Freda Bedi Cont'd (#3)

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Re: Freda Bedi Cont'd (#3)

Postby admin » Fri May 07, 2021 4:46 am

A Forged Copper-Plate Inscription From Eastern Bengal.
by Theodor Bloch
Archaeological Survey of India Annual Report
P. 255
1907-8

This inscription is written on both sides of a single sheet of copper, measuring 8” by 4-3/4”. The plate has no raised rims, and bears, on its left-hand side, clear indications of having been soldered on to a seal. Nothing is known to me about the exact find spot of the plate, beyond the vague fact, that it came from Eastern Bengal. When I saw it in July, 1908, it was with some Bengali gentleman in Calcutta; however, I understand, that it has since been returned to its owner.

The main point of interest attaching to the inscription on this plate, is the fact that it proves to be an ancient legal forgery, made with the object of claiming the ownership of certain landed property, which, by a previous copper-plate, had been given to certain persons. This fact becomes evident both from paleographical and grammatical reasons. To begin with paleography, the inscription, at first sight, conveys the impression of being written in the alphabet current in North-Eastern India from 600 to 800 A.D. approximately. There are, perhaps, even a few letters that would carry us a little further back, especially such forms as the letter ha in the end of 1.20 (sahasrani), and in its combined form, in the group hma, in 11.11 and 14 (vrahmana-). This form of ha may generally be taken as a test letter proving that any form of writing, in which it occurs, belongs to the 4th or 5th century A.D.1 [See A.S.R. 1903-4, p. 102.] and I believe, there can be no possible doubt about the spuriousness of any inscription, which exhibits, by the side of the ancient Gupta ha, such late forms, as the tu of 1.10 (catu-), and the la of 1.12 (alam) and (lopari-). This last letter la is particularly instructive, as its younger form occurs only twice, in one and the same line, while in the many other places where la has been employed we find forms varying but slightly from the ordinary la of the North-Eastern variety of the Indian Alphabet during the Gupta time. Evidently, the writer had become absent-minded for a moment, and forgot his part as a clever forger, which, otherwise, he has not played badly up to the end. The tu, which he wrote in 1.10, likewise, shows that he was generally accustomed to write this letter in a way which somewhat resembles the modern Bengali form of tu.2 [It may be seen e.g. in 1.15 of the Deopara Inscription of Vijayasena, chatur-jjaladhi=; see Ep. Ind. Vol. I, p. 309, and plate.]

The grammar of the inscription, especially the syntax, is in such a bad state of confusion, that it would be impossible to attempt anything like a connected and literal translation of the text.
Thus, in the beginning, in 1.2, we find the loc. sing. of the present participle, pratapati, connected with the name of the king, Samacaradeve. Evidently this phrase was intended to mean, ‘while Samacaradeva was reigning,’ but pra-tap- is never used in that sense, and the writer of the inscription clearly blundered, perhaps from such phrases as prathivipatau ‘while Samacaradeva was lord of the earth.’ Following close upon this wrongly employed phrase, we read in 11.3 and 4 suvarna-visyadhikrt-antaranga, an epithet, referring to the uparika Jivadatta (1.4). We may well imagine that the writer had in his mind an expression meaning that Jivadatta gained the affection (antaranga, lit. heart) of the people by magnificent gifts of gold (suvarna-visranana), but here as well as in all the following lines of the inscription, it is altogether hopeless to attempt any corrections.

The inscription purports to record a grant of land made during the reign of the Maharajadhiraja, the illustrious Samacaradeva (1.2), by the uparika1 [This term still requires explanation. I only find the Marathi word upari explained by Molesworth as ‘a tenant or farmer, having no right of occupancy, as opp. to thalakari, a landed proprieter’; but this modern term does not appear to help us much further.] Jivadatta (1.4). The grant was made in supersession of a previous one, by which a portion of the land had already been given to certain persons, whose names are not mentioned (11.15ff. prak-tamrapatti-krta-ksettra-kulyavapa-ttvayam-apasya). The recipient of the present grant appears to have been a certain Supratikasvamin (11.5 and 17). The land was situated in the district (mandala) of Kavaraka (1.4).

So far, at least, it appears to me possible to grasp the general meaning of the inscription. But, here again, grave doubts arise in regard to its genuineness. First of all, a name like that of the grantee Supratikasvamin, seems to me an extremely dubious form of an Indian proper name. Likewise, the king’s name Samacaradeva (1.2), meaning ‘His Highness, Decency,’ is certainly very surprising, and I can only imagine, that it might have been employed as a biruda, one of those secondary titles often borne by Indian princes. The case of two of the proper names of mahattaras, mentioned in 11.7 and 8, is still more suspicious. Are we really to believe, that such words as Vatsakunda and Janarddanakunda can ever have been employed as personal proper names? In Sanskrit kunda means ‘a pond,’ and any name, formed with this word, certainly can only be taken as a local, but never as a personal name. Nevertheless, I believe, we are able to understand how the forger came to introduce these two names into the inscription. For it seems very reasonable to assume that he actually found them mentioned in an ancient, genuine grant, which he used for his forgery; but failing to understand them properly, he committed himself to the grave error of treating two local names as personal proper names.

I have already given it as my opinion, that the grant has been forged with the help of and in accordance with another genuine grant, dating approximately from the 7th or 8th century A.D. We may well imagine, that the forger used a genuine document, or a draft of a genuine document, which he found in the Record Office (aksapatala) of one of the States of Eastern Bengal. This genuine document, moreover, does not appear to have been lost to us altogether. In the Indian Antiquary for 1892, page 45, Dr. Hoernle mentions a copper-plate from the Faridpur District in Eastern Bengal, which, as he informs us, had just been sent to him for decipherment. As far as I know, this plate has never been edited completely, and I have at present only the initial lines, published by Dr. Hoernle, to go on with. However, they agree so closely with the opening lines of our present inscription, that I have not the slightest hesitation in looking upon the Faridpur inscription as the genuine archetypes of the present, forged copy.1
[Dr. Hoernle’s Faridpur Grant, according to his transcription (lc.), reads as follows: Svasty-asyam-prthivyam=apratirathe / Nrga-Naghusa-Yayaty-Ambarisa-Samdhrta (sic. !) –Maharajadhi-raja-Sri-Dharmmaditya-bhattaraka-rajye / tad-anumodan-alabdh-aspade (nadhyana P) Kasikayam mahapratihar- oparika-Nagadevasy-addhyasana-kale. With regard to the word put by Dr. Hoernle into brackets, compare 11.2 and 3 of the present inscription: etac-carana-karala (read: kamala)-yugal-aradhan-opatta-navya-vakasikayam. Dr. Hoernle’s reading probably has to be corrected accordingly. Read also sama-dhrtau for sama-dhrta-in the beginning of Dr. Hoernle’s transcript.]

It is possible to assume, that Samacaradeva, the name of the king in the forged inscription, may have been a biruda, or second name, borne by Dharmaditya, the king, mentioned in the opening lines of Dr. Hoernle’s inscription from Faridpur. For I feel rather reluctant to believe that Samacaradeva could be a mere invention. Allowing, as we certainly do, a great state of confusion for any Record Office in Eastern Bengal at the time when the forgery was made, we must, nevertheless, keep in mind that the forgery was made with the object of proving that an entire plot of land was rightly claimed by certain persons, who, hitherto, has been enjoying the possession of only a part of it. At least, the words prak-tamrapatti-krta-ksettra-kulyavapa-ttrayam-apasya, in 11.15-16, uncertain and doubtful though their exact meaning remains to me, were still probably intended for the purpose above mentioned. The case of the present inscription, thus, appears to be the reverse of that of the Madhuban copper-plate inscription of Harsavardhana of Kanauj.2 [Ep. Ind. Vol. I, p. 73.] Here we observe the king, the famous Harsavardhana, issuing a grant of land, in order to set aside a previous forged grant,3 [The term kutasasana, ‘a forged grant,’ is of some interest. Sanskrit kuta, of course, means ‘deceit,’ but as its original meaning is ‘horn,’ it came to be employed in the wider sense of ‘forgery’ evidently, because it was a common thing in ancient India, to sell any carving, made of horn, as ivory. I may mention in this connection, that we learn from one of the inscriptions on the gateways of the Sanchi Stupa, that the stone carving of a certain portion of it was done by the ivory-workers of Vidisa, the modern Bhilsa, a town close to Sanchi; see Ep. Ind. Vol. II, page 378, No. 200 Vedisakehi damta-karaehs rupakamnam katam.] by which the village of Somakundaka had been enjoyed by a Brahman, called Vamarathya. The proprietary right to the said village was transferred by Harsavardhana to the Brahmans Vatasvamin and Sivadevasvamin. But, while the Madhuban plate of Harsavardhana contains a genuine grant, made in order to set aside a kutasasana or forged grant, we have in our plate from Eastern Bengal clearly a katasasana, prepared with the object of proving certain claims to some landed property, which could only be substantiated by means of a forgery. And from the fact, referred to above, that this forged copper-plate from Eastern Bengal bears clear indications of having been soldered on to a seal, we may well conjecture, that this seal actually was a genuine seal, to which the forged plate had been attached in the same manner, as the spurious Gaya plate of Samudragupta actually still bears a genuine seal of one of the Gupta kings attached to it.4 [ See Fleet, Gupta Inscriptions pp. 254-257 and Plate XXXVI.]

In regard to the time, when the present forgery was made, the forms of the letters la and tu, mentioned above, on page 255, seem to carry us back to a comparatively late period, perhaps not earlier than the 11th or 12th century A.D., but I feel rather reluctant to allow too wide a margin for this, as the forger’s work appears to me too clever to be anything that we might call fairly modern.

I now edit the inscription from photographs and impressions prepared from the original copper-plate.

Obverse.

(1) Svasty=Asyam=prthivyam-apratirathe Nrga-Naghusa-Yayaty-Amvarisa-sama-

(2) dhrto (tau)1 [The last aksara looks almost like tam.] Maharajadhiraja-sri-Samacaradeve pratapaty=etac-carana-karala-2 [Read kamala.—The preceding word pratapati is the loc. sing. of the present participle of pra-tap, ‘while he was shining’.]

(3) yugal-aradhan-opatta-navy-avakasi-kayam suvarna-visyadhikrt-antara-

(4) nga uparika-Jivadattas-tad-anumodita-Kavaraka-mandale visaya-

(5) pati-Pavittrako yato=sya vyavaharatah Supratikasvamina jyesth-adhi-

(6) karanika-Damuka-pramukha-sadhikarana-svisaya-mahattara-Vatsa-

(7) kunda-mahattara-Suvipalita3 [This should be either Suvipalita or Srivipalita.] –mahattara-Vihitagsasuida-

(8) mahattara-Priyadasa-mahattara-Janaradanakunda-adayah anye cha

(9) vahavah pradhana vyavaha [ri*] nas-cha vijnaptaderacchasyaham bhavata prasa-4 [As the writer miscalculated the space on the plate, half of the last aksara, sa, has been written above the line.]

(10) dac=cirovasanna-khela-bhu-khandala-kamval [e] catu5 [This letter looks almost like u. Evidently the forger was used to write tu in a similar way as it is written in modern Bengali, viz [x]] h-si*]m[a*]- ntra (nta)-pracanta m niya-

(11) vrahmanopayogaya ca tamrapattikrtya tad=aham sa –prasada-kattra-m=iti yatadhanadaty-alam nasupalatya-saml-oparilikhita-

Reverse.

(13) nye vyavaharibhih samanyasagatas=ca padijnamhrarajnaidha svamsam niraksala-

(14) [ i]cchatogyikrtabhumindam pasyai carthadhamyam krtadasyai vrahman-adayatami

(15) vyavadhrtya karanika-Nayanaga-Kesav-adin=kulacaran=prakalpya prak-tamrapatti-

(16) krta-ksettra-kulyavapa-ttrayam=apasya vyaghra-corakair=yacchepatac-catuh-sima-

(17) lingabhir=d=distam krtv=asya Supratikasvaminah tamrapatti-krtya pratipadita[m*]

(18) simalingani c=attar / Purvvasya[m*] pisacapakkamtti daksinena vidya-

(19) dharajaigika pascimayam candra-campakogakenah uttarena (na) Go-

(20) pendracoraka-grama-sima c=eti / Bhavanti c=attar slokah Sastim=varsa=saha-

(21) srani svarge modati bhumidah aksepta c=anumanta ca1 [read ca.] tany=eva narake vaset 1

(22) Sva-da[t*]tam=para-dattam=va vo hareta vasundharam sva2 [read sa.] visthaya-[m*]krmi[r*]=bhutva pitrbhih

(23) saha pacyate / Samvat 10 4 Kartti di r /

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T. Bloch
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Re: Freda Bedi Cont'd (#3)

Postby admin » Sat May 08, 2021 3:31 am

Naga people
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 5/7/21

Naga people
Total population: 2.8 millions+(approx)
Regions with significant populations
India 2.7 millions+[1]
Nagaland 1,700,000
Manipur 700,000
Arunachal Pradesh 200,000
Assam 40,000 - 80,000
Meghalaya 3,000
Mizoram 1,000
Myanmar 300,000[2]
Naga SAZ 120,000+[3]
Sagaing Division NA
Kachin State NA
Languages: Naga, Northern Naga, Southern Naga, Nagamese Creole, English
Religion: Christianity (majority); Theravada Buddhism; Animism; Heraka
Related ethnic groups: Meiteis, East Asians, Singphos, Tamans†, etc

Nagas[4] are various ethnic groups native to the northeastern India and northwestern Myanmar. The groups have similar cultures and traditions, and form the majority of population in the Indian state of Nagaland and Naga Self-Administered Zone of Myanmar; with significant populations in Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh and Assam in India; Sagaing Division and Kachin State in Myanmar.

The Nagas are divided into various Naga ethnic groups whose numbers and population are unclear. They each speak distinct Naga languages often unintelligible to the others.

Etymology

The present day Naga people have been called by many names, like 'Noga' by Assamese[5] 'Hao' by Manipuri[6] and 'Chin' by Burmese.[7] However, over time 'Naga' became the commonly accepted nomenclature. According to the Burma Gazetteer, the term 'Naga' is of doubtful origin and is used to describe hill tribes that occupy the country between the Chin in the south and Kachin (Singpho) in the Northeast.[8]

Languages

Main article: List of Naga languages

The Naga languages are either classified under the Kuki-Chin-Naga languages or the Sal languages.

