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Issue 15 Volume 03 March 2012

YOGA & YOGISAMES MALLINSON


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Publishers & Founding EditorsR M E S

AdvisorsD. R E. S

M MJ S

EditorsM ME S

Design & ProductionR ME S

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NMARPA uses diacritical marks, as per thechart shown to the right, for the transliteration of allSasktawords. While many of the articles do con-tain these marks, it is not a universal occurrence in themagazine. In those cases where authors have electednot to use diacritics, Sasktawords remain in theirsimple, romanized form. Chart by Vyaas Houston.

a i u

e ai o au a a ka kha ga gha a ca cha ja jha a a ha a ha a ta tha da dha na pa pha ba bha ma ya ra la va a a sa ha

ka tra ja

ISSUE 15 VOLUME 03MARCH 20121. YOGA & YOGIS James Mallinson

Cover: Knpha yogi at the oepning of the Ganga Mata temple atGangotri in April 2008. Photograph by Robert Moses.

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S K. P J


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YOGA &YOGISJAMES MALLINSONPhotographs by James Mallinson

B

T of a lecture I gave at ColumbiaUniversity, New York, in September2011, in Sheldon Pollocks MellonSanskrit series. As you might expectfrom the title of that series I am aSanskritist. My doctoral thesis was acritical edition of a Sanskrit text onyoga called the Khecarvidy, for whichmy supervisor was Professor AlexisSanderson, the worlds foremost scholarof tantric aivism.

I am also something of an amateurethnographer. I even did an MA inethnography, with a dissertation onasceticism in India, but I was deterredfrom continuing down the path offormal ethnography by what SheldonPollock has called the hypertrophy oftheory which afflicts the humanities,so for my doctoral thesis I returnedto philology, seeking to make sense ofIndian asceticism through texts.

I did continue my ethnographicefforts, however, albeit on the side. eKhecarvidy is about khecarmudr,a yogic practice in which the tongueis loosened and lengthened so that itcan be turned back and upwards intothe cavity above the palate, in orderto access the amta, the nectar ofimmortality, dripping from the topof the skull. In order to shed light onthe text, I sought out traditional yogisin India who practise khecarmudr -but I made sure I didnt do so much

ethnography that I had to justify mymethods.

I met my first such yogi in Kullu, atthe Dussehra Mela of 1995. It was thefinal night, the full moon of Karttik,also known as Sharat Purnima, theautumn full moon. I was staying inthe Rmnand camp and asked myguru if he knew of any practitioners ofkhecarmudr at the festival. Anothersadhu nodded towards a gruff-lookingbaba at the other end of the tent and

said he was a yogirj. I tentativelyapproached him and asked in mymost respectful Hindi if he practisedkhecarmudr. He told me that he did,but that it was not for a sdhra vyakti,an ordinary individual, like me.Disappointed, I returned to my gurujisside. Later that night, when the fullmoon was at its zenith and said to bepouring forth amta, we all filed outsidefor the festivals final ritual, in whichwe ate steaming tasm, rice pudding,into which the amtawas said to havedripped.

Sitting up bleary-eyed early the nextmorning drinking chai with my guruji,I was nudged by another sadhu whopointed towards theyogirj. His mouthwas wide open. I crossed to him andlooked inside. Sure enough his tonguehad disappeared into the cavity abovehis palate and he was demonstratingkhecarmudr to me. He then deignedto divulge some of his secrets.

Paraurm Ds J Yogrj 1995.Photograph by James Mallinson.

James Mallinson is a scholar of the texts and practices of traditional yoga and yogis

in India and an Associate at the Oriental Institute, Oxford University.


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Y

T with scholarship on yoga, inparticular the hahavariety from whichmost of the yoga practised around theworld is, at least in part, derived, willknow that a sect of Yogs called theNths, and in particular their foundingguru, Gorakhnth, is credited withinventing it and writing its texts.

e Nths are also known asKnpha, Split-Eared, Yogs onaccount of the holes cut in the cartilagesof their ears, in which they wear largehooped earrings.

In its classical formulations, the bestknown of which is found in the fifteenth-century Hahapradpik, hahayogaemploys a variety of physical techniques

with the ultimate aim of wakingKualin, the serpent goddess who liessleeping at the base of the spine, andraising her upwards through a variety ofcakrasto union with iva in the head.

e Khecarvidyis attributed to ivain the form of dintha, the first Nth,and is thus associated with the Nths.But in the course of my work on theKhecarvidy, both my textual studiesand ethnographic observations led meto become increasingly skeptical about

the blanket attribution of hahayoga tothe Nths, and indeed of the existenceof a formal Nth order at the time ofthe Khecarvidys composition. Notlong after I finished my thesis I wasasked by Professor David Lorenzen tocontribute to a volume on the Nthsand their literature.

