Yogi Heroes and Poets: Histories and Legends of the Naths

4. The Influence of the Naths on Bhima Bhoi and Mahima Dharma

and marginal. The image of a legendary Nath and the practices at the Raja Bakshar shrines might thus find congruent places toward the furthest reaches of the socioreligious imagination of someone who knows them both. In practice, however, Gwalior’s middle classes are not, for the most part, open to anything too radical. It is the tamer, Maharashtrian variants of Nath heritage that flourish in the city, not the more rugged versions that have a place in most residents’ broad North Indian cultural taxonomies but not in their everyday practice. In general, split-eared Naths of legendary visage—still found in rural India— are not major presences in urban areas of the subcontinent beyond monastic centers such as Gorakhpur or Jalor. Contemporary urban Indian religion, without much use for the Naths’ earlier royal and popular socioreligious functions, doesn’t offer them a ready place: the tough ascetic style that once made the Naths useful to kings is not one attractive to most spiritually-minded modern urbanites, whose gurus tend to cultivate a more nurturing—and often more learned—manner; and while many in the city may seek supernatural help with personal affairs, they tend to favor less the occult powers that a Nath might offer than the theistic approaches of saints and shrines. Although individual split-eared Nath ascetics from the North Indian countryside may find support in urban areas and settle there, they don’t seem to play major institutional roles. In the more relaxed Maharashtrian Nath heritage represented by Dholi Buwa and Raja Bakshar, however, the characteristic royal and popular roles of Nath yogis are transformed into viable urban institutions. In Dholi Buwa, the royal Nath morphs into a sort of civic guru—a religious dignitary called on to perform at major public occasions, gracing them with the authority of an inherited family charisma and an idealized old regime. With Raja Bakshar, the visage of the aweinspiring Nath yogi, whose exceptional practical power derives in part from his unconventional ways, turns into an unconventional shrine that offers intense experience and magical power. Although Hindu shrines with curing priests—sometimes householder Naths—are common in rural India, they are not very frequent in the cities. Their place often seems subsumed by Sufi shrines—whose attendants may perform similar curing functions, which Hindus also frequent. Raja Bakshar offers Gwalior Hindus a communally ambivalent alternative to conventional Sufi shrines together with a type of intense experience that these shrines don’t regularly offer. The particular institutional roles these two variants of Maharashtrian religion fulfill may explain why North Indian Hindus are attracted to them. In fact, local North Indians don’t normally frequent most other Maharashtrian religious institutions in town. Certainly, some of those institutions—an old math (Hindu Cloister) linked to a predecessor of Mahipati Math, say, or a newer one to Sant Ram Das— function largely in Marathi and for Maharashtrians. But the old aristocracy also 60 DANIEL GOLD sponsored a number of temples to Hindu deities popular in Maharashtra but not common in the North—in Dattatreya, Vithoba, and Khandoba—some elaborately built, well-maintained, and open to all. But, given the many other temples in town, few North Indians find any compelling reason to visit them: the version of familiar Hindu worship they offer is not particularly extraordinary and the divinities installed in them exert no special pull. Dholi Buwa and Raja Bakshar, by contrast, are institutions that find no simple counterparts in other religious establishments in the city. They are popular because they are different from others in town, finding unfilled niches toward opposite extremes of the urban socioreligious world, but in neither case exceeding the religious comfort zone of most urban Hindus. Although awe-inspiring, split-eared Nath yogis have a place in the imaginations of North Indian city dwellers, adapted Maharashtrian versions of Nath traditions may be better suited for everyday urban practice. Drums in Gwalior 61 CHAPTER FOUR The Influence of the Naths on Bhima Bhoi and Mahima Dharma Ishita Banerjee-Dube The considerable overlap between the traditions of the Naths and the Nirgunis (followers of sects that worship a formless God) and between yoga and tantra has been noted by various scholars. It is also generally accepted that all these trends had a pervasive influence over new religious orders in all regions of India. This is not surprising: “traditions” in real lives and societies actually mingle and overlap; their separation...