Nagas have more language diversity than any other ethnic group or states in India. Naga people speak over 89 different languages and dialects, mostly unintelligible with each other. However, there are many similarities in between different languages spoken by them. The diversity of languages and traditions of the Nagas results most likely from the multiple cultural absorptions that occurred during their successive migrations. According to legend, before settling in the region, these groups moved over vast zones, and in the process, some clans were absorbed into one or more other groups. Therefore, until recent times, absorptions were a source of many interclan conflicts.[9]

In 1967, the Nagaland Assembly proclaimed English as the official language of Nagaland and it is the medium for education in Nagaland. Other than English, Nagamese, a creole language form of the Assamese language, is a widely spoken language. Every community has its own mother tongue but communicates with other communities in either Nagamese or English. However, English is the predominant spoken and written language in Nagaland.[citation needed]

Culture

Art


The Naga people love colour as is evident in the shawls designed and woven by women, and in the headgear that both sexes design. Clothing patterns are traditional to each group, and the cloths are woven by the women. They use beads in variety, profusion and complexity in their jewelry, along with a wide range of materials including glass, shell, stone, teeth or tusk, claws, horns, metal, bone, wood, seeds, hair, and fibre.[10]

According to Dr. Verrier Elwin, these groups made all the goods they used, as was once common in many traditional societies: "they have made their own cloth, their own hats and rain-coats; they have prepared their own medicines, their own cooking-vessels, their own substitutes for crockery.".[11] Craftwork includes the making of baskets, weaving of cloth, wood carving, pottery, metalwork, jewellery-making and bead-work.

Weaving of colorful woolen and cotton shawls is a central activity for women of all Nagas. One of the common features of Naga shawls is that three pieces are woven separately and stitched together. Weaving is an intricate and time consuming work and each shawl takes at least a few days to complete. Designs for shawls and wraparound garments (commonly called mekhala) are different for men and women.

Image
Ancestral Naga Beads, Courtesy Wovensouls Collection

Among many groups the design of the shawl denotes the social status of the wearer. Some of the more known shawls include Tsungkotepsu and Rongsu of the Aos; Sutam, Ethasu, Longpensu of the Lothas; Supong of the Sangtams, Rongkhim and Tsungrem Khim of the Yimchungers; and the Angami Lohe shawls with thick embroidered animal motifs.

Naga jewelry is an equally important part of identity, with the entire tribe wearing similar bead jewelry.

The Indian Chamber of Commerce has filed an application seeking registration of traditional Naga shawls made in Nagaland with the Geographical Registry of India for Geographical Indication.[12]

Cuisine

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Smoked pork with akhuni, a fermented soybean product

Main article: Naga cuisine

Naga cuisine is characterized by smoked and fermented foods.

Folk song and dances

Main article: Music of Nagaland

Folk songs and dances are essential ingredients of the traditional Naga culture. The oral tradition is kept alive through the media of folk tales and songs. Naga folk songs are both romantic and historical, with songs narrating entire stories of famous ancestors and incidents. Seasonal songs describe activities done in a particular agricultural cycle. The early Western missionaries opposed the use of folk songs by Naga Christians as they were perceived to be associated with spirit worship, war, and immorality. As a result, translated versions of Western hymns were introduced, leading to the slow disappearance of indigenous music from the Naga hills.[13]

Folk dances of the Nagas are mostly performed in groups in synchronized fashion, by both men and women, depending on the type of dance. Dances are usually performed at festivals and religious occasions. War dances are performed mostly by men and are athletic and martial in style. All dances are accompanied by songs and war cries by the dancers. Indigenous musical instruments made and used by the people are bamboo mouth organs, cup violins, bamboo flutes, trumpets, drums made of cattle skin, and log drums.[14]

Festivals

The various Naga groups have their own distinct festivals. To promote inter-group interaction, the Government of Nagaland has organized the annual Hornbill Festival since 2000. Another inter-tribe festival is Lui Ngai Ni. The group-specific festivals include:[15]

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hornbill festival

Festival / Ethnic group / Time / Major center

Chiithuni festival / Mao / January (7) / Mao Gate
Sekrenyi / Angami / February / Kohima
Chavan kumhrin / Anal Naga / October (23) / Chandel
Ngada / Rengma N/ ovember (last week) / Kohima
Luira Phanit / Tangkhul Naga / February/March / Ukhrul
Chagaa, Gaan-Ngai, Hega n'gi, Mlei-Ngyi / Zeliangrong Communities - (Liangmei, Rongmei, and Zeme) / December (last week), 10 March for Melei-Ngyi / Tamenglong-Cachar, Jalukie
Sükhrünyie, Tsükhenyie / Chakhesang / January & March/April / Phek
Yemshi / Pochury / September/October / Phek
Moatsü / Ao / May (first week) / Mokokchung
Aoleang / Konyak / April (first week) / Mon
Monyu / Phom / April (first week) / Longleng
Miu / Khiamniungan / May (second week) / Tuensang
Naknyu Lem / Chang / July (second week) / Tuensang
Metemneo / Yimchunger / August (second week) / Tuensang
Amongmong / Sangtam / September (first week) / Tuensang
Tokhu Emong / Lotha / November (first week) / Wokha
Tuluni / Sumi / July / Zunheboto
Thounii Festival / Poumai Naga / January (18th to 22nd) / Senapati


Naga identity

Main article: List of Naga ethnic groups

The word Naga originated as an exonym.[16] Today, it covers a number of ethnic groups that reside in Nagaland, Manipur, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh states of India, and also in Myanmar.

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A Naga tribesman

Before the arrival of the British, the term "Naga" was used by Assamese to refer to certain isolated ethnic groups. The British adopted this term for a number of ethnic groups in the surrounding area, based on loose linguistic and cultural associations. The number of groups classified as "Naga" increased significantly in the 20th century: as of December 2015, 89 groups are classified as Naga by the various sources. This expansion in the "Naga" identity has been due to a number of factors including the quest for upward mobility in the society of Nagaland, and the desire to establish a common purpose of resistance against dominance by other groups. In this way, the "Naga" identity has not always been fixed.[17]

The Kuki people of Nagaland have been classified as "Naga" in the past, but today are generally considered a non-Naga. The Kuki have had good relations with the Naga in the past, but since the 1990s, conflicts have risen, especially in Manipur.

Nagas in India

Several Naga tribes are listed as scheduled tribes in 6 Indian States i.e. Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Maharashtra, Mizoram and Nagaland[18]

Nagas in Myanmar

Nagas in Myanmar are mostly found in Sagaing Division and Kachin state. The Naga territory in Myanmar is marked by Kabaw valley in the south bordering to the Chin state, the Kachin on the north and the Burmese on the east.[19]

The Major Naga ethnic groups in Myanmar are:

1. Konyak

The Konyaks are one of the major Naga[1] ethnic groups. In Nagaland, they inhabit the Mon District—also known as 'The Land of The Anghs'. The Anghs/Wangs are their traditional chiefs whom they hold in high esteem. Facial tattoos were earned for taking an enemy's head.[2]

Other unique traditional practices that set the Konyaks apart are: gunsmithing, iron-smelting, brass-works, and gunpowder-making. They are also adept in making 'janglaü' (machetes) and wooden sculptures.

Festival

Aoleng, a festival celebrated in the first week of April (1-6) to welcome the spring and also to invoke the Almighty's (Kahwang) blessing upon the land before seed-sowing, is the biggest festival of the Konyaks. Another festival, 'Lao Ong Mo', is the traditional harvest festival celebrated in the months of August/September.

Image
A chief of Konyak tribe in his traditional outfit

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A ceremonial basket of the Konyak tribe with a skull and two human heads carved from wood. This basket is a status symbol.

Society

The Konyaks are the largest of the Naga tribes. They are found in Tirap, Longding, and Changlang districts of Arunachal Pradesh; Sibsagar District of Assam; and also in Myanmar. They are known in Arunachal Pradesh as the Wanchos ('Wancho' is a synonymous term for 'Konyak'). Ethnically, culturally, and linguistically the Noctes and Tangsa of the same neighbouring state of Arunachal Pradesh, are also closely related to the Konyaks. The Konyaks were the last among the Naga tribes to accept Christianity. In the past, they were infamous for attacking nearby villages, often resulting in killings and decapitation of the heads of opposing warriors. The decapitated heads were taken as trophies and usually hung in the 'baan' (a communal house). The number of hunted heads indicated the power of a warrior. The headhunting expeditions were often driven by certain beliefs, such as code of honour and principles of loyalty and sacrifice.

The tribal members maintain a very disciplined community life with strict adherence to duties and responsibilities assigned to each of them.

Language

The Konyak language belongs to the Northern Naga sub branch of the Sal subfamily of Sino-Tibetan.

-- Konyak Naga, by Wikipedia


2. Lainong
3. Makury
4. Nokko (Khiamniungan)
5. Para
6. Somra Tangkhul

Image
Tangkhul Naga elder in a ceremonial dress

The Tangkhuls are a major ethnic group living in the Indo-Burma border area occupying the Ukhrul and Kamjong district in Manipur, India and the Somra tract hills, Layshi township, Homalin township and Tamu Township in Burma. Despite this international border, many Tangkhul have continued to regard themselves as "one nation".[2] Tangkhuls living in Burma are also known as Hogo Naga/Eastern Tangkhul/Somra Tangkhul. Also Kokak Naga and Akyaung Ari Naga are included tribally within Tangkhul Naga tribe but their language are quite distinct. The Tangkhul (Somra/Hogo) language in Myanmar is very different from Tangkhul (Ukhrul) spoken in India. The villages in the north like Jessami, kuingai, Soraphung and Chingjaroi (swimai) have quite a different culture than the main Tangkhul group but have more cultural ties with that of the Chakhesang (Jessami and Soraphung) poumai (chingjaroi )tribes.

History

The Tangkhuls, as with other tribes on the hills, came to Manipur, Nagaland, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh from Myanmar entering their present habitats in successive waves of immigration. The Tangkhuls came together with the Angamis, Chakhesangs, Zeliangrongs, Maos, Poumais, Marams and Thangals because all of them have references to their dispersal from Makhel, a Mao village in Senapati district. They had also erected megaliths at Makhel in memory of their having dispersed from there to various directions.

In course of time every Tangkhul village became a small republic like the Greek city states. Every village had an unwritten constitution made up of age-old conventions and traditions. The Tangkhul villages were self-sufficient except for salt, and self-governing units ruled by hereditary or elected chief assisted by a Council of Elders. The chief was a judge, administrator and commander rolled into one.

Hunphun was the headquarters of the Tangkhul Long (Tangkhul Assembly). The Tangkhul annual fair locally known as "Leih Khangapha" used to be held at Somsai in Ukhrul.

The boundary of Manipur and Burma (Myanmar)was laid down by an agreement signed between the British authorities (East India Company) and Burma on 9 January 1834 on the river bank of Nighthee (Chindwin). The Article No.4 (iii) of this agreement relates to the Tangkhul country. "Fourth (iii) - On the north, the line of boundary will begin at the foot of the same hills at the northern extremity of the Kabaw Valley and pass due north up to the first range of hills, east of that upon which stand the villages of Chortor (Choithar), Noongbee (Nungbi), Nonghar (Lunghar), of the tribe called by the Munepooriis (Manipuris) Loohooppa (Tangkhul), and by the Burmahs Lagwensoung, now tributary of Manipoor." As a result of this boundary demarcation without the knowledge let alone consent of the Tangkhuls, many Tangkhul villages situated in the Somrah hills, Layshi township, Tamu township and Homalin township are included under Burma. Later, when India and Burma attained national independence, the Tangkhuls found themselves belonging to two different countries.

Language

Main article: Tangkhul language

The Tangkhul tribe has hundreds of regional dialects. Each village has its own dialect including Khangoi, Khunggoi, Kupome, Phadang, Roudei and Ukhrul. Ukhrul Tangkhul is the literary standard and is used as a lingua franca with most Tangkhul speaking it as a second language. Also Hogo Naga or Eastern Tangkhul or Somra Tangkhul in Burma speak the Somra dialect. Some northern villages (Chingjaroi, Jessami, Soraphung) in Tangkhul area have language more closely related to the Angami-pochuri language group.

A slightly modified English alphabet is used. Tangkhul Language is included in the CBSE syllabus and is the first Tribal language from North East India to be included in the CBSE syllabus.

Demographics

Literacy rate in first language

Because of the diversity in dialects and lack of a standardized language, it is difficult to gauge the literacy level. However, if the knowledge of Tangkhul is taken as an indicator, most young Tangkhuls are losing their grasp of the language, often preferring to use the English language to describe more complex ideas. There are some important factors that contribute to the standardization of English language as the primary medium of learning and communication. Firstly, there are various concrete and abstracts objects and ideas which cannot be termed in Tangkhul language, simply because unlike the English language it does not have a rich vocabulary. Secondly, the emergence of western education, which rapidly change and uplift the live and standard of Tangkhuls led the people to neglect learning the language and hence became a secondary subject. Thirdly, the idea of globalization captures the attention of the people to neglect their own language and culture...

Tangkhul Villages

There are approximately 380 Tangkhul villages in India and 50 Tangkhul villages in Myanmar. The villages in the west include Hongman, Aheng, Champhung, Changta, Hoome, Kachai, Lamlang, Leisan, Maichon, Ngainga, Phalee, Ringui, Roudei (TM Kasom), Seikhor, Shokvao, Sinakeithei, Sirarakhong, Somdal, Taloi, Tanrui, Teinem, Theiva, Tora, Zingshong etc. And villages in the north include Pui, Huishu, Halang, Chingai, Chingjaroi, Jessami, Kalhang, Khamasom, Kharasom, Kuirei, Longpi, Lunghar, Ngahui, Marem, Phungcham, Paorei, Peh, Sihai, New Tusom, Varangai, Razai, etc. And villages in the middle frontier are Choithar (Ruithar), Hatha, Hungpung, Hunphun, Khangkhui, Langdang, Lungshang, Nungshong, Pharung, Phungcham, Ramva, Shangshak, Shangzing, Shirui, Tashar. Villages in the east includes Alang, Apong, Bungpa, Chahong, Chamu, Chatric, Chungka, Grihang, Godah, Hangao, Kachouphung, Kanpat, Kalhang, Kuirei, Khambi, Khayang, Khamasom, Khunthak, Koso, Kumram, Langkhe, Langli, Leishi, Longpi, Loushing, Maileng, Maku, Mapum, Ningchao, Ningthi, Nongman, Khonglo, Nungou, Patbung, Pheishat, Phungtha, Phange, Pushing, Ramphoi, Ramsophung, Roni, Ronshak, Sampui,Sehai, Shakok, Shingcha, Siyang, Skipe, Sorathen, Shungri (Sorde), Sorpung, Yedah, Zingsui, Hangou Kaphung (H.kaphung) etc. Villages in the south include Bohoram, Chadong, Island, Irong Kongleiram, Joyland (Muirei), Kankoi, Keihao, Kaprang, Kashung, Kasom, Laikoiching( Bongso), Lairam, Lamlai, Leingaching, Leiyaram, Lishamlok, Lambakhul, Litan, Lungpha, Lungtoram, Manthouram, Mapao, Maryland, Mawai, Nambashi, New Canaan, Ngarumphung, Nongdam, Nungthar, Poirou, Riha, Saman, Sailent, Sharkaphung, Marou, Shingta, Shingkap, Tamaram, Tangkhul Hungdung, Itham, Thoyee, Wunghon, Zingshao,Yeasom, Irong, etc.

