the songs are about him, not by him. Unlike Kabir and others of his ilk, Chaitanya does not command us to listen to him, but invites us to enact, embody, experience, and mimic.32 It is this unique paradox—between the (Sanskritic) cosmopolitan and the (Bengali) vernacular, the Brahmanical elite and the subaltern popular, and the nonexistent poet and the saint who is God—that lies at the heart of modern re-imaginings of the igure of Chaitanya and that spurs this study to ask the kinds of questions that it does. The Middleness of Chaitanya At a time when to be modern meant unquestionably participating within a rational religious worldview, the choice of an ecstatic devotee and a tradition of devotion explicitly based upon the erotic principle can be nothing short of unusual. Nonetheless, this was the choice made by numerous bhadralok Bengalis in our period. What makes Chaitanya such an evocative igure, a igure who is able to ire the bhadralok imagination in multiple ways in our period? The key lies in Chaitanya’s capaciousness—the essential multiplicity of his cultural memory in the region, the widespread popularity of his legacies, the ability of the devotional complex of Bengali Vaishnavism to at once straddle the world of popular devotion in South Asia as well as represent Brahmanical orthodoxy in its crystallized form. Hence, for a brief period in the late nineteenth and early twentieth 1 Introduction 11 centuries, Chaitanya was able to fulill a certain aspirational role for the colonized middle classes of Bengal. As a local Brahmin boy, a scholar of Sanskrit, a Krishna devotee who considers caste irrelevant to devotional practice, and a sannyasi, Chaitanya helps the bhadralok to address their concerns around questions of history and its purported “lack,” religion and its dark double of superstition and ritual, and an upper-caste, Hindu, and genteel regional identity locatable in high standards of literary production and cultural sophistication from Bengal’s own past. In studies of Bengali middle-class religion, that famously mercurial nineteenth-century saint—Ramkrishna—has been the focus of scholarly attention. Ramkrishna’s seemingly paradoxical popularity among Calcutta’s high society in the decade of 1880 has been analyzed as the result of this section of the urban, cosmopolitan Bengali bhadralok’s fascination with its “other.”33 Ramkrishna’s ability to assuage fears around the loss of authenticity among the middle classes is key to his uncanny prestige and recognition in his time.34 If Ramkrishna’s “otherness” is the key to understanding his popularity in the late nineteenth century, in the case of Chaitanya, it is precisely the opposite. The Bengali bhadralok is able to create an image of Chaitanya that simulates a mirror-image of themselves— simultaneously similar and diferent. It is an image that resonates equally in the colonial cosmopolis of Calcutta as it does in the provincial towns of Malanchi in the Pabna district or Moina in the Sylhet district of the Bengal Presidency.35 Chaitanya’s middleness, hence, is not the result of his diference but a result of his ownness—an ownness that is a product of the middle-class appropriation of key aspects of his cultural memory in the region. Arguably, such an interpretative arc is not unique to Chaitanya; it is characteristic of many bhakti igures from all over the subcontinent. In their precolonial hagiographic representations, in established sectarian doctrines, in local pockets of popular memory, and in secular-humanist expressions of the modern period, a range of bhakti igures carry the weight of the aspirations (and, sometimes, humiliations) that their devotees, guardians, proponents, and enthusiasts choose to invest them with.36 Chaitanya is speciically associated with “middleness”—what Nrisingha Prasad Bhaduri calls the majjhim pantha (or the middle way) that lies in between the “great tradition” of Sanskrit scholasticism and the “little tradition” of folk religion. Similarly, Narendra Nath Bhattacharya, a scholar of Buddhism and Hinduism, notes in an essay on Chaitanya’s place in the so-called Bhakti Movement of India that Chaitanya was both a remarkable 12 12 unforgeTTing chaiTanya man as well as the “spirit of the age”—a zeitgeist of bhakti.37 He notes three key features that made Chaitanya into a zeitgeist: his familiarity with Islam, his status as a scholar-ascetic steeped in Sanskrit learning and Brahmanical modes of being (including his familiarity with various kinds of Vedanta and his subcontinent-wide travels), and his close