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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 September 2018
The purpose of this article is to examine what was involved when the great linguist George Grierson framed the history of Indian bhakti in terms of ‘the four churches of the reformation’ in one of his most widely read publications, ‘Bhakti-Mārga’, an entry in the Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics (1910). This was his translation of the concept of catuḥ (or cār) sampradāy, which plays a significant role in Nābhādās's Hindi Bhaktamāl (circa 1600). The weight of the target language and its enveloping culture (‘church’, ‘reformation’) raise obvious red flags. Grierson did not submit them to the sort of self-critical scrutiny we might today, nor did he examine the adequacy of Nābhādās's historiography. But did he get it all wrong? I will suggest that there are in fact some intriguing, if distant, analogies between the early modern world out of which Nābhādās wrote and its contemporary Protestant European counterpart, and I will ask whether Nābhādās may have been encouraged to adopt the framework he did because of precedents established in contemporary Muslim historiographical practice. In outlining his four sampradāys, Nābhādas played a role in creating a set of assumptions that long survived his own time in North India—and not just because Grierson would later be listening.
1 Grierson, George A., The Modern Vernacular Literature of Hindustan (Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 1889), p. viiGoogle Scholar. Grierson, Compare G. A., Lallā-Vākyāni, or, The Wise Sayings of Lal Dĕd, a Mystic Poetess of Ancient Kashmīr (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1920)Google Scholar.
2 William, Frederick Turner and Ralph Lilley Turner, ‘George Abraham Grierson 1851–1941’, Proceedings of the British Academy 28 (1941), p. 4Google Scholar. The quotation is Grierson's own, but the source is not given.
3 Mistakenly, I believe, Grierson himself dated Kabīr a good bit earlier, giving his floruit as ‘c. 1400 A.D’. (Grierson, Modern Vernacular Literature, p. 7.) The considerations that lead me to prefer the sixteenth century are given in Hawley, J. S., ‘Can There be a Vaishnava Kabir?’, Studies in History 32:2 (2016), pp. 147–161CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 In this regard we might even contrast him to the man who was perhaps his closest counterpart in such matters, Farquhar, James N.. In his Primer of Hinduism (London: Oxford University Press, Frowde, H., 1912Google Scholar; subsequently Humphrey Milford, 1914), Farquhar assigned meaningful roles to what he called the ‘period of [post-Vedic] reconstruction’, beginning in the Gupta period where the ālvārs along with ācāryas such as Śaṃkara and Rāmānuja make their appearance (Chapter 9), and to ‘the bhakti period’ with its numerous leading lights (Chapter 10). But in the chapter that follows he concedes that in ‘About 1875 a remarkable change makes itself manifest in the Indian spirit’ in response to challenges posed by the presence of the British (p. 155). He marks a similar watershed in his more detailed study of the colonial period: see Farquhar, J. N., Modern Religious Movements in India (New York: Macmillan, 1915), p. 291Google Scholar.
5 Grierson, G. A., ‘Bhakti-Mārga’, in Hastings, James (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1910), Vol. 2, p. 546Google Scholar.
6 Ibid., pp. 544, 546. It would be going too far to say that the ‘four churches’ formulation came to be taken for granted in subsequent English-language writing on Vaishnavism. However, one clearly sees its influence in Farquhar, A Primer of Hinduism, his popularly oriented book, where we read about ‘four mother churches’ (p. 137) and ‘the church of Rāmānanda (pp. 134–135), one of the four. The reader is also offered a chart called ‘the Four Churches’ (p. 149).
7 Grierson holds that while Kabīr was a direct pupil of Rāmānand, Tulsīdās was ‘seventh in descent, in succession of master and pupil’. See ‘Two Indian Reformers: A Lecture Delivered by G. A. Grierson at St. Paul's Room, Camberley, on Saturday, 1st December, 1906’, Yorktown, Surrey, 1906, p. 8. On more general features of the claiming of Tulsīdās for and within the Rāmānandī sampradāy, see Vasudha Paramasivan, ‘Between Text and Sect: Early Nineteenth Century Shifts in the Theology of Ram’, PhD thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 2010.