Culture

The culture of Tangkhul revolves around traditional beliefs and custom, exercises being passed down, and ancient tools and materials, like spears, swords, shields, bows, axes and spades. Culturally, the Tangkhuls share close affinities with the Meiteis of the Imphal Valley.

The Tangkhuls are fond of singing, dancing and festivities. For every season, there is a festival that lasts almost a week. Luira phanit, the seed sowing festival is the major festival. The Tangkhuls are an egalitarian society. There is no caste or classes in the society. Every person is equal in the society and the society follows patriarchal system.

The life and art of the Tangkhul are attractive and captivating. Their different clothing, utensils, architecture, monumental erections and memorial set-ups depict their dexterity in art, which also speak of their sense of beauty and fitnesse...

Music and dance

Tangkhuls are music lovers and their songs are soft and melodious. Apart from encoding into the music the varied seasonal and cultural ideas and philosophies, music is a medium wherein historical events are also related in the lyrics. In as much as religious fervor is incorporated and composed in the songs, the romantic nature of the people also finds its expressions in the music. There are various varieties of songs, some are mood special, some are festival/seasonal specials. These folk songs and folklores can be taught and sung by anybody, anytime, but there are also some specific musical expressive melodies of every region or area. People are restricted from singing certain songs outside of particular seasons or occasions. Some festivals have ceased since the introduction of Christianity to the region.

These folk songs and folklores can be played or accompanied by musical instruments. Some of the musical instruments are tingteila (violin), tala (trumpet), pung (drum), mazo (woman's mouth-piece), sipa (flute), and kaha ngashingkhon (bamboo pipe).

Corresponding to the rhythmic composition of the songs, the dances of the Tangkhuls are also rhythmic and these are eventful and vigorous. There are also some special occasional dances, like the Kathi Mahon, a dance for the dead; Laa Khanganui, a virgin dance during Luira Festival; and Rai Pheichak, a war dance. Rewben Mashangva, a member of the Tangkhul community, is instrumental in popularising the music of the community to the world. The majority of the youth know how to play the guitar and other musical instruments. However, Western culture has been blamed for the declining popularity of some ancestral songs.

History of Christianity among Tangkhuls

Christianity is the major religion of the Tangkhul Nagas. Tangkhuls were the first community in Manipur to become Christians. Christianity was first brought to the Tangkhul people by Rev. William Pettigrew in 1896.[5] The first christian church of Manipur, Phungyo Baptist Church was set up among the Tangkhuls in Ukhrul. The story goes that the chief of Hunphun, Raihao, had stories about his great grandfather dreaming that a white missionary would come to Ukhrul. Because of this, when Rev. Pettigrew showed up, Raihao allowed him to live among them and work as a missionary. When the chief was converted, the whole villagers converted as well, and Christianity has remained a prominent religion among Tangkhul Nagas to this day. The New Testament was translated into the local language in 1924.[5] Also Tangkhuls (Hogo/Somra) in Burma follow the religion of Animism, Buddhism and Christianity.

-- Tangkhul Naga, by Wikipedia


7. Tangshang

Image
Tangsa man

The Tangsa or Tangshang Naga in India and Myanmar (Burma), is a Naga tribe native to Changlang District of Arunachal Pradesh, parts of Tinsukia District of Assam, in north-eastern India, and across the border in Sagaing Region, parts of Kachin State, Myanmar (Burma). The Tangshang in Myanmar were formerly known as Rangpang, Pangmi, and Heimi/Haimi. Tangshang/Tangsa is the largest Naga sub-tribe having an approximate population of 450,000 (India and Myanmar). Their language is called Naga-Tase in The Ethnologue and Tase Naga in the ISO code (ISO639-3:nst). They are a scheduled group under the Indian Constitution (where they are listed under ‘other Naga tribes’) and there are many sub-groups within Tangsa on both sides of the border.

Background

The Tangshang in Myanmar as well as the Tangsa in India regard themselves as a Naga tribe. They are well-built and of medium-stature. Today Tangsa people live in the Patkai mountains, on the border of India and Burma, and some live in the plains areas on the Indian side of the border. Many Tangsa tell of migrations from what is now Mongolia, through the South-West China Province of Yunan into Burma. Tangsa traditions suggest that they settled in the existing region from the beginning of the 13th century. It is believed that in their native place in China and Burma they were known as ‘Muwa’ and ‘Hawa’ respectively. The term ‘Hawa’ (also pronounced ‘Hewe’ or ‘Hiwi’) is used by many Tangsa to refer to the whole group of Tangsa. The term Tangsa is derived from ‘Tang’ (high land) and ‘Sa’ (son) and means 'people of the high land'...

About 70 different subtribes have been identified;[1][2][3] Within India, the most recently arrived Tangsa are known as Pangwa...

Culture

The Tangsa's habitation along the Myanmar border resulted in cultural influence from neighbouring groups across the border and the adoption of Burmese dress among many tribal members.[4]

Traditionally, the Tangsa kept long hair in both sexes, which is tied into a bun and covered with a piece of cloth, known in some Tangsa varieties as the Khu-pak / Khu-phop. The menfolk traditionally used to wear a long and narrow piece of cloth called lamsam / lengti that barely covers the hip and pelvis region. ... On the other hand, the costume of the womenfolk traditionally used to be a piece of cloth wrapped around the chest and a similar piece of cloth wrapped around the waist extending just below the knees...

Lifestyle

Traditionally Tangsa people practiced shifting cultivation (known as Jhwum in Assamese). Nowadays those Tangsa in the plains area of India practice wet rice cultivation. In the traditional agriculture, using simple manual tools, the Tangsa raise crops that include paddy, millet, maize and arum, and vegetables. Tangsa people make scanty use of milk and milk products, although milk tea is now served in many Tangsa houses. Traditional meals consist of a wide variety of recipes. But, staple foods are boiled or steamed rice, vegetables boiled with herbs and spices (stew) and boiled or roasted fish or meat. Snacks include boiled or roasted arum or topiaca. Traditional drinks include smoked tea (phalap) and rice beer (called ju, kham or che).[5]

Owing to the climate and terrain, the Tangsa live in stilt houses, which are divided into many rooms. Like the Nocte, the Tangsa traditionally had separate dormitories for men, known in Longchang Tangsa as Looppong for the males and Likpya for the female.

Traditionally, the Tangsa believed in a joint family system, and property is equally divided between all family members. A tribal council, known as Khaphua (Longchang), Khaphong (Muklom) was administered by a Lungwang (chief), who sees to the daily affairs of the Tangsa group.

Religion

Nowadays Tangsa follow a variety of religions. Traditionally their beliefs were animistic. One example of the animistic beliefs still practised is the Wihu Kuh festival held in some parts of Assam on 5 January each year. This involves sacrifice of chickens, pigs or buffaloes and prayers and songs to the female earth spirit, Wihu.

This group believe in a supreme being that created all existence, locally known as Rangkhothak / Rangwa / Rangfrah, although belief in other deities and spirits is maintained as well. Many followers of Rangfrah celebrate an annual festival called Mol or Kuh-a-Mol (around April/May), which asks for a bumper crop. Animal sacrifice, in particular the sacrifice of 'Wak' (pigs) and 'Maan' (cows), is practised. At funerals a similar ceremony is undertaken and a feast between villagers is held by the bereaved family. After dusk, man and women start dancing together rhythmically with the accompanying drums and gongs.

Some Tangsas, particularly the Tikhak and Yongkuk in India and many Donghi in Myanmar, have come under the influence of Theravada Buddhism,[6] and have converted.[7] There are Buddhist temples in many Tikhak and Yongkuk villages.

Most of the Tangsas, including most of the Pangwa Tangsas, and nearly all of the Tangshang in Myanmar, have accepted Christianity.[8] Probably the most widespread Christian denomination in both Myanmar and India is Baptist. Tangsa Baptist Churches' Association with its headquarters at Nongtham under Kharsang sub-division is the largest Baptist Association working among the Tangsas with more than 100 churches affiliated to it[5], but there are also large numbers of Presbyterians in India, and perhaps smaller numbers of Catholics, Church of Christ and Congregationalists.

Out of a total of 20,962 Tangsa (proper) living in Arunachal Pradesh, 6,228 are Animist (29.71%) and 5,030 are Hindu (24.00%). Most of the remaining are Christian (44%), with a Buddhist minority of close to 3%. There are another 8,576 Tangsa residing in Arunachal, belonging to fringe Tangsa groups such as Mossang, Tikhak and Longchang. The Mossang, Rongrang, Morang, Yougli, Sanke, Longphi, Haisa, and Chamchang (Kimsing) tribes are mostly Christian. Most of the Longchang and Langkai are Rangfrahites, while the Tikhaks are evenly divided into Christians and Buddhists. Taisen is majority Buddhist. The Moglum Tangsa are evenly divided between Rangfrah, Animists and Christians. The Namsang Tangsa are two-thirds Animist, with the remaining one-third Hindu.[9]

-- Tangsa Naga, by Wikipedia


8. Anal Naga

The Anāl are some of the oldest settlers of the present day Manipur. They belong to the Naga tribe native to Manipur state in North-East India and part of Myanmar. They are listed as a Scheduled Tribe, in accordance with The Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes Orders (Amendment) Act, 1976 Indian Constitution.[2][3] The Anāl tribe is one of the 'sixty six Naga tribes' of the Naga ancestral homeland.[4] The members of this tribe are found both in India and Myanmar. In India, they are situated in the States of Manipur and Nagaland but mostly concentrated in the former. In the State of Manipur, the Anāl Naga population concentrated in Chandel [5] and a few Anāl villages are located in its neighbouring districts, Churachandpur district has about three villages and Thoubal district has one or two.[6]

The Anāls in Myanmar live in the Sagaing sub-division. The Anāl population in this part has been dwindling. At present, there are three Anāl villages, 'Nga Kala, Napalun and Haika'. Formerly the Anāls had no problem to move or visit Anāl areas now in Myanmar and vice versa.[7] However, with the demarcation of boundaries, they came under two distinct units and the consequent restriction imposed on the movement of the people of both sides, the Anāls had to stop such free movement between them. Consequently, there has not been any interaction between the members of the same tribe now existing under two different countries. The Anāl community is one of the oldest inhabitants of the hill areas in Manipur state. The archaeological findings at Chakpikarong also point it. According to Census of India, the Anāl population was 94,242 and 1991 census placed as 82,693.[8]

The Anāl Naga is recognized as a tribe in Manipur since 1951. This recognition of Anāl tribe was done by Rochunga Pudaite[9] who met the Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in Delhi in 1951 and requested him to give Scheduled Tribe recognition to the Hmar tribe of Northeast India by wearing a traditional Hmar attire. The PM then asked him if he knew of the existence other tribes which had not been included in the list. Rochunga then added the tribes of Anāl, Kom, Paite, Vaiphei, Ralte, Chothe and others, thus paving way for their recognition. However, it was only after the Scheduled Tribes Reorganisation in 1956 that all the aforementioned tribes were recognised by the Manipur government. Therefore, Anāl Naga is one of 33 tribes in Manipur.[10] The Anāl Language falls under Tibeto-Burman languages family.[11] Referred to them as one of the "Naga" tribes of Manipur and recognised as part of the List of Naga tribes by the state government of Manipur.[12]

History

The Anāl tribe is one of the oldest indigenous tribes in the state of Manipur in Northeast India.[13] Chakpikarong is a land of the Anāls since the time the earliest settlers occupied the hill country of Manipur. The Anāls settled both in India and Myanmar, their settlements crossed the Indo-Myanmar border. In India, the members of the tribe are found in the state of Manipur, mainly in Chandel district and a few villages in Churachandpur district and Thoubal district. There are hundred and forty one villages in Chandel district. The neighbouring districts, Churachanpur district has three Anāl villages, namely Kolen, Dutejol and Warkhu, and the Thoubal district has one Anāl village- Moirankhom. Under the Myanmar administrative unit, there are three Anāl villages namely, Ngakala, Napaleen and Haika. According to the census report of 2001, the total Anāl population in India ais 21,242. The Anāl population in Myanmar is not known because many of them are assimilated to the major community. Originally, the Anāls were animistic but are now largely Christian.[14] However, Christianity became a religion for the Anāls only after India's independence. Today, more than 95 per cent of Anāls are Christians and are concentrated in Chandel of Manipur.[15] One of the positive impacts of Christianity among the Anāls is education.

The Anāls are amongst the indigenous of Manipur. The history of Moirang (a Meitei kingdom) and the Anāl traditional songs and tales suggests an existence in the presence of inhabited areas since the beginning of the 1st century AD or much earlier.[13] The Anāl cultural and traditional relationship with the Meitei brethren dates backs to 33 AD, and the Meitei King Wangbarel (Pakhangba) married an Anāl woman belonging to the Wanglum clan of Anāl Khullen.