I gladly accepted. Great, I thought,an incentive to get to the bottom ofall this. I soon realised that to do so,however, would involve going back tofirst principles: I would have to figureout what constituted the corpus ofearly works on hahayoga. Somewhatsurprisingly, considering the popularityof yoga, there has been very little criticalstudy of them, and no critical study ofthe corpus as a whole.

Identifying the corpus anddetermining a relative chronology ofits works involved lots more of thepainstaking philological work I had gotused to while editing the Khecarvidy.

r r Mahyog Guru Gorakanth J, Anil Sharma BPP studio, no date,

chromolithograph, collection of James Mallinson

Knpha earring, Jwalamukhi 2011 James Mallinson


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Knpha earring, Jwalamukhi 2012 James Mallinson


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I was greatly assisted by the fact thatthe Hahapradpikis for the most parta compilation. e Hahapradpikshahayoga is in fact very catholic,encompassing a broad range of practices,some of which appear to have conflictingpurposes (more on which later).

Building on the pioneering work ofthe late Christian Bouy, I identifiedtwenty works from which Svtmrma,the Hahapradpiks compiler, hadtaken verses. Of these only fourmention hahayoga by name, and ofthose only one, the c. 13th-centuryDatttreyayogastra, describes itspractices. ey consist of an eight-limbedyoga similar to that taught by Patajalibut ascribed in the Datttreyayogastrato the sage Yjavalkya, together withten techniques known as mudrs and

bandhas. It is these latter practiceswhich set hahayoga apart from otheryogas. ey were practised by Kapilaand other sages and work on the ancientand still prevalent Indic notion that inmen the vital principle, the distillateof the various rasas which nourish thebody, is bindu, semen, which is equatedwith amta, the nectar of immortality.In women it is rajas, menstrual fluid. Inyogic physiology binduis created in thehead, where it is secreted by the moon

at the top of the central channel, andit drips down to the base of the spine,where it is either consumed in the solarfire, or ejaculated, thereby weakeningthe body and leading to old age anddeath.

e techniques of this early hahayogause pneumatic and mechanical methodsto keep bindu in the head or raise itshould it fall. ey include the alreadymentioned khecarmudr in whoseearliest manifestation the opening ofthe palate is sealed with the tongueso that bindu cannot fall. en thereare various techniques which are saidto make the breath enter the centralchannel and rise upwards, takingbindu with it. e well known yogicheadstand uses gravity to keep binduinthe head.

en there is vajrolimudr, whichinvolves the yogi creating a vacuum inhis stomach in order to resorb his bindushould he accidentally ejaculate.

Having established that thesepractices distinguished hahayoga inits earliest formulation I set aboutexamining the other works used tocompile the Hahapradpikin order toidentify others that teach them. I foundseven such works. e earliest is thec.11th-century Amtasiddhi. Like thatof the Datttreyayogastra, the yogaof the Amtasiddhi is geared towardskeeping bindu in the head and, likethe Datttreyayogastra, it makes nomention of Kualin, nor cakras.e remaining six works are contem-poraneous with the Datttreyayogastraor later. Five of them are attributed toNth gurus or mention them in their

magala verses. ese Nth works donot call their yoga haha. e sixth,the ivasahit, is a product of thervidy tradition associated with theakarcryas of Shringeri and Kanchi.In all six works the aim of the yoga thatthey teach is the raising of Kualin.

ese works incorporate thetechniques and, in some cases, versesof the Datttreyayogastra and

Amtasiddhi, but, with varying degreesof success, redact them to be more inkeeping with the new aim of raisingKualin. So in the Vivekamrtaa,for example, which can be dated to aperiod roughly similar to that of theDatttreyayogastra, six hahayogicmudrs, including khecarmudr, aretaught after a description of Kualinbut all are said to be for the preservation

of bindu. e Khecarvidy, meanwhile,mentions the Vivekamrtaa in itsopening verses, but makes no mentionof the preservation of bindu in itsteaching of khecarmudr, which is usedto awaken Kualin and raise her to thestore of amtain the head, with whichshe then floods the body on her return

journey to the base of the spine.e most coherent reworking of the

hahayogic mudrs is in the ivasahit,in which, even though its compiler used

several verses from the two early bindu-obsessedhahatexts, theAmtasiddhiandDatttreyayogastra, the preservation ofbindu is nowhere the main aim of anyof its techniques, whose purpose is theawakening of Kualin.

e Hahapradpik is not socoherent. In its attempt to be all thingsto all yogis, it includes the verses whichdescribe khecarmudrfound in both theVivekamrtaa and the Khecarvidy,with their conflicting aims of sealingbinduin the head and flooding the bodywith amta.