association with the Siddhas, Naths, Buddhists, Tantriks, and Sahajiyas. This vision of Chaitanya as a zeitgeist may come across as an enthusiastic overstatement, but it surely places him alongside other key bhakti igures from India—igures such as Kabir, Nanak, and Namdev, or Mirabai, Surdas, and Narsingh Mehta—who are well known as champions of the South Asian “vernacular millennium” playing a key role in providing a rich literary cultural past to the respective regions they hailed from. By the late nineteenth century, as countless studies on what is called Hindu “revivalism” and its relationship to cultural nationalism have shown, the literate classes were beginning to assume a leadership role all over British India. They were the leaders of an emerging nation, or many simultaneously emerging, even contending “nations,” that would only much later ind their territorial deinition. Their leadership depended critically upon positing the “vernacular mind” as the site of the authentic self.38 The role of language and literature in this enterprise of locating a modern authentic self has not been lost upon literary scholars and historians of the colonial period. What is often overlooked, however, in this historiography is that the story of the modern Indian vernaculars is, simultaneously, also the story of bhakti literary cultures in the various regions and regional languages of the subcontinent. For what we today identify as bhakti literatures provides numerous Indian vernaculars with the richest repository of their premodern literary cultures. Not surprisingly in the case of Bengal, this responsibility is borne almost entirely by the vast body of Vaishnava literature—both lyrical and the sacred biographic kind that holds Chaitanya at its center. Expressions such as the “spirit of the age” or a “cultural mediator” who is able to forge a “middle path” between the Brahmanical elite and the subaltern popular, all remind us of Chaitanya’s middleness—a middleness that the Bengali middle class actively forged and drew upon. Was this middleness an inherent characteristic of Chaitanya? Or did his evaluators and his enthusiasts superimpose middleness upon him? My investigation in this book leads me to conclude that if we are concerned with the historical Chaitanya, then this is practically an unanswerable question. If we, however, approach the same question from the perspective of Gaudiya 13 Introduction 13 Vaishnava doctrine, his “middleness” has to do with his theological signiicance as a human who is simultaneously divine. However, if we choose to examine his broader legacies in the region and the multiple sites of his memories, we shall be able to locate some of the other middle spaces where he, and the traditions associated with Bengali Vaishnavism, emerge as “cultural mediators”—not only between Brahmanical Hinduism and folk religious traditions but also between an authentic and rooted Bengali subjectivity ensconced within a seemingly colonialized self. Bhadralok Vaishnavism and the Aura of Authenticity In the process of interpreting Bengali Vaishnavism as the sanctuary of a quintessentially Bengali culture, the late nineteenth-century bhadralok claimed for itself an “aura of authenticity” and deployed it to mount what Aamir Mufti has characterized as an “auratic critique” of colonialism—a critique that was “concerned in particular with the thematics of authenticity and recovery of the self.”39 This “authentic self” was pitted against the intellectual traditions and religious world represented primarily by Christian missionary polemic, and secondarily by the Brahmo Samaj. That the former assume the role of key opponents was to be expected in the context where Protestant Christianity had emerged as the dominant paradigm of “true” religion, deined as textual, monotheistic, and faith-based, and successfully compelled all hopeful contenders—Gaudiya Vaishnavism being one of them—to comply with their deinition of religion. For the bhadralok, there existed deep-seated anxieties around the question of conversion to Christianity, especially when the conversion was done by one of their “own,” that is, an educated and upper-caste Hindu. They perceived conversion as enacting a complete break from community and tradition—a loss of one’s caste, or jati, literally an identity that is ascribed to an individual by virtue of birth. If conversion to Christianity was the ultimate step in rejecting what was one’s own, there were other minor to major infractions along the way for orthodox Bengali Hindus. Adopting “Western” modes of behavior, such as inter-dining and ingesting forbidden foods, to supporting a reformist agenda, such as widow remarriage, were all seen to be characteristic of a deracinated, overly Westernized, even foppish, Calcutta-based Bengali babu who had little connection with the land and the people that he belonged to. 14 14 unforgeTTing chaiTanya It was just such a igure that was relentlessly caricatured in popular genres of literature, performance, and visual culture. The same babu, however, as one of our protagonists in this book—the stridently anticolonial publisher and author, Sishir Kumar Ghosh—reminds us, was also the “native gentleman … with that respectful demeanor,” on whose account the missionary “could not propagate his faith,” who, with his constant legal petitioning, had turned into an irritant for the colonial magistrate, and, armed with modern education, into an occupational challenge for the European doctor.40 Here is the image of a babu who stands irmly in the middle of the European colonizers and the native people of Bengal—the “middle class” that stands, literally, in the middle and assumes for itself the power to speak for and on behalf of the rest of the people.41 It is a class prepared to fulill its historic role as a “nationalist elite,” aware of its will to power and its own hegemonic project of discipline and control. We can recognize another one of our protagonists, Kedarnath Datta Bhaktivinoda, to be such a babu. While disinterested in the anticolonial movement to an extent that he may be considered a loyalist of the Empire, Datta used the cultural capital he had acquired as a consequence of his colonial education and bureaucratic status to fundamentally transform Gaudiya Vaishnavism into a modern religious movement.42 The biographies of Sishir Kumar Ghosh and Kedarnath Datta, alongside those of numerous other public intellectuals of Bengal who publicly embraced Vaishnavism late in life, such as Bijoy Krishna Goswami and Bipin Chandra Pal, are testimony to the dialectical relationship that late nineteenth-century Bengali Vaishnavism shared with its native antagonist, the Brahmo Samaj. While mid-century Brahmos, members of organizations such as the Tattvabodhini Sabha and various branches of the Brahmo Samaj, were themselves “modern Vedantists,” keen to articulate their version of Hinduism “simultaneously in the idioms of modernist theism and Upanishadic Vedānta,” for Vaishnavas such as Kedarnath Datta, they were simply people who had lost the roadmap of indigenously directed civilizational progress.43 In a speech delivered, signiicantly, at the local branch of the Brahmo Samaj in Dinajpur in 1869, Datta—then a young bureaucrat—chose to talk about the Vaishnava text the Bhāgavata Purāṇa as laying down such a roadmap, and Chaitanya as a teacher who leads his constituency up that path of progress. Like Moses, Christ, Confucius, and Mohammad, Datta asserts, Chaitanya was a true reformer who sought to “fulill” the “old law.”44 Contrarily, Ram Mohan Roy—the founder of the Brahmo Samaj and a proponent of Vedanta as articulated in the Upanishads 15 Introduction 15 as the core of Hindu religion—was considered by Datta to be a destroyer of the “old law” who merely succeeded in creating an indigenized version of Unitarianism.45 In a similar vein, Sishir Kumar Ghosh speaks evocatively in his memoirs about growing up learning about Jesus Christ, becoming caught up in worldly matters as an adult, and rejecting the simple Vaishnava faith of his own people in the process.46 There was certainly a robust sense of embracing what is truly one’s own when Keshab Chandra Sen danced at the head of a sankirtan session with tears running down his eyes, or when Bijoy Krishna Goswami decided to assume his traditional occupation of being a Vaishnava gosvami. The question that animates this study is not just why these bhadralok public intellectuals performatively, publicly, and triumphantly turned to Vaishnavism, but also what made Bengali Vaishnavism, in particular, a desirable choice for them. The answer lies in the kind of authenticity that was being sought by this class of Bengalis. It was an authenticity that sought to buttress the caste and religious constitution of the bhadralok by reading it back into a prominent igure from the region’s past. Hence, when the Vaishnava polemicist Ranjanbilas Raychaudhuri exclaimed on the pages of the Shri Bishnupriya Patrika, “Our Gauranga … used to wear a dhuti, eat rice and mochar ghanta … and speak Bengali like us; will we Bengalis refuse to