Folklore

In the words of Horam,[16] in ‘Naga Polity, "it can be said that the Nagas at first live in stone caves or in the womb of the earth".[17] YL. Roland Shemmi also writes,"Angami, Lotha, Rengam belief that they came out from the earth hole. Tangkhul Naga came out from earth hole at Hundung. Ao tribe believes that they were the first to come out of underground cave". Thus cave theory as an epicenter of their origin is common among many tribes and all the Nagas tribe shared this theory. Anāl legend states that the Anāl, together with the other Pakan tribes, originated in Mongolia. They lived in a cave guarded by a man-eating tiger. Two Anāls, Hanshu and Hantha, killed the tiger with the help of birds from the sky. After the tiger's death, the tribes left the cave, traveling through China, Tibet, and numerous other areas before settling in Manipur.[18]:1515–6 The Anāls are divided into two groups based on who they believe they are descended from, Hanshu and Hantha .[19]:119–120

Ethnic identity

The political relationship between the Nagas and the Kukis since the eve of British colonialism to post-British era has always been opposed to one another. The Anāls oral history says they were always at war with the Kukis. In Chakpikarong (The Anāls Naga habitation) Stone Age culture age has been explored and found the existence of this culture.[20] This shows the Anāl Naga tribe is one of the oldest tribes of Manipur state. The oral history of the Anāls says that Anāls were oppressed by the Kukis during the Kuki rebellion of 1917.[20]

Demographics

The Anāls live in the Manipur region of Northeast India, which is surrounded by the Imphal valley to the north, Churachandpur district to the west, the Chin Hills to the south and Kabaw valley to the east. The area is very hilly, with thick jungles and many wild animals. According to the 2001 census, there are approximately 94,242 Anāls in Manipur.[21] In 1981 they were living in 95 villages.[19]:120 In 1981 they were living in 95 villages.[22][23]

Social life

In social practices, many of them are unique. One conspicuous trait is the division of tribe's clans into two distinct groups, viz., 'Mosum' and 'Murchal'. Such as marriage can occur between the members of these two blocks, if any intra-marriage prevails, it leads to ostracism of the concerned couple. The economy of Anāls is primarily based on crude agriculture.[6]

The Anāls' political system, since time immemorial, is democratic in nature and practice. This could be evinced by the election of village authority: the chief and his associates are elected by either voice vote or raise hand.[6][24]

The Anāl traditionally live in windowless wooden houses with thatched roofs, erected above ground level. The houses have two doors of different sizes and two rooms, a bedroom and a storeroom (Anal: zuhmun).[18]:1516

Anāl men traditionally wear a lungi (similar to a dhoti) and a simple shirt, called a pakan lungum; they also strap on a basket (Anal: vopum) for carrying dao and other tools.[18]:1516–7 Women wear undergarments, a skirt, blouse, and shawl, which cover them from their heads to their knees; they also carry a basket (Anal:Bowl).[18]:1516–7 Both sexes can wear jewellery, including rings, necklaces, and bracelets, as well as special long earrings made from insect wings.[18]:1517 Traditionally clothing is made by the women.[18]:1517

Anāl are traditionally monogamous, although cases of polygyny have been reported. In order to marry, an Anāl man must pay a bride price (Anal: jol min); after marriage, the wife moves to the husband's home. Divorce (Anal: ithin) is permitted among the Anāl, although a fine may be incurred.[19]:122

The Anāl are traditionally polytheistic, believing in a supreme creator named Asapavan, as well as a secondary deity named Wangparel and numerous spirits. The largest Anāl rite is called Akam, which is divided into six stages (Judong, Bhuthawsing, Hni, Sapia, Akapidam, and Dathu) and takes six years to complete. During the Akam, the Anāl sacrifice mithun and pigs and offer a feast to the community. Some Anāl have converted to Christianity.[18]:1517

Traditionally, Anāl men work as carpenters, particularly the manufacture of bamboo furniture, and in basketry. Women traditionally specialized in weaving and spinning cotton, which is grown locally. Due to modernization and competition from factory-produced goods, many traditional methods have been abandoned.[18]:1517–8 They are also farmers, harvesting rice, corn, soybeans, pumpkins, tomatoes, and gourds.[19]:125

The Anāl have many traditional musical instruments, including the khuwang (drum), sanamba (three-stringed fiddle), dolkhuwang (gong), pengkhul (trumpet), tilli (flageolet), rasem (a pipe instrument), and diengdong (xylophone)[18]:1517 They are good dancers and their traditional dances include the kamdam, which is performed by young people for the akam festival, and the ludam, which celebrated victorious headhunting.[25]

The Anāl are omnivores, eating fish, eggs, beef, pork, and other kinds of meat as well as fruits and vegetables.[19]:121 Although traditionally they do not drink milk, some families now drink it with tea. A form of rice beer, known as zupar or zuhrin, is also drunk.[19]:121

-- Anāl Naga, by Wikipedia


Some other minor Naga groups are Lamkang, Moyon, Koka, Longphuri, Paung Nyuan, etc
The townships which are inhabited by the Nagas are:

1. Homalin
2. Lahe with Tanbakwe sub-township
3. Layshi with Mowailut sub-township and Somra sub-township
4. Hkamti
5. Nanyun with Pangsau and Dunghi sub-township
6. Tamu of Sagaing Division and
7. Tanai of Kachin state

Anal and Moyon are mainly found in Tamu township on the south and a few Somra Nagas are also found in and around Tamu bordering to Layshi jurisdiction. Makury, Para and Somra tribes are mainly found in Layshi township. Makury Nagas and a few Somra Nagas are also found in Homalin township. Lahe is highly populated by Konyak, Nokko, Lainong and Makury tribes. Nanyun on the north is the home of Tangshang tribe which comprises more than 54 sub-dialect groups. Homlin township is highly populated by the considered lost tribes (Red Shans). But Kukis, Burmese, Chinese and Indians are also found there. Hkamti township is populated altogether by all the Naga tribes majority and with a number of Burmese, Shans, Chinese and Indians. Tanai in Kachin state of Myanmar is inhabited by the Tangshang Nagas among the Kachin people.

Gallery

Image
An Angami Naga girl in her traditional attire

Image
An Ao Naga girl in her traditional attire

Image
A Lotha Naga girl in her traditional attire

See also

• History of the Nagas
• List of Naga ethnic groups
• List of Naga languages
• List of Naga people

References

1. "Census of India". Census India. MHA, Govt ofIndia.
2. "Naga ethnic group Myanmar".
3. "Nagas of Myanmar".
4. "Nagas". Minority Rights Group. Retrieved 27 November 2020.
5. Grierson. Linguistic Survey of India Vol iii part ii. p. 194.
6. Hodson, TC (1911). The Naga tribes of Manipur. p. 9.
7. Upper Chindwin District vol A. Burma Gazetteer. p. 22.
8. Burma Gazetteer, Upper chindwin vol A. page 23. published 1913
9. Drouyer, Azevedo, Isabel, Drouyer, René, THE NAGAS -MEMORIES OF HEADHUNTERS vol.1, White Lotus, 2016, p. 7
10. Ao, Ayinla Shilu. Naga Tribal Adornment: Signatures of Status and Self (The Bead Society of Greater Washington. September 2003) ISBN 0-9725066-2-4
11. "Arts and crafts of the Nagas" Archived 19 June 2009 at the Wayback Machine, Nagaland, Retrieved 23 June 2009
12. "Naga shawls in for geographical registration", AndhraNews.net, 7 April 2008
13. Shikhu, Inato Yekheto. A Re-discovery and Re-building of Naga Cultural Values: An Analytical Approach with Special Reference to Maori as a Colonized and Minority Group of People in New Zealand (Daya Books, 2007), p. 210
14. Mongro, Kajen & Ao, A Lanunungsang. Naga Cultural Attires and Musical Instruments (Concept Publishing Company, 1999), ISBN 81-7022-793-3
15. "Tourism: General Information". Government of Nagaland. Archived from the original on 30 October 2011. Retrieved 24 October 2011.
16. Christopher Moseley (6 December 2012). Encyclopedia of the World's Endangered Languages. Routledge. pp. 572–. ISBN 978-1-135-79640-2. Retrieved 8 September 2013.
17. Arkotong Longkumer (4 May 2010). Reform, Identity and Narratives of Belonging: The Heraka Movement in Northeast India. Continuum. pp. 6–7. ISBN 978-0-8264-3970-3. Retrieved 8 September2013.
18. https://tribal.nic.in/ST/LatestListofSc ... tribes.pdf
19. http://morungexpress.com/nagas-myanmar- ... otten-land

Further reading

• Drouyer, A. Isabel, Drouyer René, " THE NAGAS: MEMORIES OF HEADHUNTERS- Indo-Burmese Borderlands vol.1"; White Lotus, 2016, ISBN 978-2-9545112-2-1.
• Wettstein, Marion. 2014. Naga Textiles: Design, Technique, Meaning and Effect of a Local Craft Tradition in Northeast India. Arnoldsche, Stuttgart 2014, ISBN 978-3-89790-419-4.
• von Stockhausen, Alban. 2014. Imag(in)ing the Nagas: The Pictorial Ethnography of Hans-Eberhard Kauffmann and Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf. Arnoldsche, Stuttgart 2014, ISBN 978-3-89790-412-5.
• Shongzan, Mayaso, "A Portrait of the Tangkhul Nagas"; Exodus, 2013, ISBN 978-81-929139-0-2.
• Stirn, Aglaja & Peter van Ham. The Hidden world of the Naga: Living Traditions in Northeast India. London: Prestel.
• Oppitz, Michael, Thomas Kaiser, Alban von Stockhausen & Marion Wettstein. 2008. Naga Identities: Changing Local Cultures in the Northeast of India. Gent: Snoeck Publishers.
• Kunz, Richard & Vibha Joshi. 2008. Naga – A Forgotten Mountain Region Rediscovered. Basel: Merian.
• Singh, Waikhom Damodar (21 June 2002). "The Indo - Naga Ceasefire Agreement". Manipur Online (originally published in The Sangai Express). Archived from the original on 26 May 2005.
• Shimray, Atai, A.S. - "Let freedom ring?: Story of Naga nationalism".

Novels

• Ben Doherty, Nagaland, Wild Dingo Press, Melbourne, 2018, ISBN 978-0-6480-6637-8.

External links

• Official site of Nagaland state government
• Photos of Nagas in Burma by Goto Osami
• Photos of Nagas by Pablo Bartholomew
• Article "Textile & Bead Art of Nagaland"
• National Geographic Why These Headhunters Converted to Christianity
• Naga National Council's Official site
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Akhāṛās: Warrior Ascetics
by Matthew Clark
Brill's Encyclopedia of Hinduism Online
2018



The Hindi term akhāṛā means “wrestling arena,” from which akhāṛiyā derives, meaning “master fighter,” “skilled manoevrer,” or “strategist.” There is a network of akhāṛās throughout India, particularly in the north, where men train in wrestling and other methods of fighting. Akhāṛās specialize in various techniques of fitness and combat, which include the use of weights, clubs, and maces. The akhāṛās have a resident guru. The wrestlers’ patron deity is → Hanumān. This network of akhāṛās, which serves local men who typically train before or after work, is distinct from another network of akhāṛās pertaining to groups of (formerly) militant ascetics with particular religious and sectarian identities.

That religious ascetics would be inducted into fighting regiments is neither necessarily perverse – in the context of the history of traditional Hinduism – nor necessarily a radical break from a previous mode of life. There is an obvious similarity in the lifestyles of both soldiers and ascetics: both require rigorous self-discipline, enduring the hardships of lengthy travel and extended periods of camping; subsistence, sometimes, on meager rations; being subservient to a commander or guru; and enduring extended (or permanent) celibacy. In medieval India, asceticism, trade, and war were not incompatible.

Fighting ascetics are usually referred to as nāgās (deriving from the Hindi term naṅgā, “naked”). Nāgās are usually almost naked, except for a loincloth (laṅgoṭī/kaupīn), and besmear their bodies with ash known as bhasm or vibhūti (“supernatural powers,” “dignity”), the most sacred (or pure) form of which is made from the product of burnt and filtered cow dung. They keep a sacred fire (dhūnī), and some have experience of training in fighting and the use of basic weaponry, particularly the sword, mace, and dagger. Some members (particularly nāgās) of some akhāṛās smoke a great quantity of gāñjā (the buds of female cannabis plants) and caras (cannabis resin), mostly in chillums (Hind. cilam, clay pipe), and may also regularly eat bhāṅg (prepared cannabis leaves; see also → intoxicants). While some nāgās keep their hair short, many wear jaṭā (dreadlocks). In terms of appearance and lifestyle, nāgās are in many respects indistinguishable from South Asian Sufi faqīrs (Arab.; Hind. fakīr). Some nāgās practice rigorous austerities, such as maintaining an arm aloft (ūrdhvabāhu) or remaining standing (khaṛeśvarī) for many years (see also → sādhus); some practice yoga exercises.


Origins of the Akhāṛās

One of the earliest available (semihistorical) references to militant (or armed) ascetics (or yogīs) in the Indic world is in Bāṇabhatṭạ’s 7th-century romance Harṣacarita based on the life of King Harsạ, who ruled (606–648 CE) North India from Kanauj and Thanesar (Sthāṇvīśvara), near Kurukshetra (150 km northwest of Delhi). In the Harṣacarita appear two ascetics (Pātālasvāmin and Karṇatāla) who eventually become employed as personal guards to King Pusp̣abhūti, “elevated to a fortune beyond their wildest dreams . . . occupying the front rank in battle” (HCar. 3.130). In the Bṛhatkathāślokasaṃgraha (8th–10th cents.), there is a reference (18.202–207) to “mendicant mercenaries with strange weapons” who are described as shaven-headed → Pāśupatas who are protecting trade. There are a couple of references (see Sanderson, 2009, 261–262n616) in the Mayasaṃgraha (5.182) and the Piṅgalāmata (10.28–31), from the 9th to 12th centuries, to Śaiva maṭhas (monasteries) containing armories for the storage of weapons of war. In a frequently cited reference to fighting ascetics in the mid-16th-century Bījak of → Kabīr (Ramainī 69), scorn is poured on yogīs, siddhas (another name for yogīs), mahants (chiefs/superiors), and ascetics who resort to arms, keep women, and collect property and taxes. An entourage of (perhaps) three thousand, which included armed yogīs in service to a yogī king in conflict with a ruler in Gujarat, is described by Ludovico di Varthema of Bologna the early 16th century (see Winter Jones, 1863, 111–112) in what may be the first account by a European of a contingent of armed ascetics.

Another incident often referred to in accounts of the early history of akhāṛās is of a conflict reported at Thanesar. In 1567 the Mughal emperor Akbar (1542–1605) watched a battle between two groups of ascetics who had become disputatious concerning the right to collect alms from pilgrims who had gathered at an annual pilgrimage to Thanesar. The two groups, who numbered around three hundred and five hundred, are referred to, respectively, as “Purī” and “Kur” (or Gur) saṃnyāsīs by Abu al-Fazl, one of the court biographers of Akbar. The “Gurs” were in all probability “Giris” (Purī and Giri are two of the ten names of saṃnyāsīs: see below). The fighting ascetics were armed with stones, swords, and cakras (metal wheels that may be hurled at opponents). Akbar instructed his troops to assist the Purīs, who were the faction weaker in number, resulting in their victory. About a score of the combatants died.

The Sang-joe is also a great occasion of alms and charity, and the priests, especially the acolytes and disciples, go round at dawn to collect alms in the temple when the service is concluded. The people being more generously disposed at this season than at other times give quite liberally. I am sorry to say that this pious inclination on the part of the people is often abused by mischievous priests, who do not scruple to go, in violation of the rules, on a second or even third or fourth round of begging at one time. I was astonished to hear that the priests who are on duty to prevent such irregular practices are in many cases the very instigators, abetting the younger disciples in committing them. The ill-gotten proceeds go into the pockets of those unscrupulous ‘inspectors’ who, urged on by greed, even go to the extreme of thrashing the young disciples when they refuse to go on fraudulent errands of this particular description. Now and then the erratic doings of these lads come to the ears of the higher authorities, who summon them and inflict upon them a severe reprimand, together with the more smarting punishment of a flogging. The incorrigible disciples are not disconcerted in the least, being conscious that they have their protectors in the official inspectors, and of course they are immune from expulsion from the monastery.