S I this arcane talk of bizarre yogictechniques? Well, behind theHahapradpiks eclecticism therewas an agenda, which only becomesapparent when we compare it withthe texts which were used in itscompilation. In some of those textsthere is a typology of yoga which divides

Rm Ds J Yogirj, Citrakoot 1995 James Mallinson


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it into three methods: mantra, layaand haha. e Hahapradpik makesno mention of mantrayoga, whichdenotes the core practice of aivism:the pursuit of siddhis, magical powersand supernatural enjoyments, bymeans of mantra repetition. Layayogadenotes a variety of techniques forachieving cittalaya, dissolution of themind, the best known of which is theaforementioned raising of Kualinthrough the six progressively moresubtle cakras. Other methods of layainclude ndnusandhna or nda,listening to series of progressively moresubtle internal sounds that arise inthe course of yogic meditation. esetechniques, which are individually calledsaketas, are secret methods said to havebeen taught by iva. Many of them

are described in earlier aiva Tantras,and they are also taught in the worksassociated with Nth gurus which wereused to compile the Hahapradpik.Svtmrma incorporated several ofthese saketas in the Hahapradpik,including nda and the awakening ofKualin, but he does not teach themunder the rubric of layayoga, insteadsubsuming them, along with everythingelse in the Hahapradpik, under thename haha.

What this boils down to is thatthe meditational, visualisation-basedtechniques of the early Nth texts, aivatechniques that had been known as thesaketas of layayoga, are overlaid ontothe physical bindu-oriented techniquesof early hahayoga, in a synthesis thatconstituted what I term classicalhahayoga. is melding of the physicaland the imaginary created a varietyof ontological paradoxes which wereresponsible for, for example, the possiblyapocryphal story of Daynanda Saraswati,the founder of the rya Samj, pulling acorpse out of the Ganga and dissecting itin order to ascertain the existence of thecakras. On failing to find any he threwhis Sanskrit texts on yoga, including theHahapradpik, into the river.

Y

T N - bindu-oriented early hahayogawaspart of the process of their becoming aformal order of celibate ascetics. Textualsources from the period prior to thecomposition of the hahayogic corpusshow that the first human Nth gurus,namely Matsyendra and Goraka wereanything but celibate ascetics; theywere adepts of the Pacimmnya or

Western Transmission of Kaula aivism,complete with its panoply of esotericdoctrines, such as the propitiation of

yoginsthirsty for human bodily fluids,alchemy, sexual rituals, mantra magicand so forth.

Matsyendra was famously licentious.A much retold legend tells of hisbecoming ensnared in the land ofwomen only to be brought to his sensesby his more austere disciple Goraka.is is interpreted as a reformation byGoraka of his gurus degenerate Kaulaways. But the story is likely to postdateGoraka by some centuries. In probablyour earliest portrayal of him, which waswritten in Old Kannada in the earlythirteenth century, he is said to live inKolhapur with not one but two wives.Texts from the same period associated

with him, such as the Gorakasahit,include teachings on sexual rites.

It is not until the fourteenth andfifteenth centuries, the time of thecomposition of Nth works onhahayoga, that an order of celibateNth ascetics starts to take shape, inparticular in the north and west of thesubcontinent, and their appropriationof the celibate bindu yoga with itsemphasis on continence is emblematicof that process.

r Nav Nth Svarp Daran, no date, chromolithograph, collection of James Mallinson


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A Nth text of the early corpus, theGorakaataka, ends with the followingverse:

We drink the dripping liquidcalled bindu, the drop, not wine; weeat the rejection of the objects of the fivesenses, not meat; we do not embrace asweetheart [but] the Suumn n,her body curved like kua grass; if weare to have intercourse, it takes placein a mind dissolved in the void, notin a vagina.