8 Grierson, ‘Bhakti-Mārga’, p. 548. In the spirit of Macauley's famous ‘Minute’, the use of the Christian term ‘saint’ to describe Hindu counterparts was anathema to Europeans such as Henry Shea, but Grierson persisted in appealing to such parallels, hoping to broaden his audience's vision. On Shea, see Ulrike Stark, ‘Translation, Book History, and the Afterlife of a Text: Growse's The Rámáyana of Tulsi Dás’, in Maya Burger and Picola Pozza (eds), India in Translation Through Hindi Literature: A Plurality of Voices (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010), pp. 172–173. As to Grierson, see, for example, Grierson, G. A., ‘The Popular Literature of Northern India’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies 1 (1920)Google Scholar [delivered orally in 1918], pp. 87–122.
9 Grierson, ‘Bhakti-Mārga’, p. 550.
10 Grierson, Modern Vernacular Literature, pp. 42–43. In another formulation Grierson says, ‘Over the whole of the Gangetic valley, and even far beyond, Tulasi Dâsa's Râmâyana is better known than the Bible is in England’: Grierson, ‘Two Indian Reformers’, p. 13.
11 Grierson, ‘Bhakti-Mārga’, p. 548; compare Grierson, G. A., ‘Modern Hinduism and its Debt to the Nestorians’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 39:2 (1907), pp. 311–335Google Scholar.
12 Vasudha Dalmia devotes considerable attention to the relationship between Grierson's Nestorian preoccupation and his later ‘Bhakti-Mārga’ essay in her authoritative study, Dalmia, V., The Nationalization of Hindu Traditions: Bhāratendu Hariśchandra and Nineteenth-Century Banaras (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar. As she shows, this is but one of the ways in which Grierson can be seen in relation to the larger ‘Orientalist’ world he inhabited (pp. 401–407). Like Krishna Sharma before her—and indeed, in his way, like Hazariprasad Dvivedi—Dalmia emphasizes Grierson's pivotal position in creating a unified view of Vaishnavism in the longue durée, one that took meaningful account of vernacular language production (p. 403).
13 Grierson, , ‘The Origins of the Vernacular Literature of Hindustan’, The Chaitanya Library Journal 1:2 (1893), pp. 62–63Google Scholar.
14 Williams, Monier, Religious Thought and Life in India: An Account of the Religions of the Indian Peoples, Based on a Life's Study of their Literature and on Personal Investigations of their own Country, Part I (London: John Murray, 1883), p. 139Google Scholar. Mention could be made of a number of similar formulations, but often the Reformation paradigm is allowed to apply to Indian figures hailing from older or more recent times, as, for example, in J. N. Farquhar's vigorous comparison between Luther and Dayanand Saraswati in Farquhar, Modern Religious Movements in India, pp. 111–113.
15 Ranade, M. G., Rise of the Maratha Power (New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1961 [originally 1900]), pp. 64–65Google Scholar. It is to be noted that Ranade takes Jñāndev or Jñāneśvar to be a major figure among these reformers, but dates him to the fifteenth century, not the fourteenth, as is common (ibid., p. 76).
16 Ibid., pp. 65, 72.
17 Ibid., p. 73.
18 Peter Marshall, ‘How did the Reformation become a global phenomenon?’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNsWS_S6odk, [accessed 31 May 2018].
19 See Grierson, ‘Two Indian Reformers’. Addressing a local audience, Grierson, apropos the theme of reform and vernacular access to truth, speaks in general—not specifically Christian—terms of History, with a capital H, ‘repeating itself’ in that it ‘has hammered on the anvil of time with ever untiring clang’ (p. 14). Later, quoting Henry Melvill Gwatkin, he approves of the notion that ‘There is no true unity except in Christ; yet everyone on the face of the earth who does a work of love is so far one in Christ with us, even though he had never heard Christ's name; for Christ's grace is with him’ (p. 16).
20 For example, Grierson, G. A., ‘Modern Hinduism and its Debt to the Nestorians’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 1907, p. 323Google Scholar, notes 1–4.
21 Grierson, G. A., ‘Gleanings from the Bhakta-Mala’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 1909, p. 608Google Scholar.