These mischievous young people are in most cases warrior-priests. These warrior-priests, of whom an account has already been given, are easily distinguished from the rest by their peculiar appearance and especially by their way of dressing the hair. Sometimes their heads are shaved bald, but more often they leave ringlets at each temple, and consider that these locks of four or five inches long give them a smart appearance. This manner of hair-dressing is not approved by the Lama authorities, and when they take notice of the locks they ruthlessly pull them off, leaving the temples swollen and bloody. Painful as this treatment is, the warriors rather glory in it, and swagger about the streets to display the marks of their courage. They are, however, cautious to conceal their ‘smart’ hair-dressing from the notice of the authorities, so that when they present themselves in the monastery they either tuck their ringlets behind the ears or besmear their faces with lamp-black compounded with butter. When at first I saw such blackened faces I wondered what the blackening meant, but afterwards I was informed of the reason of the strange phenomenon and my wonder disappeared as I became accustomed to the sight.

I am sorry to say that the warrior-priests are not merely offensive in appearance; they are generally also guilty of far more grave offences, and the nights of the holy service are abused as occasions for indulging in fearful malpractices. They really seem to be the descendants of the men of Sodom and Gomorrah mentioned in the bible.

They are often quite particular in small affairs. They are afraid of killing tiny insects, are strict in not stepping over broken tiles of a monastery when they find them on the road, but walk round them to the right, and never to the left. And yet they, and even their superiors, commit grave sin without much remorse. Really they are straining at gnats and swallowing camels.


-- The Festival of Lights, Excerpt from Three Years in Tibet, by Ekai Kawaguchi


Some commentators follow J.N. Farquhar (1925), who reported, based on anecdotes, that Madhusūdanasarasvatī (1540–1647), the well-known → Vedānta philosopher, approached Akbar to seek advice on the protection of an order (to which he belonged) from harassment by armed Muslim faqīrs (notwithstanding the unreliability of this account, Madhusūdanasarasvatī did have a connection to Akbar’s court). According to J.N. Farquhar, Madhusūdanasarasvatī was advised by Rājā Birbal to initiate a large number of non-Brahmans into a militant order. Thus were many Ksạtriyas, Vaiśyas, and, says J.N. Farquhar, “multitudes of Śūdras at a later date” admitted into the order. It is said that half of the Bhāratīs (see below) refused to accept this and went to Sringeri to remain “pure.” The recruitment of nāgās into organized fighting units appears to have occurred around the time of Akbar’s reign, although it is unlikely to have been in response to attacks by Sufis. Nearly all of the recorded conflicts between bands of ascetics have been between factions of Hindus, in most instances between Vaisṇạva → Rāmānandī vairāgīs/bairāgī and Śaiva → Daśanāmī saṃnyāsīs (also known as gosāīṃs) at melās (festivals) over bathing priorities for particular akhāṛās. The Rāmānandīs and the Daśanāmīs are the largest of the 60 or so extant sādhu sects in India and Nepal, and also those with the greatest number of nāgās.

The evidence indicates that organized nāgā military activity originally flourished under state patronage. During the latter half of the 16th century and the early part of the 17th century, a number of bands of fighting ascetics formed into akhāṛās with sectarian names and identities. These armies were of mercenaries who often largely disbanded during cessations of conflict and during harvest times, when many of the men would return home to attend to agricultural duties. The formation of mercenary nāgā armies occurred largely in parallel with the constitution of a formal and distinct identity for many of the currently recognizable sects of sādhus, including the Rāmānandīs and Daśanāmīs.
Several commentators (e.g. Orr, 1940) have maintained that members of the Nāth sect (→ Nāth Sampradāya) have at times constituted elements of nāgā armies, but there seems to be no substantial evidence to support this assertion. It is most likely that observers mistakenly identified either Rāmānandīs or Daśanāmīs as Nāths.

Conflicts Involving Armies of Nāgās

From the late 16th century until the early decades of the 19th century, many prominent regional regents recruited bands of nāgās to fight in interregional struggles for power. The Mughal emperor Aurangzīb authorized in 1692/1693 five Rāmānandī commanders and their armies to move without hindrance. The British officer lieutenant-colonel Valentine Blacker included “gossyes” (i.e. gosāīṃs) in his account of the rise of infantry forces in India in the 1700s, comparing them in proficiency to Afghan and Jāt ̣Sikh khālsā troops (the Sikh order, or brotherhood, known as the khālsā, was, according to tradition, founded by Gurū Gobind Singh, and its troops were drawn almost entirely from the Jāt ̣ caste of northwestern cultivators). They were particularly renowned for their nocturnal guerilla operations: naked, sometimes slippery with oil, and dangerous with the dagger. The disposition of regents to employ nāgā armies may have also been partly due to their reputation for “supernatural” yogic abilities, and the consequent potential apprehension of adversaries, and to several historical legal statutes that either restricted or annulled the ability of states to prosecute them, being of religious orders, for crimes committed.

In 1763, Pṛthvī Nārāyaṇ Śāh, king of Gorkha and the founder of modern Nepal, was engaged in a campaign to extend his empire into the Kathmandu Valley. His chief advisor and strategist was a Nāth siddha named Bhagavantnāth, who used his influence to negotiate various matrimonial and military alliances between Gorkha and some of the other 45 kingdoms of western Nepal. During Pṛthvī Nārāyaṇ’s attack on the village of Saga, his Gorkhalese troops were confronted by five hundred nāgās – under the leadership of Gulābrām – who were fighting on behalf of one of his opponents, Jāyāprakāś Malla, king of Kathmandu. All the nāgās were slaughtered by the Ghorkalese army, though Gulābrām escaped.

During the 1780s, some seven hundred nāgās died in battle in another Himalayan province, Kumaon. A total of 1,400 nāgās had been enlisted, with the promise of substantial financial rewards, by King Mohan Cand in his unsuccessful attempt to recapture his seat in Almora, from which he had been deposed by his rival, Harsḍev Josị̄, king of the neighboring Himalayan province, Garhwal.

In the political history of North India, the most influential armies of nāgās were those commanded by three Daśanāmī gosāīṃs, Rājendragiri (d. 1753), and his two celās (disciples), the adopted brothers Umrāvgiri (b. 1734) and Anūpgiri (Himmat Bahādur; 1730–1804). These gosāīṃs had complex relationships with several wives, courtesans, and offspring, leading to lengthy legal disputes over inheritance and property. At the height of their careers, the gosāīṃs commanded armies of up to 20 thousand horse and foot soldiers. The movement and recruitment of troops were greatly facilitated by a network of weapon stocks and grain stores in the countryside. When on campaigns, most of which were in the Gangetic region, they carried equipment – including materials for mounting fortified buildings – on elephants and other pack animals and had camel-mounted guns. The army was equipped with excellent horses and state-of-the-art weapons, including musketry and artillery.

The gosāīṃs Rājendragiri, Umrāvgiri, and Anūpgiri, and their nāgā saṃnyāsī armies, fought on behalf of several North Indian regents who were the most important political actors in the region during the lifetimes of these gosāīṃs. Their mercenary approach to war resulted on several occasions in their changing sides to fight on behalf of former adversaries. The gosāīṃs’ patrons in the 18th century included Safdar Jang –- who was vazīr (chancellor) to the Mughal emperor Ahmad Shāh and ruler of the province of Awadh (the gosāīṃs began service with Safdar Jang in 1731) -– and his successor Shuja-ud-Daulah. (The Mughals also supported Rāmānandī nāgās at Ayodhya: Safdar Jang granted seven bīghās [approx. five-eights of an acre] of land at Hanumān Hill in Ayodhya to Abhay Rām Dās, the mahant of the Nirvāṇī anī [see below].) Other patrons of the gosāīṃs included the Maratha rulers Mahādjī Śiṃde and Alī Bahādur, the Mughal emperor Shāh Alam, the Jāt ̣ ruler Javāhir Singh, and the Persian Nāzaf Khān, who Anūpgiri joined in his campaign in 1776 in northern Rajasthan.

In league with the Afghans, the gosāīṃ nāgās also fought the Marathas. In the lead up to the Anglo-Maratha war, Anūpgiri and his forces also supported the East India Company, under Richard Wellesley. Campaigns were launched by the gosāīṃs against encroaching Afghans, and an unsuccessful attempt to capture Delhi was pursued in 1753, resulting in the death of Rājendragiri. In 1775 the gosāīṃs captured most of Bundelkhand from the Marathas. However, by 1803 the gosāīṃs were supporting the British in their (successful) campaign to conquer Bundelkhand. The gosāīṃs, in particular the Ānanda and Jūnā akhāṛās (see below), remained in service to the British for 17 months.


Beginning in 1743, numerous minor rebellions (which were eventually suppressed, by 1800) took place, in a period of famine, against the rule, trade monopolies, and taxation imposed by the East India Company in Bengal, which for most of that time was under the governorship of Warren Hastings. Peasants and marauding Sufi faqīrs and Daśanāmī gosāīṃs fought company troops in the Bengal region, with many casualties on all sides, in a series of military encounters. However, it was with the assistance of an army of gosāīṃs under Anūpgiri that the British were eventually able to capture Delhi and thereby extend their control over large parts of North India. However, after 1857 the company had no further use for the gosāīṃs and suppressed their military and banking activities. By this time, the saṃnyāsis, owing to their mercenary activities, had become the wealthiest bankers and largest landowners in North India. (Many of the akhāṛās still derive revenue from landholdings today.)

Since the effective curtailment of their military power by the British, the main public arenas for the display of the military organization of the akhāṛās is at melās, particularly at kumbh melās.

Becoming a Nāgā in an Akhāṛā

To become a sādhu not only entails renouncing one’s family name and former caste identity in a rite of renunciation (saṃnyāsa; see → āśrama and saṃnyāsa) but also results in acquiring a new identity and a new name as a member of a recognizable renunciate sect. The saṃnyāsa rite to become a Daśanāmī saṃnyāsī is performed in two stages: the first is the pañc guru saṃskār, when the initiate acquires five gurus, and the second initiation is the virajā homa (the rite of purification), which is usually performed at a kumbh melā, when the initiate performs his own funeral rites, thereby relieving any family member of future responsibility in that regard. Once initiated as a sādhu, the initiate may then perform a subsequent rite to become a nāgā in an akhāṛā (which in some akhāṛās entails the tendon in the penis being broken, to ensure celibacy). The processes of becoming a nāgā are similar for Rāmānandīs, the first initiation being the pañc saṃskār dīkṣā, which is almost identical to that performed by → Śrīvaisṇạvas (with whom the Rāmānandīs have a complex historical connection). A second ritual is required to become a tyāgī (see below), and a third ritual is traditionally required to become a nāgā, but in recent decades nāgās have been initiated without their first becoming tyāgī.

At kumbh melās one may see the camps of the 13 akhāṛās extant in South Asia. The Śaiva Nāths also have institutions in several places in India and Nepal but camp separately from the 13 akhāṛās and are not within the organization of akhārạ̄s pertaining to the other Śaiva and Vaisṇạva sects. Seven of the 13 akhāṛās are Śaiva Daśanāmī saṃnyāsī akhāṛās. Three akhāṛās of the 13 are of the Vaisṇava Rāmānandī Sampradāy, which are referred to as anīs (army corps) in Vaisṇava terminology, akhāṛā being a subdivision of an anī. The Dādūpanth (see → Dādū Dayāl) also has an akhāṛā, which has an affiliation with the Rāmānandīs.

The other three of the 13 akhāṛās are affiliated with the Sikh tradition. Two are Udāsī (“detached”; see also → sādhus), namely, the Baṛā (large) Pañcāyatī Udāsī Akhāṛā, and the Chotạ̄ (small) or Nayā (new) Pañcāyatī Udāsī Akhāṛā; the third of the Sikh-affiliated akhāṛās is the Nirmal Pañcāyatī Akhāṛā. Although historically involved in the Sikh movement, these three akhāṛās function as independent organizations. All 13 akhāṛās have administrative offices, particularly in the cities of Banaras, Prayag (Allahabad) and Haridwar (for the Daśanāmīs), Ayodhya (for the Rāmānandīs), and Punjab state (for the Udāsīs).

Overseeing the activities of all 13 akhāṛās is an organization, the Akhil Bharatiya Akhara Parishad, which is based in Haridwar and meets to decide on practical and policy issues.

The Daśanāmī Saṃnyāsī Akhāṛās

Daśanāmī means “he who has [one of] ten names,” those initiate names being Giri (hill), Purī (town), Bhāratī (learning), Vana (or Ban: forest), Parvata (mountain), Araṇya (wilderness), Sāgara (ocean), Tīrtha (pilgrimage place), Āśrama (hermitage), and Sarasvatī (knowledge). The most common names are Giri, Purī, and Bhāratī.

The seven Daśanāmī akhāṛās are the Nirañjanī, Jūnā, Mahānirvāṇī, Ānanda, Āvāhan, Atạl, and Agni akhāṛās. The leading akhāṛās, in terms of members and property, are the Nirañjanī and Jūnā. The Jūnā has the largest number of nāgās and is believed to be the oldest of the akhāṛās. Members of the akhāṛās are also affiliated to one or another of 52 (or 51) maṛhīs, which are subdivisions of the akhāṛās. The system of maṛhī organization is further organized in a system of eight dāvās (section, claim). Within each akhāṛā, there is a hierarchy of authority – mahant, śrī mahant, and mahāmaṇḍaleśvara – and (nominally) at the apex there are the śaṅkarācāryas (see below). The mahāmaṇḍaleśvaras usually live in their own maṭhs or āśrams and generally have little practical involvement in the daily operation of the akhāṛā, except when they preside over initiation rituals and become involved in administrative issues. In all akhāṛās (including those of the Rāmānandīs, Udāsīs, and Nirmals), each of which has an administrative body (pañc or pañcāyat), there is usually a sabhāpati (president), and beneath mahants there is a hierarchy of other elected functionaries: kārbārīs (assistants), thānāpatis (property managers), sacivs (secretaries), pujārīs (who perform ritual worship), koṭvāls (guards), and koṭhārīs/bhaṇḍārīs (who manage daily supplies). The main venue for initiations, elections to positions within the akhāṛā, and administrative discussions is kumbh melās. The Daśanāmī akhāṛās administer up to a hundred institutions, including temples, maṭhs, and āśrams.

Each of the Daśanāmī akhāṛās has a tutelary deity, namely, Kārttikeya (Nirañjanī), Dattātreya (Jūnā), Kapil Muni (Mahānirvāṇī), Sūrya (Ānanda), Siddh Gaṇeś (Āvāhan), Ādi Gaṇeś (Atạl), and Gāyatrī (Agni). The nāgās of each Daśanāmī akhāṛā revere the bhālā, which is a five to seven-meter-long javelin engraved with the sign of the respective deity of the akhāṛā. It is carried at the front of the arrival (peśvāī) and “royal” bathing processions (śāhī snān) at melās by the chief mahant or by nāgās. The bhālā is usually kept at the headquarters of the akhāṛā that it represents, but during melās, it is planted in the ground near the temporary shrine of the tutelary deity, at the center of the akhāṛā’s camping area.