e Nths appropriation of earlyhahayoga was only in name. In facteven their adoption of the name wasshort-lived. After the composition ofthe Hahapradpik, no further textson hahayoga were written by Nths

and they appear not to have practisedit, or at least its early variety. Referencesto hahain the Hindi verses attributedto Goraka are all scornful, associatingit with harmful ascetic practices. Todaythe practice of hahayogaamongst Nthsis almost non-existent. ere is oneNth guru from Orissa, a Svm ShivNth J, who is an ardent proponent ofhahayoga, but his attempts to introduceit among others of his sapradyahavebeen altogether fruitless. In November

2011 I met at Jwalamukhi in HimachalPradesh Yog Bb Anp Nth J, ayoung Nth who lives at Manikaran andwho demonstrated to me a sequence ofdifficult yogic sanas. Surprised by this Iasked him where he had learnt his yogaand he told me that it had come to himapne-p, automatically, when he was achild and that he had not been taught itby a Nth guru.

Rather than practise hahayoga, theNths have remained true to their roots.ey are renowned amongst otherascetics as experts in the meditativeand magical arts of tantra, and recentprescriptive Nth publications teachtantric rites of worship of the goddessBl or Tripursundar in the traditionof the Dakimnya or SouthernStream of Kaula aivism.

So if it wasnt the Nths practisingearly hahayoga, who was it? To answerthis question we need to identify thesectarian origins of the two texts of the

corpus that teach a pure binduyoga, theAmtasiddhiand Datttreyayogastra.

e sectarian origins of theAmtasiddhiare unclear. I suspect that itis the product of a Klamukha traditionfrom northern Karnataka, but I cannotyet be sure. e sectarian origins of theDatttreyayogastra, however, althoughnot made explicitthe text is in factvery anti-sectariancan be inferredfrom a variety of clues. It originatedamong forerunners of renouncer groups,in particular those of the Giris andPurs, which were later included in theten names or subsects of the DasnmSanyss, the famous aiva asceticorder, pictures of whose members (punintended) are beamed around the worldevery three years when they processnaked before bathing at the Kumbh

Mel.e clues in the text are many.

Datttreya is the tutelary deity of theJn Akh, the largest of the divisionsof the Dasnms.

Dasnm Ngs at the 2001 Allahabad Kumbh Mela James Mallinson

Datttreya at the Jn Akh Haridwar2010 James Mallinson


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Datttreya, no date, chromolithograph, collection of James Mallinson


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Vivmitra performing tapas, 17th century British Library Board Ramayana MS 15295

Urdhvamukhi (from J.C.Omane Mystics, Ascetics and Saints

of India) 1903, p.43


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non-Vedic celibate tradition but theirfirst textual exposition is in the earliesttexts of hahayoga. Although the detailsof the formation of their sects are stillunclear, it is clear that the heirs of thoseascetics are the two biggest monasticorders in India today, the DasnmSanyss and Rmnands. ey arethe orders amongst which the practiceof hahayogais still most prevalent, andtheir hahayoga is very much aboutpreserving and sublimating bindu. Partof the Dasnm Ngs initiation riteis the tag to, in which the penis isyanked downwards, rendering it foreverflaccid and enabling an array of bizarredemonstrations of the ascetics disdainfor his member (see picture above).

e Rmnands, meanwhile, donot go to such lengths as they will notpermamently disfigure themselves, butsome of them who struggle with thevow of celibacy do opt for chemicalsterilisation.

Not only are the Dasnms andRmnands the foremost asceticpractitioners of hahayoga today, butthey also continue to practise the otherascetic techniques with which theforerunners of those of hahayoga areassociated in our early sources.

us it is the Rmnands whonowadays are the main exponents ofthe ancient austerity of sitting underthe midday summer sun surroundedby smouldering cow-dung fires (seefacing), and they often round off thispenance by practising yogic sanas (seeabove). is is not without its dangers:it is not uncommon for these yogis totopple onto their fires.

Indeed, the parallels between thecurrent practice of the Rmnan ds, or,to be precise, their Tyg suborder, andthose of ascetics in our early sources arestriking. e Vaikhnasasmrtastra,

which has been dated to betweenthe 4th and 8th centuries, describesthe practices of celibate hermits (i.e.vnaprasthas). It includes amongthem the practice of yoga, sittingdown between five fires, remainingin a pot of water, sitting in vrsana,maintaining silence, inverting thebody and standing on one foot. esame hermits are to meditate onViu with bhakti, devotion. Allthese practices are typical of todaysRmnand Tygs.