recognize this Gauranga?”47—the image that comes to mind is one of a nineteenth-century Bengali babu, with all his cultural capital of caste, class, and education, inserted backward into the image of a ifteenth-century saint. This is a bhadralok Chaitanya for a bhadralok audience, and this Chaitanya is devoid of association with both Muslims and with the lower castes, who have historically had intimate relations with the Vaishnava devotional complex in the region. If caste and religion formed one register of the authenticity sought by Bengali middle-class engagement with Chaitanya, regional identity was another. Most scholars studying Hindu “revivalism” or “traditionalism” assume the emergence of an unfractured, pan-Indian Hindu identity as the natural consequence of such intellectual endeavors. My study, however, challenges those assumptions by demonstrating that, in important ways, the revivalist or traditionalist trajectory was deeply embedded in the particularities of local traditions, regional languages, and the folds of the vernacular mind. And the goal was not “articulating and formulating the new amalgamation of Vaiṣṇavatā into a Hinduism of subcontinental dimension and claim,”48 but of giving a pride of place speciically to local religious traditions, in our case Bengali Vaishnavism, vis-à-vis the region. 16 16 unforgeTTing chaiTanya There is little hint here of Hindu ecumenism (or, to use a term with controversial connotations, “inclusivism”) that, according to Paul Hacker, characterizes modern Hindu apologetics of a Swami Vivekananda or a Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan, and abets the formulation of modern Hinduism into a unnatural umbrella-like phenomenon, pulling in multiple strands of Hindu ritual and philosophy as equally valid paths to salvation.49 That said, there are many examples of eclecticism, especially of the Vaishnava kind, that are ofered by our sources.50 This leads me to conclude that the igures this book deals with, especially the religiously oriented ones, were less interested in constructing a modern Hinduism and more concerned with inding diferent ways of representing Vaishnavism, especially of the kind taught by Chaitanya, as the highest expression of monotheistic religion. Nonreligious authors, on the other hand, were mainly concerned with celebrating Bengali Vaishnavism by linking it to various aspects of Bengali regional identity. Locality, Region, and Nation in Bengali Vaishnavism This book charts a regional story from Bengal. It is a story from Magura and Ula, the villages that two important protagonists of the book hail from. It is a story from colonial towns, such as Comilla, Murshidabad, Ranaghat, Dinajpur, Krishnanagar, Jessore, Cuttack, and Patna. It is also a story from key Vaishnava sacred sites in Bengal—Nabadwip, Bishnupur, Shantipur, Shrikhanda, Sylhet, and Katwa. These are provincial Bengali towns claiming a rich legacy of Chaitanya. Some of them, such as Shantipur and Katwa, boast of a “seat” belonging to Chaitanya’s primary Bengali disciples who generate their own gosvami lineages. Many of these seats, or shripats, are living sites of Chaitanya worship and devotion in Bengal. Others, such as Bishnupur, emerge as key centers of Vaishnava patronage and temple-building activity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.51 And these spaces are populated not only by gosvamis, but also by mahants (temple priests) and grihasthas (householder Vaishnavas), and the “mendicants”—the babajis and baishnabis, and other practitioners of sahajiya devotion.52 The histories of these seats, temples, and their devotional cultures have been relegated to the sidelines in inscribing the broader growth and development of a globally oriented Gaudiya Vaishnavism. The elision of the region of Bengal and its social, cultural, and historical peculiarities in studies of Gaudiya Vaishnavism has been 17 Introduction 17 both curious and detrimental to the overall understanding of modern transformations of this rich, vibrant, and myriad devotional tradition and cultural phenomenon. Allow me, in this context, to state upfront a key productive tension that operates in this book as a heuristic device. This is the tension between Bengali Vaishnavism and Gaudiya Vaishnavism. By Gaudiya Vaishnavism, I mean the institutionally sanctioned form of Vaishnavism that grounds itself in the teachings of Chaitanya, especially as they are commented upon and disseminated through the writings of the six gosvamis of Vrindavan. This tradition, which produced a