The members of six of the seven Daśanāmī akhāṛās, apart from the Agni akhāṛā, take one of the “ten names,” but members of the Agni akhāṛā take one of the four following names: Svarūpa, Prakāśa, Ānanda, or Caitanya. These are what are known as brahmacārī (orthodox Brahman undergoing religious studentship and chastity) names, which are the same four names given to members of the other main wing of the saṃnyāsīs, the daṇḍīs.

The saṃnyāsī akhāṛās, to which nāgās belong, function independently from other saṃnyāsī organizations, those pertaining to the other branches of the Daśanāmī order, comprising daṇḍīs and paramahaṃsas. Daṇḍīs are orthodox Brahmans and carry a stick (daṇḍa). They frequent their own maṭhs and āśrams and have no organizational connection to the akhāṛās. Their link to the akhāṛās is only in respect to their common belief in the foundation of their order by Śaṅkarācārya (→ Śaṅkara). Paramahaṃsas are affiliated with one or another of the akhāṛās but usually live independently in their own maṭhs.

The Daśanāmī saṃnyāsī order claims descent from the philosopher Śaṅkarācārya (fl. c. 700 CE), through four disciples who, according to tradition, were established in four monasteries ( pīṭhas) at four places in India (in the north, south, east, and west); the five incumbent śaṅkarācāryas – two in the south – claim descent from these disciples. However, the tradition of the founding of four monasteries most probably dates from no earlier than the late 16th century.

The founding of the Daśanāmī akhāṛās is difficult to discern. According to traditions among the Daśanāmīs – one of which is recorded in an influential account by J. Sarkar (1958), which has been reiterated with anomalies in several subsequent publications – the first akhāṛā to be founded was Āvāhan in 547 CE, followed by Atạl (646 CE), Mahānirvāṇī (749 CE), Ānanda (856 CE), Nirañjanī (904 CE), Agni (1136), and Jūnā (1156). (In other sources the founding year of the Agni akhāṛā is given as 1370.) However, J. Sarkar adds one thousand years to some of the founding dates, which produces many inconsistencies. Notwithstanding accounts stating a greater antiquity, it seems probable that it was during the latter decades of the 16th century and the early decades of the 17th century that the Daśanāmī saṃnyāsī akhāṛās first formed, a time when diverse lineages of both monastic and militant renunciates coalesced into a sect with a distinct identity, sectarian history, and founding guru, namely Śaṅkarācārya.

The Rāmānandī Akhāṛās

The Rāmānandī Sampradāy has both lay and sādhu communities, the latter comprising rasiks, tyāgīs, and nāgās, and is one of the four Vaisṇava Sampradāyas (catuḥ sampradāyas), the constitution of which has changed twice during the last four centuries. The catuḥ sampradāyas, which meet at kumbh melās, have an administrative body, the Akhil Bharatiya Khalsa, which oversees 412 sub-branches (known as khālsās).

The traditional dates (based on the Agastyasaṃhitā) of → Rāmānanda are 1299–1410, but it seems more probable that Rāmānanda flourished in the 15th century. While some sources maintain that Rāmānanda came to northern India from the south (where he had been a disciple of Rāghavānanda), Rāmānandīs claim that Prayag was his place of birth. The language of the texts attributed to Rāmānanda indicates a North Indian provenance. “Rāmānandī” as a term of self-designation was first used around 1730.

The Rāmānandīs, whose main deities are → Rām, Sītā (see → Draupadī and Sītā), and Hanumān, appear to have organized their military branches between 1650 and 1720.
There is a reference from 1734 at Galta (near Jaipur) to seven branches of the Rāmānandī Sampradāy, which seems to indicate the extant organization of seven Rāmānandī akhāṛās. It is most probable that the catuḥ sampradāyas were organized into systems of dvārs, anīs, and akhāṛās in two stages during four successive conferences, at Vrindavan (c. 1713), Brahmapuri (near Jaipur; c. 1726), Jaipur (1734), and Galta (1756). It was Bālānand who in the mid-18th century organized the army of nāgās (the rāmḍāl) for service to Mādhav Siṃh, regent of Jaipur. Among the Rāmānandīs, 52 dvārs (doors/gates) – which are essentially lineages – are assigned to places throughout India and mirror the 52 maṛhīs of the Daśanāmī saṃnyāsīs.

Rāmānandī tyāgīs (renunciates), who are the largest subsection of the Rāmānandīs, have a lifestyle and appearance that are almost identical to those of Daśanāmī nāgās. Rāmānandī tyāgīs are also referred to as vairāgīs (or bairāgis; without passion). While the tyāgīs are Rāmānandī ascetics, it is the Rāmānandī nāgās who are soldiers, who carry weapons, and who are given money by tyāgī mahants at melās to protect the order. Technically, only the nāgās are said to be in the akhāṛā. Unlike the tyāgīs, Rāmānandī nāgās wear stitched cloth and do not wear jaṭā. A Rāmānandī disciple (who usually receives the surname “Dās” during initiation) wishing to enter an akhāṛā has to pass through seven stages before he becomes a Vaisṇava nāgā (also known as nāgā atīt):

(1) yātrī (collects nīm [neem, bot. Azadirachta indica] sticks for his superiors and wanders alone or with the jamāt [fighting unit]);

(2) chorā (serves, draws water, and makes leaf-plates);

(3) bandagīdar (looks after food stores, serves food, and cleans nāgā atīt’s utensils);

(4) huṛdaṅg (cooks, offers food to the deity, calls “Harihar” [i.e Visṇụ-Śiva], carries the insignia and flag of the akhāṛā, and learns weaponry);

(5) mureṭhiya (worships the deities, supervises sevaks [servants], calls “jay” [“victory”], and has mastered weapons):

(6) nāgā (administers the akhāṛā, worships the deity, protects the order’s property, leads the jamāt, and prepares for the kumbh melā); and

(7) atīt (decides important issues and guides nāgās).


This process of becoming a nāgā takes 12 years, after which he may vote in the akhāṛā, as a member of the pañc (the organizational body). Vaisṇạva nāgās are organized in four divisions (selīs), according to where they were initiated: Haridvārī (at Haridwar), Ujjainīya (at Ujjain), Sāgarīya (at Ganga Sagar, near Calcutta), and Basantīya (at other places). The most important center for Rāmānandī nāgās is the Hanumāngaṛhi Temple in Ayodhya.

The three Rāmānandī anīs collectively have eight akhāṛās among them: two for the Digambar anī (Rām Digambar, Śyām Digambar), three for the Nirvāṇī anī (Nirvāṇī, Khākī, Nirālambī), and three for the Nirmohī anī (Nirmohī, Mahānirvāṇī, Santosị̄). The akhāṛās’ banners all display the sun (sūrya), an emblem of Visṇu.

The Dādūpanth Akhāṛā

The Dādūpanth also has an akhāṛā, which joins the (Rāmānandī) Nirmohī anī for bathing at kumbh melās. Toward the end of Akbar’s reign, Dādū (1544–1604), a cotton cleaner from Ahmadabad who was a nirguṇī bhakt (see → nirguṇa and saguṇa), organized a new sect of Rām devotees, the Dādūpanth, which comprises virakts (ascetics), vastradhārīs (householders), and nāgās (khākī [ash-clad] virakts). Dādūpanthī nāgās had a prominent role in the armies of various regents, particularly of Jodhpur and Jaipur, in the 18th and 19th centuries. They were employed as mercenaries from 1799 to 1938.

Dādūpanthī nāgās claim that they are descended from Sundardās, an early disciple of Dādū, and thus from the late 16th or early 17th century. Although the genealogy of the Dādūpanthī nāgās may have begun in the mid-17th century, at the earliest, firm records are only available from the second half of the 18th century. The nāgās were officially constituted in akhāṛās in 1756, but may have previously fought alongside Rāmānandīs. The organization of the nāgās into 11 akhāṛās, which are subsumed within seven jamāts, is attributed to Kevalrām and Hṛdayrām. Nearly all of the nāgās were of Rājpūt descent. By the late 18th century, the armed jamāts were numerically and politically dominant in the Dādūpanth.

Sikh-Affiliated Akhāṛās

The Sikh-affiliated akhāṛās, the Baṛā Udāsī, Chotạ̄ Udāsī, and Nirmal, revere and recite daily the Gurū Granth Sāhib, the Sikh text that occupies a central place in all Sikh gurdvārās. Also of importance to the Udāsīs are the Udāsī Bodh, composed in Braj in 1858 (but written in Gurmukhi), and the Mātrā (measure/discipline; attributed to Srī Cand), besides which they have their own version of the Gurbilās (early biography/hagiography of Gurū Gobind Singh) and Janamsākhīs (biographies/hagiographies of Gurū Nānak). Like the practice among Daśanāmīs and Rāmānandīs, five mahants preside over the first initiation, whereby the initiate gains a new surname, usually “Dās” or “Brahm.” The initiate should be detached, shunning women, gold, tobacco, and spirits – though, as among other renunciate sects, occasionally Udāsīs marry and live as householders. Unlike Khālsā Sikhs, Udāsīs may shave their beards and cut their hair.

The Udāsīs are closer to mainstream Sikh tradition than some of the other breakaway Sikh sects of the 17th century, such as Mīnā (founded by Pṛthi Cand, 1558–1618), Dhir Maliā (followers of Dhir Mal, 1627–1677), and Rām Rāiyā (followers of Har Rāi, 1630–1661, the seventh Sikh guru). Distinctive traits of the Udāsīs are their Advaita Vedānta (advait brahm) philosophy (through which they interpret Sikhism), keeping a dhūnī, and practicing Hatḥa Yoga (see → Yoga).

The tutelary deity of Udāsī akhāṛās is Candra Bhagvān (believed to be an incarnation of → Śiva), who was Śrī Cand (b. 1494), the eldest of the two sons of Gurū Nānak (1469–1539). After the death of Nānak, the leadership of the Sikhs passed to Gurū Aṅgad (a householder), and not to Gurū Nānak’s son Śrī Cand (a bachelor), who, according to Sikh tradition, founded the Udāsī order. Although Śrī Cand is not recognized within the Sikh gurū paramparā (succession of teachers), neither is he rejected. However, there is some historical evidence that Śrī Cand and his followers may have been rejected from the Sikh order. According to tradition, Śrī Cand lived past the age of one hundred, into the time of the sixth gurū of the Sikhs, Gurū Hargobind (1595–1644), which would mean that the Udāsī order was probably founded sometime between the end of the 16th century and the early 17th century. The gaddi (royal seat/sectarian leadership) of the Udāsīs passed from Śrī Cand to the soldier and householder Bābā Gurditā (1613–1638), who had four preaching disciples (masands), each of whom, according to tradition, founded in 1636 a dhūān (dhūnī), which are the four main divisions of the Udāsīs, namely, Bābā Hasan (1564–1660), Phūl Sāhib (or Mīān/Mīhān Sāhib), Almast (1553–1643), and Gondā/Goindā (or Bhagat Bhagvān); these four leaders are known as the ādi (original) udāsīs.

According to another account, however, Mīān Sāhib and Bhagvat Bhagvān (i.e. Bhagat Gir, who was a Daśanāmī) founded not dhūāns but missionary centers (bhakṣīṣes). According to tradition, six bhakṣīṣes were gifted by the Sikh gurūs, Hargobind, Har Rāi, Tegh Bahādur, and Gobind Singh (1666–1708), between around 1640 and 1700. The two most important bhakṣīṣes are those of Bhāī Pherū and Mīān Sāhib. Udāsī institutions, which have a tradition of education, generally function independently and are mostly in the Punjab region, though some are in eastern India; they comprise akhāṛās (which are larger institutions), devās (smaller institutions), and dharmśālās (rest houses for travelers and pilgrims). The head of an institution is referred to as śrī mahant.

The Baṛā Udāsī Akhāṛā was founded at Prayag in 1779 by Mahant Pṛtham Dās (1752–1831), with whose akhāṛā all four dhūāns are associated (some Udāsī institutions are not directly affiliated with the dhūāns). Some followers of Pṛtham Dās are naṅgā (i.e. nāgā); two subsects of naṅgā Udāsīs (the Nirbāṇ and the Nirañjanī) claim origins in the akhāṛā of Pṛtham Dās. They wear laṅgoṭī and besmear themselves with ashes.

The Chotạ̄ (or Nayā) Udāsī Akhārạ̄ was founded in 1840 by Mahant Santokh Dās and some followers of Bhāī Pherū (i.e. Saṅgat Sāhib), a disciple of Har Rāi. Gurū Gobind Singh is credited in some sources with the institution of the Nirmal order, of which the akhāṛā (whose headquarters is in Kankhal, near Haridwar) was officially founded in 1862 under the leadership of Mahitab Singh (1811–1871).

Between the 1790s and 1840s, the Udāsī and Nirmal orders received extensive state patronage, and by the end of the 19th century, their establishments had increased fivefold, to around 250.
In the early 1920s, during the Gurdwara Reform Movement, conflict arose between Udāsīs and Akālī Sikhs (Akālī – or Nihaṅg – Sikhs are a military sub-branch of the Sikh khālsā), resulting in a significant loss of influence for Udāsīs; though in recent decades, the Udāsīs have experienced a revival.

Bibliography

Alter, J.S., The Wrestler’s Body: Identity and Ideology in North India, Oxford, 1992.

Burghart, R., “Wandering Ascetics of the Ramanandi Sect,” HR 22/4, 1983, 361–390.

Clark, M., The Daśanāmī Saṃnyāsīs: The Integration of Ascetic Lineages into an Order, Leiden, 2006.

Farquhar, J.N., “The Organisation of the Sannyasis of the Vedanta,” JRASGBI, 1925, 479–486.

Ghosh, J.M., Sannyasi and Fakir Raiders in Bengal, Calcutta, 1930.

Ghurye, G.S., Indian Sadhus, Bombay, 1953, 21964.

Gross, R.L., The Sadhus of India: A Study of Hindu Asceticism, Jaipur, 1992.

Hausner, S.L., Wandering with Sadhus: Ascetics in the Hindu Himalayas, Bloomington, 2007.

Lorenzen, D.N., “Warrior Ascetics in Indian History,” JAOS 98/1, 1978, 61–75.

Orr, W.G., Armed Religious Ascetics in North India, Manchester, 1940.

Pinch, W.R., Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires, Cambridge UK, 2006.