Gag Ds Chitrakoot 1995 James Mallinson

Dhni-tap Haridwar 2010 James Mallinson

Dhni-tap sana Omkareshwar 1994 James Mallinson


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I at Yogi sects in the period when theycoalesce out of a relatively homogeneousmass into more formal orders, i.e. thesixteenth and seventeenth centuries. FirstI shall return to the Datttreyayogastraand look at a passage which gives ussome more specific details about themilieu in which it was composed.

muito daadhr vkyavasano pi v ||43||

nryaavado vpi jailobhasmalepana|namaivyavc vbhyrcpjako pi v ||44||

sthnadvdaapjo v mlbhirbahubhita|kriyhno thav krra kathasiddhim avpnuyt ||45||

Shaven-headed, carrying astick, or wearing ochre clothes;saying Nryaa, having mattedhair, or smearing the body withash; saying nama ivya, orworshipping external images;

worshipping at the twelve placesor being abundantly adornedby mls: [even doing all thesethings,] if [the yogi] does notpractice, or if he is cruel, howcan he achieve siddhi?

is passage confirms the connectionbetween the Datttreyayogastra andthe Dasnms, to whom all of theseepithets apply. Or so I thought. In2009 I gave a lecture in Oxford inwhich I discussed this passage. I tookthe compound dvdaasthnapja,worshipping at the twelve places, torefer to the twelve Jyotirliga templesof iva scattered around India, at whichthe aiva Dasnms are often found.But Dr Sanjukta Gupta suggestedthat it referred to the Pcartrika andrvaiava practice of applying therdhvapura, the Vaiava sectarianmarking, at twelve places on the body.On this page is a Rmnand Tyg

applying them at last years KumbhMel.

My initial reaction was that thiswas unlikely, because the Dasnmsare out-and-out aivas: at the KumbhMels, the Dasnms encampmentis known as the iv Dal, the army ofiva; that of the Rmnands is theRm Dal. Battles between them werefrequent in the two hundred yearsbefore the British took control of theMel, and memories of that period arestrong. At Haridwar last year I wasreminded of the story of two aivaSannyasis, Laksho Giri and BhairoGiri, who refused food each day untilthey had killed five Vaiavas, andwhose depredations are, in Rmnand

legend at least, held to be responsiblefor their militarisation.

Not long after the Oxford lecture,however, I was looking throughmy collection of scans of medievalminiatures of ascetics, returning, as Ioften do, to the following deservedlywell-known depictions by the famouspainter Basawan of a battle between twogroups of Hindu ascetics that happenedat anesar (near Kurukshetra) in 1567.e battle was witnessed by the emperor

Akbar, hence its inclusion and depictionin theAkbar Nma. e two sides in thebattle are the Giri and Pur suborders ofthe Dasnms.

Twelve tilaks Haridwar 2010 James Mallinson

anesar Battle Victoria and Albe

Museum, London (IS.2:61-189


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16/266 I V anesar Battle Victoria and Albert Museum, London (IS.2:62-1896)


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Now if we look closely at thecombatants on both sides we can seethat, wherever visible, they are sportingVaiava tilaks.

It might be argued that this painting,which dates to about 25 years afterthe event, includes a certain amountof artistic license. And similar tilaksin another painting of the same eventfrom a manuscript of the Akbar Nmain the Khuda Buksh Oriental PublicLibrary, Patna, (a scan of which ProfessorPinch kindly provided me with) maybe because the painter was copyingfrom Basawans masterpiece. But thenaturalism of the depictions found inminiatures of this era is well-known,and I can attest that the consistency inthe differing depictions of ascetics fromdifferent sects in the large number of

these paintings that I have consulted isstrikingly coherent.

Furthermore, we have other pictorialevidence of the Vaiava orientation ofat least some of the Dasnm subordersin the 16th century in the form ofa wonderful painting of an asceticencampment from an album known asthe St Petersburg Muraqqa, to whichDr Debra Diamond recently drew myattention (See next page).

It was painted by Mr Sayyd Ali in

about 1565. Unlike the anesar picture,the sadhus sect is not identified in anyaccompanying text, but I am confidentthat again they are Dasnms, probablyPurs or Giris. e similarities betweenthe depiction here and a Dasnm Ngcamp today are striking. (All except ofcourse the absence of smoking: in thesixteenth century the habit was only

just arriving in India and yet to catchon, so the Ngs are still grinding anddrinking bhangrather than smoking it.)

And we may note that these Ngs arenot depicted as warriors - there are noweapons in the picture.

Now to return to my theme: if wezoom in on the mahant of this group(see picture on right), we see that he toois wearing a Vaiava rdhvapura.