vast corpus of theological treatises and ritual manuals explicating Chaitanyite devotion to future generations, is orthodox in its social and ritual practices.53 During the period covered in this book, Gaudiya Vaishnavism receives a solid foundation as reformed religion in institutional networks of the Gaudiya Math and Mission under the aegis of the father-son duo, Bhaktivinoda Thakur and Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati. While this book remains acutely aware of the transformations within Gaudiya Vaishnavism in the colonial period, it is not my intention here to chart these out.54 Rather, my focus in this book is what I speciically characterize as Bengali Vaishnavism, by which I mean the multiplicity of devotional lifeworlds associated with the igure of Chaitanya, as well as with the complex of Radha-Krishna worship in the Bengali-speaking region of the subcontinent.55 These worlds include not only the sacred biographies written in Bengali, or temples built in a uniquely local style under the patronage of local rulers; they also include a wide range of the so-called obscure religious cults who take Chaitanya to be their spiritual progenitor as well as a mystical ideal. In other words, the book is a study of an immanent religious ield marked by its (commitment to) “locality”—of subjects and agents, of everyday life and institutional spaces, of ritual practices and devotional literature. This ield is not, and cannot be, contained within the ambit of institutional Gaudiya Vaishnavism for reasons that have to do with its inherent multiplicity and “untidiness.” Nonetheless, as this book shows, some aspects do, at various times, become accepted as components of a quintessentially Bengali linguistic, regional, and cultural identity. In some cases, Chaitanya-centric Vaishnavism pushes the cultural boundaries of the region of Bengal beyond its linguistic or territorial perimeters. When it does so, it contributes to the idea of a Greater Bengal, or brihat banga, to use the words of literary historian and antiquarian Dinesh Chandra Sen. This Greater Bengal contained territorial margins 18 18 unforgeTTing chaiTanya of the Bengali-speaking region—such as Orissa, Manipur, Tripura, and Assam. And it did so, the argument goes, because of Chaitanya’s inluence on the local devotional cultures. According to Dinesh Chandra Sen, “From Orissa to Manipur through a large tract of country covering an area of about 224750 sq. miles Chaitanya was now worshipped in temples, while the streets of cities and village-paths resounded with his praises in popular songs.”56 Bipin Chandra Pal writes of the presence of Manipuri Vaishnavas in the social world of his childhood in Sylhet.57 And Kedarnath Datta Bhaktivinoda is able to call upon the ruling family of Tripura to support his cause of Mayapur.58 A key recent study by Indrani Chatterjee brings together religious actors and agents—monks and nuns of the Vaishnava, Shaivite, Sui, and Buddhist orders—to write a connected history of northeastern India by focusing on male and female monasticism.59 Her study, while drawing attention to the importance of monastic regional connections in the eastern part of India, alerts us that the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century visions of Bengali “greatness” and grandeur, such as those expressed by Dinesh Chandra Sen or suggested by Bipin Chandra Pal, were located within a cultural imperialist imagination of the bhadralok. For the bhadralok, these peripheries were also sites of untamed Vaishnavism of the kind that Kedarnath Datta encountered as a colonial bureaucrat in 1871 among the atibadis of Orissa (a Vaishnava sect indigenous to this region), who had accepted a charismatic Bhuiyan-Paik leader, Biskishen, as an avatara of Chaitanya and “Mahavishnu.” Datta played a crucial role in imprisoning this millenarian, anticolonial rebel. Curiously, Datta’s rationale for the stern disciplinary action taken against this rebel—of which he forms an integral component—derived from the necessity of putting down false prophets whose spurious teachings had compromised the true religion taught by Chaitanya.60 It is no surprise, then, that the tussle over modern identities in these eastern regions has had to irmly, even violently, resist the domination of Bengal, often articulated in the cultural mapping of Bengali Vaishnavism, and expressed (most importantly) through the spread of Bengali language.61 Hence, an important intervention that this book extends is to relocate Chaitanya and the Vaishnavism that draws