Sanderson, A., “The Śaiva Age: An Explanation of the Rise and Dominance of Śaivism during the Early Medieval Period,” in: S. Einoo, ed., Genesis and Development of Tantrism, Tokyo, 2009, 41–349.

Sarkar, J., A History of the Dasnami Naga Sanyasis, Allahabad, 1958(?).

Singh, S., Heterodoxy in the Sikh Tradition, Jalandhar, 1999.

Sinha, S., & B. Sarasvati, Ascetics of Kashi: An Anthropological Exploration, Varanasi, 1978.

Thiel-Horstmann, M., “On the Dual Identity of Nāgās,” in: D.L. Eck & F. Mallison, eds., Devotion Divine: Bhakti Traditions from the Regions of India (Studies in Honour of Charlotte Vaudeville), Groningen, 1991, 255–272.

Winter Jones, J., ed., The Travels of Ludovico di Varthema (1503–1508), London, 1863.
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Dashanami Sampradaya [Order of Swamis] [Naga Sadhus akharas]
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Accessed: 5/7/21



Dashanami (IAST Daśanāmi Saṃpradāya "Tradition of Ten Names"), also known as the Order of Swamis,[1] is a Hindu monastic tradition of "single-staff renunciation" (ēka daṇḍi saṃnyāsī)[2][3][4] generally associated with the Vedanta tradition and organized in its present form by 5th-century BCE theologian Adi Shankara.

A swami, as the monk is called, is a renunciate who seeks to achieve spiritual union with the swa (Self). In formally renouncing the world, he or she generally wears ochre, saffron or orange-colored robes as a symbol of non-attachment to worldly desires, and may choose to roam independently or join an ashram or other spiritual organizations, typically in an ideal of selfless service.[1] Upon initiation, which can only be done by another existing Swami, the renunciate receives a new name (usually ending in ananda, meaning 'supreme bliss') and takes a title which formalizes his connection with one of the ten subdivisions of the Swami Order. A swami's name has a dual significance, representing the attainment of supreme bliss through some divine quality or state (i.e. love, wisdom, service, yoga), and through a harmony with the infinite vastness of nature, expressed in one of the ten subdivision names: Giri (mountain), Puri (tract), Bhāratī (land), Vana (forest), Āraṇya (forest), Sagara (sea), Āśrama (spiritual exertion), Sarasvatī (wisdom of nature), Tīrtha (place of pilgrimage), and Parvata (mountain). A swami is not necessarily a yogi, although many swamis can and do practice yoga as a means of spiritual liberation; experienced swamis may also take disciples.[1]

Dashanami Sannyāsins are associated mainly with the four maṭhas, established in four corners of India by Shankara himself; however, the association of the Dasanāmis with the Shankara maṭhas remained nominal.[web 1] The early swamis, elevated into the order as disciples of Shankara, were sannyāsins who embraced sannyas either after marriage or without getting married.

Single-staff renunciates are distinct in their practices from Shaiva trishuldhari or "trident-wielding renunciates" and Vaishnava traditions of Tridandi sannyāsis.[5][note 1][note 2] Any Hindu, irrespective of class, caste, age or gender can seek sannyāsa as an Ēkadaṇḍi renunciate in the Dasanāmi tradition.

History

Image
Sannyasi, a Saiva mendicant - Tashrih al-aqvam'" (1825)

Ēkadaṇḍis

Ēkadandis were already known during what is sometimes referred to as "Golden Age of Hinduism" (ca. 320-650 CE[6])

Golden Age of Hinduism

See also Gupta rule and Gupta and Pallava period

The "Golden Age of Hinduism"[6] (ca. 320-650 CE[6]) flourished during the Gupta Empire[7] (320 to 550 CE) until the fall of the Harsha[7] (606 to 647 CE). During this period, power was centralized, along with a growth of long distance trade, standardization of legal procedures, and a general spread of literacy.[7] Mahayana Buddhism flourished, but orthodox Shrauta Hinduism was rejuvenated by the patronage of the Gupta dynasty.[8] The position of the Brahmans was reinforced[7] and the first Hindu temples emerged during the late Gupta age.[7] The Mahābhārata, which probably reached its final form by the early Gupta period (c. 4th century),[9] already mentions "ēkadaṇḍi" and "tridaṇḍi".[10]

Wandering Ēkadaṇḍi ascetics

Image
Dandi Sanyasi, a Hindu ascetic, in Eastern Bengal in the 1860s

The Ēkadaṇḍis existed in the Tamil country during the south-Indian Pandyan dynasty (3rd century BCE - 16th century CE) and the South-Indian Pallava dynasty (2nd - 9th centuries CE). Being wandering monastics, they were not settled in the brahmadeyas or settlement areas for Brahmins. There existed tax free bhiksha-bogams for feeding the Ēkadaṇḍi ascetics in the ancient Tamil country.[11]

Ēkadaṇḍis and Tridandis were also active in Eastern India, and appear to have existed there during the North-Indian Gupta Empire (320 to 550 CE ).[12]

According to R. Tirumalai, "There appears to have been no sectarian segregation of the Shaiva (Ēkadaṇḍi) and Srivaishnava (Tridandi Sannyāsins)".[13]

Establishment of the Dasanami Sampradaya

See also: Sampradaya and Parampara

Image
(Vidyashankara temple) at Sringeri Sharada Peetham, Shringeri

At the beginning of what is referred to as "Late classical Hinduism",[14] which lasted from 650 till 1100 CE,[14] Shankara established the Dasanami Sampradaya.

Late-Classical Hinduism

See also Late-Classical Age and Hinduism Middle Ages

After the end of the Gupta Empire and the collapse of the Harsha Empire, power became decentralized in India. Several larger kingdoms emerged, with "countless vassal states":[15] in the east the Pala Empire[15] (770-1125 CE[15]), in the west and north the Gurjara-Pratihara[15] (7th-10th century[15]), in the southwest the Rashtrakuta dynasty[15] (752-973[15]), in the Dekkhan the Chalukya dynasty[15] (7th-8th century[15]), and in the south the Pallava dynasty[15] (7th-9th century[15]) and the Chola dynasty[15] (9th century[15]).

The kingdoms were ruled via a feudal system. Smaller kingdoms were dependent on the protection of the larger kingdoms. "The great king was remote, was exalted and deified",[16] as reflected in the Tantric Mandala, which could also depict the king as the centre of the mandala.[17]

The disintegration of central power also lead to regionalization of religiosity, and religious rivalry.[18][note 3] Local cults and languages were enhanced, and the influence of "Brahmanic ritualistic Hinduism"[18] was diminished.[18] Rural and devotional movements arose, along with Shaivism, Vaisnavism, Bhakti and Tantra,[18] though "sectarian groupings were only at the beginning of their development".[18] Religious movements had to compete for recognition by the local lords.[18] Buddhism lost its position, and began to disappear in India.[18]

Establishment

Image
H.H. Jagadguru Swami Nischalananda Saraswati, The Shankaracharya of Puri

Shankara, himself considered to be an incarnation of Shiva,[web 1] established the Dashanami Sampradaya, organizing a section of the Ēkadaṇḍi monastics under an umbrella grouping of ten names.[web 1] Several other Hindu monastic and Ēkadaṇḍi traditions remained outside the organization of the Dasanāmis.[20][21][22]

Adi Shankara organized the Hindu monastics of these ten sects or names under four maṭhas or monasteries, with headquarters at Dvārakā in the west, Jagannathadham Puri in the east, Sringeri in the south and Badrikashrama in the north.[web 1] Each maṭha was headed by one of his four main disciples, who each continued the Vedanta Sampradaya.

Monastics of these ten orders differ in part in their beliefs and practices, and a section of them is not considered to be restricted to specific changes made by Shankara. While the Dasanāmis associated with the Shankara maṭhas follow the procedures enumerated by Adi Śankara, some of these orders remained partly or fully independent in their belief and practices; and outside the official control of the Shankara maṭhas.

The association of the Dasanāmis with the Smartha tradition or Advaita Vedānta is not all-embracing. One example is the Kriyā Yoga tradition that considers itself eclectic (see: Eclecticism), with ancient[web 2] unchangeable beliefs, and outside the ambit of differences in the understanding of Vedanta. Other examples are the Tantric Avadhūta Sampradāyas and Ekadaṇḍi sannyāsa traditions outside the control of the Shankara maṭhas[22] The Dasanāmis or Ēkadaṇḍis also founded, and continue to found or affiliate themselves with, maṭhas, ashrams and temples outside the control of the Shankara maṭhas.[web 2][web 3]

The Advaita Sampradāya is not a Shaiva sect,[web 1][23] despite the historical links with Shaivism:

Advaitins are non-sectarian, and they advocate worship of Siva and Visnu equally with that of the other deities of Hinduism, like Sakti, Ganapati and others.[web 1]


Nevertheless, contemporary Shankaracaryas have more influence among Saiva communities than among Vaisnava communities.[web 1] The greatest influence of the gurus of the Advaita tradition has been among followers of the Smartha tradition, who integrate the domestic Vedic ritual with devotional aspects of Hinduism.[web 1]

According to Nakamura, these maṭhas contributed to the influence of Shankara, which was "due to institutional factors".[24] The maṭhas which he built exist until today, and preserve the teachings and influence of Shankara, "while the writings of other scholars before him came to be forgotten with the passage of time".[25]

The table below gives an overview of the four Amnaya maṭhas founded by Adi Shankara, and their details.[web 4]

Shishya (lineage) / Direction / Maṭha / Mahāvākya / Veda / Sampradaya

Padmapāda / East / Govardhana Pīṭhaṃ / Prajñānam brahma (Consciousness is Brahman) / Rig Veda / Bhogavala
Sureśvara / South / Sringeri Śārada Pīṭhaṃ / Aham brahmāsmi (I am Brahman) / Yajur Veda / Bhūrivala
Hastāmalakācārya / West / Dvāraka Pīṭhaṃ / Tattvamasi (That thou art) / Sama Veda / Kitavala
Toṭakācārya / North / Jyotirmaṭha Pīṭhaṃ / Ayamātmā brahma (This Atman is Brahman) / Atharva Veda / Nandavala


Expansion of the Dasanāmi Sampradāya

According to the tradition in Kerala, after Shankara's samādhi at Vadakkunnathan Temple, his disciples founded four maṭhas in Thrissur, namely Naduvil Madhom, Thekke Madhom, Idayil Madhom and Vadakke Madhom.

According to Pandey, the ēkadaṇḍis or Dasanāmis had established monasteries in India and Nepal in the 13th and 14th century.[web 5]

Naga Sadhus akharas

Image
Naga Sadhu performing ritual bath at Sangam during Prayagraj Ardh Kumbhmela 2007

In the 16th century, Madhusudana Saraswati of Bengal organised a section of the Naga (naked) tradition of armed sannyasis in order to protect Hindus from the tyranny of the Mughal rulers. These are also called Goswami, Gusain, Gussain, Gosain, Gossain, Gosine, Gosavi, Sannyāsi.

Warrior-ascetics could be found in Hinduism from at least the 1500s and as late as the 1700s,[26] although tradition attributes their creation to Sankaracharya[web 6]

Some examples of Akhara currently are the Juna Akhara of the Dashanami Naga, Niranjani Akhara, Anand Akhara, Atal Akhara, Awahan Akhara, Agni Akhara and Nirmal Panchayati Akhara at Allahabad.[web 7] Each akhara is divided into sub-branches and traditions. An example is the Dattatreya Akhara (Ujjain) of the naked sadhus of Juna Naga establishment.[web 8]

The naga sadhus generally remain in the ambit of non-violence presently, though some sections are also known to practice the sport of Indian wrestling. The Dasanāmi sannyāsins practice the Vedic and yogic Yama principles of ahimsā (non-violence), satya (truth), asteya (non-stealing), aparigraha (non-covetousness) and brahmacārya (celibacy / moderation).

The naga sadhus are prominent at Kumbh mela, where the order in which they enter the water is fixed by tradition. After the Juna akhara, the Niranjani and Mahanirvani Akhara proceed to their bath. Ramakrishna Math Sevashram are almost the last in the procession.[27]

Characteristics

Parampara


In the Indian religious and philosophical traditions, all knowledge is traced back to the gods and to the Rishis who primarily received the Vedas as revelations.

The current Acaryas, the heads of the maṭhas, trace their authority back to the four main disciples of Shankara,[web 9] and each of the heads of these four maṭhas takes the title of Shankaracharya ("the learned Shankara") after Adi Shankara.

The Advaita guru-paramparā (Lineage of Gurus in Non-dualism) begins with the mythological time of the Daiva-paramparā, followed by the vedic seers of the Ṛṣi-paramparā, and the Mānava-paramparā of historical times and personalities:[web 9][note 4]

Daiva-paramparā
• Nārāyaṇa
• Sada Shiva
• Padmabhuva (Brahmā)
Ṛṣi-paramparā
• Vaśiṣṭha
• Śakti
• Parāśara
• Vyāsa[note 5]
• Śuka
Mānava-paramparā
• Gauḍapāda
• Govinda bhagavatpāda
• Śankara bhagavatpāda, and then Shankara's four disciples
o Padmapāda
o Hastāmalaka
o Toṭaka
o Vārtikakāra (Sureśvara) and others

Ten Names

Hindus who enter sannyāsa in the ēkadaṇḍi tradition take up one of the ten names associated with this Sampradaya: Giri, Puri, Bhāratī, Vana/Ban, Āraṇya, Sagara, Āśrama, Sarasvatī, Tīrtha, and Parvata.[web 11][web 1]

Standardised List of Dasanāmīs in Wikipedia

This section enumerates, in standardised manner, members of the Dasanāmī Order with articles in Wikipedia, listing each under his formal title and name, without the use of the honorifics[note 6] so cherished by fawning devotees and disciples. The word "swāmī" here is not an honorific. It is the title of an initiated member of the Dasanāmī Order. Entries are listed in standard form: TITLE (SWĀMĪ) + PERSONAL NAME + SUB-ORDER NAME. A few entries have the additional title (not honorific) of "Jagadguru Śankarācārya" which designates either one of the four supreme leaders of the order (somewhat similar to the position of Pope in Catholic Christianity). "Mahanta" is an administrative title designating an organizational position or office assigned to certain persons.