One might perhaps contendthat the sadhus depicted here areVaiava Rmnands, or at least theirforerunners, but certain features militateagainst such a contention, such as the

anesar Battle close-up Victoria and Albert Museum, London (IS.2:62-1896)

Mahant wearing a Vaiavardhvapura. Close-up of picture on the following page


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Mughals Visit an Encampment of Sadhus Institute of Oriental Manuscripts, St Petersburg


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ascetics nakedness and ochre clothes:the Rmnands scorn the Sanyssochre clothes which they say are thecolour of Parvats menstrual fluid andthey never go naked. Furthermorethe ascetic practice of holding one ortwo arms in the air for years on endis not undertaken by Rmnandsbecause it permanently disfigures thebody. In historical reports and amongascetics today it is only Sanyss whoperform this penance (see photographon page 8). (In passing, allow me tonote that I think that the Rmnandsforerunners and Sanyss may havebeen very closely connected, perhapseven one and the same, at the time thatthis picture was painted, and that thedifferences I note above came aboutlater.)

So this pictorial evidence suggeststhat the Pur and Giri subsections ofthe Dasnm Ng Sanyss wereoriginally Vaiava - and let me notehere that I have not found any Mughalminiatures from the same period ofascetics wearing aiva markings.

ese Vaiava tilaksgot me thinkingabout the Dasnms and I realised thatin fact the Vaiava features of the orderare legion. So many that there is notenough time for me to list them all here.

I shall mention just a few.

One was staring me in the face:both Datttreya and Kapila areincluded in the relatively commonlists of the 24 avatrs of Viu andthe Datttreyayogastraaccordinglyopens with a magalaverse in praiseof Viu in his form as Narsiha(as whom Padmapda incarnatedin order to save his guru akarafrom a Kplika).

When Dasnms greet each other,they say o namo nrya (sorry,Sanskritists, Im afraid it is usuallynryaand not nryaya). isis the ancient Vaiava akarasalutation taught in a wide range ofDharmastra texts.

ree of the four Dasnm phasare at Vaiava trthas- Badrinath,Dvarka and Puri. (e fourth is at

Shringeri although its shrine is saidin some texts to be Rameshwaram)

akara himself, the supposedfounder of the Dasnmsbutthis attribution is very latewasprobably Vaiava.

e nominal suffix Pur, as far as Iknow, is only found in the names ofVaiavas prior to the 16th centuryor so. See for example vara Pur,the mantra guru of Caitanya.Similarly, during this period, theterm Gos, i.e.~Gosvm, whichcame to refer predominantly toaiva Dasnms, is only used torefer to Vaiava ascetics.

What this illustrates is the remarkable

fluidity of the religious world of 16th-century India, prior to the formalisationof the various traditions. Scholarsincluding Professor Jack Hawley atColumbia have recently drawn attentionto how the bhakti sects of north Indiainstitutionalised themselves duringthe late medieval period, establishingconcrete sectarian identities thatsought to lay claim to a pan-IndianHindu spatial realm. Other than theRmnands, whose overt devotionalism

allows them to straddle both ascetic anddevotional camps, the yogi and asceticorders have not been seen as part ofthis process. Indeed they are oftenviewed as quite distinct from the bhaktitraditions. But very similar processes ofinstitutionalisation can be seen to havehappened to them too.

e aiva orientation of the Dasnmsseems to have taken hold over the courseof the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies, when the Shringeri mahainKarnataka became the most influential oftheir seats. However it is still somewhatastonishing, to me at least, to think thatthey could be so fickle in their affiliation.But perhaps I am projecting laterrivalries onto a past where they did notexist. Professor Vijay Pinch has shownhow the militant Dasnms were typicalmercenaries, fighting for the highestbidder, or whoever they thought wouldbe most strategically advantageous forthem. Perhaps they were equally free

with their great tradition sectarianaffiliation while remaining true to theirguru-lineages.

e contrast with present-dayattitudes is marked. At last yearsKumbh Mel there was a fight in theRmnand camp where I was stayingthat resulted in the hospitalisation oftwo very senior mahants. e fight wascaused by another mahant changinghis tilakfrom that of a bindi-vl, whosports a red dot between his eyebrows,to that of a r-vl, who wears a redstripe. He had done this in order totake up a senior position he had beenoffered, but many Rmnands deemedit inexcusable treachery. (I should notethat there was a caste issue too.)

e institutionalisation of theDasnms followed a similar pattern

to that of the Nths and the VaiavaCatusampradya, of which theRmnands are one branch, in that itinvolved the fixingat least in theory of the orders subdivisions and a claimto pan-Indian status through affiliationwith southern traditions. I should nowlike to take a brief look at the Nthsduring this period, again through thelens of Mughal miniatures.

ere are a good number of paintingsof Nths from the 16th and 17th

centuries, but very few of them actuallyidentify their subjects. On page 21 is apair which we can be fairly sure portrayNths because they are of the Nthcentre at Gorakhkhatri in Punjab. eydepict the emperor Bburs visit there in1505 but were painted in 1580.