22 For example, Sharma, Krishna, Bhakti and the Bhakti Movement: A New Perspective (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal 1987), pp. 14Google Scholar, 50–51, 85–88. On Hazariprasad Dvivedi, who eloquently and repeatedly took issue with Grierson, see Hawley, J. S., A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), pp. 51–53Google Scholar, 253–254.
23 Grierson, ‘Gleanings from the Bhakta-Mala’, pp. 607–644; Grierson, G. A., ‘Gleanings from the Bhakta Mala’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 1910, pp. 87–109Google Scholar, 269–306.
24 See Hawley, J. S., ‘The Four Sampradayas—and Other Foursomes’, in Bangha, Imre (ed.), Bhakti Beyond the Forest: Current Research on Early Modern Literatures in North India, 2003–2009 (Delhi: Manohar, 2013), pp. 21–50Google Scholar.
25 Monika Horstmann has drawn attention to the fact that, so far as she has observed, the term ‘Rāmānandī does not come to be applied to this monastic community until the 1730s. Before that, evidently, it was customary for its members to refer to this ascetic and householder mix as the Śrī sampradāy’. Horstmann, M., ‘The Rāmānandīs of Galtā (Jaipur, Rajasthan)’, in Babb, Lawrence A., Joshi, Varsha, and Meister, Michael W. (eds), Multiple Histories: Culture and Society in the Study of Rajasthan (Jaipur: Rawat Publications, 2002), pp. 145Google Scholar, 161, 168.
26 For more on Nābhā’s authorial vision, see Pinch, William, ‘History, Devotion, and the Search for Nabhadas of Galta’, in Ali, Daud (ed.), Invoking the Past: The Uses of History in South Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 365–399Google Scholar, especially p. 395; James P. Hare, ‘Garland of Devotees: Nābhadās's Bhaktamāl and Modern Hinduism’, PhD thesis, Columbia University, 2011, pp. 66–85, 249–253.
27 This is examined in greater detail in Hawley, A Storm of Songs, Chapter 3.
28 Hawley, A Storm of Songs, pp. 205–217; also J. S. Hawley, ‘The Four Sampradāyas: Ordering the Religious Past in Mughal North India’, South Asian History and Culture, Special issue: ‘Religious Cultures in Early Modern India: New Perspectives’ 2 (2011), pp. 160–183.
29 Hawley, A Storm of Songs, pp. 196–205.
30 Nābhādās, Bhaktamāl, section 34.4, p. 13. I cite from the critical edition of Jhā, Narendra, Bhaktamāl: Pāṭhānuśīlan evam Vivecan (Patna: Anupam Prakāśan, 1978)Google Scholar, Part 2.
31 Ibid., section 1, p. 1.
32 Vijay (William R.) Pinch, ‘Bhakti and the British Empire’, Past and Present 179 (2003), pp. 159–196.
33 Bloom, Alfred, ‘Shin Buddhism in the West: An Overview’, in Clarke, Peter B. (ed.), Japanese New Religions in Global Perspective (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 2000), p. 257Google Scholar.
34 Moin, A. Azfar, The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
35 See, for example, Vallabha's Puṣṭipravāhamaryādā bhedaḥ (in James Redington's translation, ‘The Differences Between Grace, Flow, and Limitation’), in Redington, J. R., The Grace of Lord Krishna: The Sixteen Verse-Treatises (Ṣodaśagranthāḥ) of Vallabhacharya (Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications, 2000), pp. 43–49Google Scholar. Also noteworthy in this connection is Vallabha's sense of inveterate sin, were it not for Krishna's grace (Ṣodaśagranthāḥ 9.9), and his conviction that the monastic life should be eschewed (ibid., pp. 14.1–21).
36 Finbarr Barry Flood, ‘The Ottomans, Ethiopia, and Europe’, Keynote address, ‘Imaginary Geographies’, Department of Middle East, South Asian and African Studies Graduate Student Conference, Columbia University, 18 February 2011; Loop, Jon, Johann Heinrich Hottinger: Arabic and Islamic Studies in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 29–35Google Scholar, 80–82, 189, 202–204, 218–224.