from his devotional legacies back into Bengal. Such a move helps to clarify two key moments from the mid-twentieth century that are central to contemporary popular understandings of Bengali Vaishnavism and the igure of Chaitanya in India. The irst of these is the moment when Chaitanya was speciically presented 19 Introduction 19 as a Bengali representative in the discourse on the Bhakti Movement.62 The second is the moment of the emergence of “cultural communism” in Bengal when performances, such as kirtan, and performers associated with Bengali Vaishnavism were seamlessly integrated into the cultural apparatus deployed by the Communists in Bengal.63 As both of these moments alert us, secular appropriations of religious igures from the past are integrally the stuf of nationalist imaginations as well as revolutionary movements. This book seeks to map the genealogy of such secular and culturalist dimensions of Bengali Vaishnava traditions. Charting Loss and Recovery in Bengali Vaishnavism: Plan of the Book What is being unforgotten here? It is certainly Chaitanya; however, it is not merely Chaitanya the sannyasi, but Nimai the precocious Bengali lad; Gauranga, the fair-bodied Bengali avatara of Radha-Krishna; and Mahaprabhu, the Great Bengali Master. And, through him, what is also being unforgotten is an iconized and idealized image of an authentic Bengaliness, both in the past as well as in the present. The irst chapter of the book critically examines the well-entrenched discourse of Vaishnava decline in Christian missionary, colonial administrative, and Hindu reformist circles in nineteenth-century Bengal. These writings, I argue, form the discursive context of Vaishnava revival and recovery in the late nineteenth century. Chapter 2 explores the varied worlds of Vaishnava traditions in precolonial and early colonial Bengal— worlds from where bhadralok Vaishnavas had emerged and which they proceeded to discipline in light of the critiques and dismissals of Vaishnavism that they had themselves been inluenced by. Chapters 3 and 4 examine speciic types of Vaishnava recovery attempted in humanist and cultural nationalist contexts, respectively. In chapter 3, I analyze the role of literary histories of Bengali language, especially the role of individual Bengali archivists, collectors of manuscripts, and authors of these histories in presenting a secular-humanist face of Chaitanya as a religious reformer. Chapter 4 evaluates the role of a Vaishnava journal with a large subscription base in the provincial towns of the Bengal Presidency in repurposing Chaitanya as an icon of indigenous identity and belonging to the land and its people. These chapters demonstrate that the soteriological category of Vaishnava loss is able to make itself available to secular interpretations, 20 20 unforgeTTing chaiTanya thereby allowing the writing of humanist histories of social transformations, literary greatness, and religious reform. Chapter 4 also shows that the language of Vaishnava loss is reprocessed to articulate bhadralok anxieties around deracination as a result of the colonial encounter. Loss thus stokes a romantic imagination in our period, thereby invoking nostalgia and a yearning for an almost-forgotten past. In Chapter 5, I critically examine the life and contribution of a remarkable Gaudiya Vaishnava theologian—Kedarnath Dutta Bhaktivinoda and his controversial discovery and determination of Chaitanya’s birthplace in Mayapur in the late nineteenth century. Recovery, as it works in chapter 5, is simultaneously able to harness poetic and aesthetic dimensions, alongside secular humanist ones, thereby challenging the composition of secular histories and emphasizing mythic and experiential elements. In the forthcoming chapters, then, I explore late nineteenth-century bhadralok reimaginings of Bengali Vaishnavism and of Chaitanya in order to argue that they have left a deep impact on questions of self and subjectivity, religion and culture, and language and regional identity in colonial and postcolonial Bengal. Needless to say, the Bengali self that is being analyzed in these pages is thoroughly Hindu. It wishes to be that way, irmly jettisoning anything that compromises its peculiarly regional version of Hinduism. It is a conidently bhadralok Vaishnavism. In this book, the recovery of an authentic self parallels the recovery of forgotten homes, drowned birthplaces, and lost songs, each one indelibly indexed to the great Master, Chaitanya, who at one point was none other than the local lad “Nimai of Nadia.”