On pages 21 and 22 are two close-ups of the same pictures in which theearrings and horns closely associatedwith the Nths are visible.

Note also the multi-coloured necklaceswhich two of the yogis are wearing.ese crop up in a lot of miniaturesbut until recently I was puzzled whatto make of them as I have never seenone worn by todays Nths nor haveNths I have asked been able to identifythem. en I came across the report ofthe Jesuit Monserrate who at the end ofthe 16th century visited Blnth ill,a famous Nth shrine in what is nowPakistani Punjab and which was theheadquarters of the sect until Partition.


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Bburs visit to Gorkhattri, British Library Board (Or.3714fol.197a)

Bburs visit to Gorkhattri, British Library Board (Or.3714fol.320a)]

Bburs visit to Gorkhattri close-up, British Library Board (Or.3714 fol.320a)


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Bburs visit to Gorkhattri close-up, British Library Board (Or.3714 fol.197a)

In Hoylands translation of MonserratesLatin: e mark of [the] leaders rank

is a fillet; round this are loosely wrappedbands of silk, which hang down andmove to and fro. ere are three or fourof these bands.

ere is another early picture inwhich Nths are identified, the so-calledDance of the Dervishes (page 23 andclose-up this page).

is painting is likely to have beencommissioned by Dr Shikoh in the1650s and its captions identify two of theHindu saints at its bottom as Matsyendraand Goraka. Again they have thearchetypal Nth horns and earrings.

ese Nth identifying features,many of which are also mentioned invernacular textual sources, enable us toidentify Nths depicted in pictures evenwhen there is no contemporaneouscaption. us the previouslyunpublished miniatures shown on page24 from the British Library both depictgroups of Nths.

Meanwhile, if we return to the

e Dance of the Dervishes close-up Victoria and Albert Museum,London (I.S. 94-1965)


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e Dance of the Dervishes Victoria and Albert Museum, London (I.S. 94-1965)


23/2624 I V

anesar Battle (pages 15 and 16),which some scholars have suggestedinvolved Nths and have cited asevidence that the Nths were the firstIndian fighting ascetics, we can confirmmy earlier assertion that the combatantsare not Nthsthere is not a horn insightalthough there do appear to beone or two Nths lurking at the edges ofthe action. (See close-up on page 25)

e Nths are in fact the leastmilitarised of Indian ascetic orders.None of the many reports of fightsinvolving ascetics from the 16th to 18thcenturies names them as combatantsand today they take no part in themilitarised processions at the triennialKumbh Melas. Indeed, the Nthsthemselves say they cannot fight becauseit would be too easy for their Knpha

earrings to be ripped out, which resultsin instant excommunication from theorder.

T subject before I conclude: earrings.Photographs on pages 4 and 5 showKnpha Nths with their distinctiveearrings through the cartilages of theirears. If one looks closely at the groupof Nths depicted in Seven Yogis(page25) one can see that their earrings are

not in fact Knpha-style, they are intheir earlobesAnd the Nths in the Akbar Nma

depiction of the anesar battle (page25) also wear their earrings in theirearlobes. As do the Sanyss in thesame picture.

It is not in fact until the lateeighteenth century that we get the firstpictures of Knpha yogis, or indeedthe first instances of the word beingused in texts. On page 26 are threeNths in a miniature from Kishangarhdated 1780.

If we look closely at this picture wecan see that the earrings appear to beworn in the cartilages, although it is notcompletely clear.

Perhaps the earliest definite depictionof a Knpha Yog is in a folio froma wonderful album of pictures of 110characters commissioned by Colonel

James Skinner in 1825 (see page 27).What was going on here? Why did

Seven Yogis British Library Board (J.22,15)

Four Yogis British Library Board (J.22,16)


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Nths at anesar Victoria and Albert

Museum, London (IS.2:62-1896)

Seven Yogis close-up British Library Board (J.22,15)


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Kishangarh Nths. Private Collection

Kishangarh Nths. Close-up. Private Collection

these yogis suddenly decide to cut holesin their ears? Well I dont know wherethey got their inspiration from, butwhat seems to have happened is that abroad swath of yogis of different lineageswore hooped earrings in the lobes oftheir ears and then the Nths, or at leastthose who chose to affiliate themselveswith Goraka, sought to distinguishthemselves by wearing earrings in thecartilages of their ears. is coincidedwith Goraka achieving hegemony overthe Nth sapradyas many disparatesuborders.