37 O'Hanlon, Rosalind, ‘Performance in a World of Paper: Puranic Histories and Social Communication in Early Modern India’, Past and Present 219:1 (2013), pp. 87–126CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
38 John E. Cort, ‘God Outside and God Inside: The North Indian Digambar Jain Peformance of Bhakti’, in Bangha (ed.), Bhakti Beyond the Forest, pp. 255–286; also J. E. Cort, ‘Bhakti as Middle Class Religion and Literature’, Paper delivered to the ‘Exploring Bhakti: Is Bhakti a Language of Power or of Protest?’ conference, Yale University, 13–15 May 2016.
39 Horstmann, Monika, ‘Dādūpanthī Anthologies of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, in Horstmann, M. (ed.), Bhakti in Current Research, 2001–2003 (Delhi: Manohar, 2006), pp. 167–169Google Scholar. See also James M. Hastings, ‘Poets, Sants, and Warriors: The Dadu Panth, Religious Change, and Identity Formation in Jaipur State circa 1562–1860 CE’, PhD thesis, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2002, p. 17.
40 Dixon, C. Scott, Contesting the Reformation (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), p. 18Google Scholar; more broadly, see pp. 8–10, 17–23. I am grateful to Rex Barnes for bringing this volume to my attention. See Carter Lindberg on Luther's relatively restricted and sparse use of the term ‘reformatio’—especially to curricular improvement (1520)—as against Seckendorff's appropriation of the term for Lutheranism itself (de reformatione religionis ductu D. Martini Lutheri, 1694): Lindberg, C., The European Reformations, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 8–9Google Scholar. On Zwingli's recollection of his priority to Luther—1516 as against 1517—see Peter Marshall, The Reformation: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 18.
41 Halbfass, Wilhelm, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), pp. 172–196Google Scholar.
42 Alam, Muzaffar, ‘Assimilation from a Distance: Confrontation and Sufi Accommodation in Awadh Society’, in Champakalakshmi, R. and Gopal, S. (eds), Tradition, Dissent, and Ideology: Essays in Honour of Romila Thapar (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 164–191Google Scholar; also Alam, M., The Languages of Political Islam: India 1200–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, and Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004), pp. 98–114Google Scholar.
43 For evidence of this range, see Storey, C. A., Persian Literature: A Pre-Bibliographical Survey, Vol. 1, part 2 (London: Luzac, 1972), pp. 781–923Google Scholar, especially pp. 976–1003. For particular examples, see Alam, Muzaffar, ‘The Debate Within: A Sufi Critique of Religious Law, Tasawwuf, and Politics in Mughal India’, South Asian History and Culture 2:2 (2011), pp. 138–159CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Akhtar, Muhammad Saleem, The Kalimat al-Sādiqīn: A Hagiography of Sufis Buried at Delhi Until 1614 A.D. (New Delhi: Kitab Bhavan, 1978)Google Scholar.
44 I have consulted the translation by Losensky, Paul, Farid al-Din ‘Attar's Memorial of God's Friends (New York: Paulist Press, 2009)Google Scholar. On the performance of ‘Attar in India, see, for example, Green, Nile, Indian Sufism Since the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
45 Hare, ‘Garland of Devotees’, pp. 65–67, makes this point.
46 Ibid., pp. 74–75. In regard to the Indo-Persian tazkirā literature, see generally Abbas Rizvi, Saiyid Athar, A History of Sufism in India, Vol. 1 (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1978)Google Scholar; Hermansen, Marcia, ‘Religious Literature and the Inscription of Identity: The Sufi Tazkira Tradition in Muslim South Asia’, The Muslim World 87:3–4 (1997), pp. 315–329CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hermansen, Marcia and Lawrence, Bruce B., ‘Indo-Persian Tazkiras as Memorative Communications’, in Gilmartin, David and Lawrence, Bruce B. (eds), Beyond Turk and Hindu: Rethinking Religious Identities in Islamicate South Asia (New Delhi: India Research Press, 2002), pp. 149–175Google Scholar; and Ernst, Carl W. and Lawrence, Bruce B., Sufi Martyrs of Love: The Chishti Order in South Asia and Beyond (New York: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 47–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I am grateful to Stefano Pellὸ for the privilege of sitting in on his course ‘Memory and History in Persian Literature’ at Columbia University in autumn 2010, and for a number of helpful conversations as well.