C

I few general remarks. I hope I havemanaged to demonstrate how the

received wisdom that hahayoga wasfirst propagated by Goraka when heestablished the Nth order a thousandyears ago by cutting holes in thecartilages of his twelve disciples earsand that all others who practisehahayogaare thus copying the Nths is in need of revision. e key practicesof hahayoga including complex,non-seated sanas, which I have notdiscussed but whose first descriptionsare found in Pcartrika sources

originated among the forerunnersof the Dasnms and Rmnands. isopens up a new world of ethnographicsources for yoga. Hitherto the practiceof yoga among these groups hasbeen seen as a simulacrum of that ofthe Nths, when in fact it is a directdescendant of the original hahayoga.

Id like now to try to locate yoga andyogis within some broader historicalprocesses in which its role is usuallyoverlooked. I have long wondered whytexts on hahayoga were written: why,especially if, as I contend, these practiceshad already been around for severalcenturies, were they not codified untilthe early medieval period? I suggestthat this was due to a broader historicalprocess in which religion becamedemocratised.

Many of the texts of hahayogaexplicitly state that it can be practisedby anyone. Written in simple Sanskritand free from the abstruse metaphysics


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Skinner Knpha close-up British

Skinner Knpha British LibraryBoard (Add.27255 fol.399)

of the Yogastra and its exegesis, or theesoterica of aiva texts on yoga, they arethe first texts on yoga that are accessibleto all. is made its aims i.e. liberationin the case of the bindu-orientedhahayogaand siddhisin the case of aivayoga also accessible to all, doingaway with the need for either asceticrenunciation or priestly intermediaries,ritual paraphernalia and sectarianinitiations. is democratisation ofreligion is found in the bhakti cultsthat started to develop during the sameperiod and may have been a corollaryof the demise of aivism, at least as agrand, state religion.

e democratisation of yoga wasresponsible for the production of itstexts. Ascetics had learnt hahayogathrough oral teachings for centuries,

but once its teachings had opened upto householders, texts were produced,perhaps as the result of patronage bythese new practitioners, who would haveenlisted pandits to codify the teachingsof ascetic gurus.

A concurrent historical process thataffected yoga, or rather yogis, andwhich is related to the democratisationof religion, is one that I have alreadytouched upon: the formation of sectsout of a more fluid religious milieu in

the late medieval period.Nor was yoga immune to other, notspecifically religious, historical processes.us it too saw an explosion in intellectualactivity in the late medieval period,from 1550-1750, which manifested inthe production of a wealth of Sanskritcompendia and commentaries, and eventhe composition of a dozen or so new

Yoga Upaniads, compiled by cobblingtogether passages from earlier works onhahayoga, sometimes even incorporatingentire texts. e end of this period alsosaw the composition of the first trulyNth Sanskrit work, i.e. the first to becomposed after the orders formalisation,namely the Siddhasiddhntapaddhati, atext often claimed in secondary literatureto be as old as the eleventh century, butnone of whose citations or manuscriptsdates to earlier than the middle of theeighteenth century.

e same period saw the compositionf i f l k

such as Ddpanth Sundardss JnSamudra and Sarvgayogapradpik,the Jogpradpak of Jayatarma andseveral Persian works, by both Hindusand Muslims.

Finally, I want to finish byemphasising how it is philology thatunderlies all of what I have said, howit is through critical study of the textsof yoga that one can make sense of theconvoluted historical and ethnographicrecord. As I noted earlier, the corpusof Sanskrit texts on hahayogahas not,until recently, been the subject of criticalstudy. As a result, all pronouncementson its history have been based on a smallgroup of arbitrarily selected, incorrectlydated, supposedly Nth texts, andthe pronouncements of the Nthsthemselves. is, in combination withvarious historical vicissitudes, has led toan unwarranted emphasis on yogas so-called left-hand tantric antecedents,and an absence of any awareness ofthe historical processes that affected itsdevelopment. ere is a great deal morework to be done, both philological andotherwise, but a clearer picture is nowb i i

namarupayogayogis

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