47 Ernst, Carl W., Eternal Garden: Mysticism, History, and Politics at a South Asian Sufi Center, 2nd ed. (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004; first ed., State University of New York Press, 1992)Google Scholar, p. 88; cf. Hare, ‘Garland of Devotees’, pp. 79–83, especially Bhaktamāl, section 110.
48 Ernst, Eternal Garden, p. 90.
49 Clark, Matthew, The Daśanāmī Saṃnyāsīs: The Integration of Ascetic Lineages into an Order (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2006), pp. 118–122Google Scholar, 224–225, 246.
50 Aziz Ahmad once commented on this set of issues from a rather different perspective. I do not entirely share his view, but it is certainly worth quoting: ‘This orthodox school of Rāmānanda is firmly situated within Hinduism, though it seems to have received some stimulus from Islam, mainly in its puritanical challenge to the orgiastic sensuality of the Śaktī [sic] and Krishna cults’. Ahmad, A., Studies in Islamic Culture in the Indian Environment (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964), p. 141Google Scholar.
51 Allison Busch and Dalpat Rajpurohit, oral communications, Columbia University, 29 September 2012, with an important email follow-up from Dalpat Rajpurohit, 30 September 2012. See also Busch, A., Poetry of Kings: The Classical Hindi Literature of Mughal India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 30–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 88–90, 172–173; Busch, A., ‘Portrait of a Raja in a Badshah's World: Amrit Rai's Biography of Man Singh (1585)’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 55 (2012), pp. 287–328CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Digambar Jains were not tempted to compose verse celebrating the lives of their vernacular poets, since they saw them—and they saw themselves—as anything but divine, unlike their renunciant counterparts. In that way, at least, they produced nothing that could be interpreted as establishing a model that Nābhādās might have followed (John Cort, email communication, 9 October 2012).
52 McGregor, R. S., Hindi Literature from its Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1984), pp. 100–101Google Scholar; Snell, Rupert, ‘Devotion Rewarded: The Sudāmācarit of Narottamdās’, in Shackle, Christopher and Snell, Rupert (eds), The Indian Narrative: Patterns and Perspectives (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1992), pp. 173–194Google Scholar.
53 I am grateful to Manan Ahmed for this caution (oral communication, Columbia University, 29 September 2012).
54 Alam, The Languages of Political Islam, p. 146.
55 Pellὸ, Stefano, ‘Persian as a Passe-Partout: The Case of Mīrzā ‘Abd al-Qādir Bīdal and his Hindu Disciples’, in deBruijn, Thomas and Busch, Allison (eds), Culture and Circulation: Literature in Motion in Early Modern India (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2014), pp. 21–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The work in question is Safīna-yi Khwushgū (‘Khwushgū’s Vessel’), compiled between 1724 and 1734.
56 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.)Google Scholar
57 Agrawal, P., Akath Kahānī Prem kī: Kabīr kī Kavitā aur unkā Samay (Delhi: Rājkamal Prakāśan, 2009)Google Scholar, for example, the section called ‘Modernity: Indigenous Versus Colonial’ (pp. 27–36) and throughout Chapter 2 (pp. 65–150).
58 Ibid., pp. 235–310. Also Agrawal, P., ‘In Search of Rāmānand: The Guru of Kabīr and Others’, in Banerjee-Dube, Ishita and Dube, Saurabh (eds), Ancient to Modern: Religion, Power, and Community in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 135–170Google Scholar.
59 Hawley, A Storm of Songs, pp. 313–315.
60 Pollock, Sheldon, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), pp. 423–436Google Scholar, 478–482. Pollock specifically mentions what he perceives as widespread misperceptions about ‘the role of the Reformation in the growth of vernacular languages’ in Europe (p. 424), a set of ‘Protestant presuppositions’ that he subsequently attempts to redress (pp. 437–452). I summarize my reactions to Pollock's arguments about the connection (or lack thereof) between bhakti religion and the expansion of Indian vernacular literary usage in Hawley, A Storm of Songs, pp. 311–312.