A
Name Notability
Swāmī Abhayānanda Puri French American initiate of Vivekānanda.
Swāmī Abhedānanda Puri Disciple of Rāmakrsna.[1]
Swāmī Abhinavavidyā Tīrtha Jagadguru Śankarācārya of Śrngeri.
Swāmī Achalānanda Puri Disciple of Vivekānanda.
Swāmī Achyutananda Sarasvatī Gaudiya Vaisnava teacher.
Swāmī Adbhutānanda Puri Disciple of Rāmakrsna.
Swāmī Adidevānanda Puri Ramakrishna monk.
Swāmī Advaitānanda Puri Disciple of Rāmakrsna.
Swāmī Agehānanda Bhāratī Austrian American intellectual and expert on Indian languages and phonology.[2][3][4]
Swāmī Agnivesha Sarasvatī Activist; reformer; interfaith dialog advocate.[5]
Swāmī Akhandānanda Puri Disciple of Rāmakrsna.
Swāmī Akhilānanda Puri Founder of Vedanta Society of Providence and Ramakrishna Vedanta Society of Boston.
Swāmī Akshobhya Tīrtha Dvaitavādin.
Swāmī Ānanda Tīrtha Preceptor of Dvaita.
Swāmī Ānandānanda Puri Gandhian activist.
Swāmī Ashokānanda Puri Ramakrishna monk.
Swāmī Atmabodhendra Sarasvatī Pīthādhipati of Kamakoti Math, Kanchipuram.
Swāmī Ātmājñānānanda Puri American Ramakrishna monk.
Swāmī Ātmasthānanda Puri President of the Ramakrishna Mission.
B
Name Notability
Swāmī Bhāratī Tīrtha Jagadguru Śankarācārya of Śrngeri.
Swāmī Bhāratīkrsna Tīrtha Jagadguru Śankarācārya of Puri and scholar of Indian mathematics. First Śankarācārya to visit the West. Authored Vedic Mathematics.
Swāmī Bhaskarānanda Sarasvatī Scholar and anchorite of Benāres.
Swāmī Bhūmānanda Tīrtha Social reformer. Teacher of Bhagavad Gita and Bhagavata Purana.
Swāmī Bhuteshānanda Puri President of the Ramakrishna Mission.
Swāmī Bodhānanda Sarasvatī Disciple of Sivānanda.
Swāmī Bodhendra Sarasvatī Pīthādhipati of Kamakoti Math, Kanchipuram.
Swāmī Brahmānanda Sarasvatī Highly-respected Jagadguru Śankarācārya of Jyotirmāyā Pītha, Badrināth.
C
Name Notability
Swāmī Chandrachudhendra Sarasvatī Pīthādhipati of Kamakoti Math, Kanchipuram.
Swāmī Candrasekhara Bhāratī Jagadguru Śankarācārya of Śrngeri.
Swāmī Chandrasekharendra Sarasvatī Pīthādhipati of Kanchi Kamakoti Peetham, Kanchipuram. Featured in Paul Brunton's A Search in Secret India.
Swāmī Chidānanda Sarasvatī Disciple of Svāmī Śivānanda Sarasvatī. President of Divine Life Society. Interfaith advocate and friend of Thích Nhất Hạnh.
Swāmī Chidānanda Sarasvatī Founder of temples in Australia, Canada, Europe, and the USA.
Swāmī Chidvilasānanda Sarasvatī Disciple and designated successor of Muktānanda. Sister of Nityānanda.[6]
Swāmī Chinmāyānanda Sarasvatī Hindu missionary. Disciple of Svāmī Śivānanda Sarasvatī and Svāmī Tapovanam Giri. Founder of Chinmaya Mission.[7]
D
Name Notability
Swāmī Dayānanda Sarasvatī Socio-religious reformer. Founder of the Arya Samaj.
Swāmī Dayānanda Sarasvatī Vedānt ācārya. Founder of Arsha Vidya Gurukulam.[8]
Swāmī Dhanarāja Giri Advaita Vedānta ācārya. Founder of the highly-prestigious Kailash Ashram, Rishikesh.
G
Name Notability
Swāmī Gahanānanda Puri President of the Ramakrishna Mission.
Swāmī Gambhirānanda Puri President of the Ramakrishna Mission.
Swāmī Ganapati Sarasvatī Long-lived yogī of Benāres.[9][10]
Swāmī Ganeshānanda Sarasvatī Yoga teacher. Pupil and sannyās initiate of Swāmī Śivānanda Sarasvatī. Pupil of Swāmī Suraj Giri.
Swāmī Gangadharendra Sarasvatī Teacher of Advaita Vedānta.
Swāmī Ghanānanda Puri Ramakrishna monk who was active in Europe.
Swāmī Ghanānanda Sarasvatī Ghanaian disciple of Svāmī Krishnānanda Sarasvatī. Possibly the first Black African convert to Hinduism.
Swāmī Gītānanda Giri Indian Canadian physician. Yoga teacher; Mahanta of the Brighu Order; "Lion of Pondicherry".
Swāmī Gñānānanda Giri Long-lived yogī. Guru of French Catholic monastic Abhishiktānanda.
H
Name Notability
Swāmī Haridāsa Giri Disciple of Swāmī Gñānānanda Giri.
Swāmī Hariharānanda Āranya Noted Samkhya Yogī
Swāmī Hariharānanda Giri Kriyā Yoga teacher. Pupil of Śrījukteśvara, Bhupendranāth Sanyal, Yogānanda, Satyānanda, and Bijoy Krishna.[11]
Swāmī Hariharānanda Sarasvatī Respected Vedānt ācārya. Disciple of Svāmī Brahmānanda Sarasvatī. Met Yogānanda at the Kumbh Mela.
I
Name Notability
Swāmī Isvara Puri Dvaitavādin.
J
Name Notability
Swāmī Janakānanda Sarasvatī Danish disciple of Svāmī Satyānanda Sarasvatī; founder of Skandinavisk Yoga och Meditationsskola.
Swāmī Jaya Tīrtha Dvaitavādin.
Swāmī Jaya Tīrtha Dvaitavādin.
Swāmī Jayendra Sarasvatī Disciple of Svāmī Chandrasekharendra Sarasvatī. Pīthādhipati of Kamakoti Math, Kanchipuram.
Swāmī Jītātmānanda Puri Ramakrishna monk.
K
Name Notability
Swāmī Kalyanānanda Puri Disciple of Vivekānanda.
Swāmī Kesavānanda Bhāratī Mahānta/Pīthādhipati of Edneer Math, Kasaragod district, Kerala.
Swāmī Kesavānanda Tīrtha Yogī of Vrindāban.
Swāmī Kirtidānanda Puri Ramakrishna monk.
Swāmī Krishnānanda Sarasvatī Disciple of Śivānanda; General Secretary of Divine Life Society, 1963-2001.[12][13]
Swāmī Kriyānanda Giri American disciple of Yogānanda. Founder of Ananda World Brotherhood Colonies.
Swāmī Kṛṣṇacaitanya Bhāratī Vaisnava teacher and scholar of Bengal; regarded as an avatār in Bangla Vaisnavism. Called "Caitanya Mahaprabhu" by devotees.[14]
L
Name Notability
Swāmī Laksmanānanda Sarasvatī Humanitarian social relief worker of Orissa. assassinated by suspected Christian Maoists.
Swāmī Laksmīnārāyana Tīrtha Dvaitavādin.
M
Name Notability
Swāmī Madhavānanda Puri President of the Ramakrishna Mission.
Swāmī Madhavendra Puri Dvaitavādin. Disciple of Lakshmipati Tirtha.
Swāmī Madhusūdana Sarasvatī Teacher of Advaita Vedānta.
Swāmī Mahādevendra Sarasvatī Pīthādhipati of Kamakoti Math, Kanchipuram.
Swāminī Māyātitānanda Sarasvatī Ayurveda teacher.
Swāmī Muktānanda Sarasvatī Meditation teacher. Founded the SYDA (Siddha Yoga Dham) organization, with several ashrams and centers. Author.
N
Name Notability
Swāmī Narahari Tīrtha Dvaitavādin. Disciple of Swāmī Ānanda Tīrtha.
Swāmī Nārāyanānanda Puri Ramakrishna monk. Rāja yoga teacher in Denmark.
Swāmī Nigamānanda Sarasvatī Bhakta, gyānī, yogī, tantrika of Eastern India.
Swāmī Nikhilānanda Puri Ramakrishna monastic; Vedānta teacher in the USA.
Swāmī Nirañjanānanda Puri One of the six disciples of Rāmakrsna who were regarded as iśvarakoti.[15]
Swāmī Nirañjanānanda Sarasvatī Disciple of Satyānanda; head of Bihar School of Yoga.[16][17]
Swāmī Nirmalānanda Puri Disciple of Rāmakrsna.
Swāmī Nischayānanda Puri Disciple of Vivekānanda.
Swāmī Nrsimha Sarasvatī Sage of Mahārāshtra. Regarded as an incarnation of the legendary sage Dattātreya.
O
Name Notability
Swāmī Omānanda Puri Irish violinist, singer, theosophist, writer, poet, esoteric teacher and authority on Indian music.
Swāmī Omānanda Sarasvatī Educator.
P
Name Notability
Swāmī Padmanabha Tīrtha Dvaitavādin. Disciple of Swāmī Ānanda Tīrtha.
Swāmī Paramānanda Puri Ramakrishna monk. Vedānta teacher in the USA.
Swāmī Prabhavānanda Puri Ramakrishna monk. Vedānta teacher in the USA.
Swāmī Prakāshānanda Puri Ramakrishna monk; Vedānta teacher in the USA.
Swāmī Prakāshānanda Sarasvatī Rādhā-Krsna devotee, convict and fugitive in the USA. Disciple of Rādhā-Krsna bhakta Kripālu "Mahārāj."
Swāmī Prakāshānanda Sarasvatī Hindu teacher in Trinidad.
Swāmī Prameyānanda Puri Ramakrishna monk.
Swami Pranavānanda Giri Founder of Bharat Sevashram Sangha.
Swāmī Pranavānanda Sarasvatī Disciple of Śivānanda; Yoga-Vedānta teacher, Divine Life Society, Malaysia.
Swāmī Premānanda Puri One of the six disciples of Rāmakrsna who were regarded as iśvarakoti.
Swāmī Purnaprajñā Tīrtha Preceptor of Dvaitavāda.
Swāmī Purushottamānanda Puri Ramakrishna monk.
R
Name Notability
Swāmī Raghavendra Tīrtha Dvaitavādin.
Swāmī Raghaveshwara Bhāratī Advaita Vedāntin. 36th Jagadguru of Sri Ramachandrapura Math, Hosanagara, Shimoga, Karnātaka.
Swāmī Raghuttama Tīrtha Dvaitavādin.
Swāmī Rāma Bhāratī Yogī; founder of Himalayan International Institute of Yoga Science and Philosophy, Honesdale, Pennsylvania.
Swāmī Rāma Tīrtha Teacher of "Practical Vedanta".
Swāmī Rāmakrishnānanda Puri Disciple of Rāmakrsna.
Swāmī Rāmakrsna Puri Temple priest, ascetic, mystic of Bengal. Regarded as an avatār (a "descent" or physical incarnation of God) by devotees.
Swāmī Rāmānanda Tīrtha Activist in Hyderābād.
Swāmī Ranganāthānanda Puri President of the Ramakrishna Mission and a great Vedantin.
Swāmī Rudrānanda Puri Ramakrishna monk in Fiji.
Swāmī Rudrānanda Sarasvatī American spiritual teacher.
S
Name Notability
Swāmī Saccidānanda Bhāratī Jagadguru Śankarācārya of Śrngeri.
Swāmī Saccidānanda Bhāratī Jagadguru Śankarācārya of Śrngeri.
Swāmī Saccidānandaśivābhinavanrsiṃha Bhāratī Jagadguru Śankarācārya of Śrngeri.
Swāmī Sadānanda Puri Disciple of Vivekānanda.
Swāmī Sadaśivendra Sarasvatī Scholar, yogī-siddha, poet, avadhūta; mentioned in Yogānanda's Autobiography of a Yogi.
Swāmī Sahajānanda Sarasvatī Indian nationalist.
Swāmī Sahajānanda Sarasvatī South African spiritual teacher. Disciple of Śivānanda.
Swāmī Samyamindra Tīrtha Mathadhipati of Kashi Math.
Swāmī Śaradānanda Puri Disciple of Rāmakrsna. Author of the Śrī Śrī Rāmakrsna Līlaprasanga, the lead biography of Rāmakrsna.
Swāmī Satchidānanda Sarasvatī Yoga teacher. Disciple of Śivānanda. Founder of Sivananda Ashram (Sri Lanka) and Satchidananda Ashrams (USA).
Swāmī Satcidānandendra Sarasvatī Vedānt ācārya.
Swāmī Satyānanda Giri Kriyā Yoga teacher. Disciple of Śrījukteśvara.
Swāmī Satyānanda Sarasvatī Disciple of Śivānanda; founder of Bihar School of Yoga.
Swāmī Satyanātha Tīrtha Dvaitavādin.
Swāmī Satyapramoda Tīrtha Dvaitavādin.
Swāmī Satyātmā Tīrtha 42nd pontiff of Uttaradi Matha.
Swāmī Shambhavānanda Puri Ramakrishna monk.
Swāmī Shankarānanda Puri President of the Ramakrishna Mission.
Swāmī Shankarānanda Sarasvatī American disciple of Muktānanda.
Swāmī Shantānanda Sarasvatī Disciple of Śivānanda. Spiritual guide in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Swāmī Shivānanda Puri Disciple of Rāmakrsna and 2nd President of the Ramakrishna Order.[18]
Swāmī Shivom Tīrtha Siddhayoga teacher.
Swāmī Shraddhānanda Sarasvatī Hindu social activist. Assassinated by a Muslim.
Swāmī Shuddhānanda Puri President of the Ramakrishna Mission.
Swāmī Śivānanda Sarasvatī Founded Divine Life Society and Yoga-Vedanta Forest Academy, Rishikesh; authored 200 books.
Swāmī Śivānanda Rādhā Sarasvatī Canadian yoga teacher. Disciple of Śivānanda.
Swāmī Smaranānanda Puri Ramakrishna monk. President of the Ramakrishna Order.[19]
Swāmī Śrījukteśvara Giri Kriyā Yoga adept. Astrologer. Disciple of Shyāmacharan Lahirī. Guru of Yogānanda.
Swāmī Subodhānanda Puri Disciple of Rāmakrsna.
Swāmī Sudhindra Tīrtha Mathadhipati of Kashi Math.
Swāmī Sukrathindra Tīrtha Mathadhipati of Kashi Math.
Swāmī Swahānanda Puri Ramakrishna monk.
Swāmī Swarūpānanda Puri Disciple of Vivekānanda.
Swāmī Swarūpānanda Sarasvatī Jagadguru Śankarācārya of Jyotirmāyā and Dwarka Pītha.
T
Name Notability
Swāmī Tapasyānanda Puri Ramakrishna monk.
Swāmī Tapovanam Giri Reclusive yogī of Uttar Kashi.[20]
Swami Tejomayananda Saraswati Current Head of Chinmaya Mission Worldwide.
Swāmī Trigunatitānanda Puri Disciple of Rāmakrsna.
Swāmī Turiyānanda Puri Disciple of Rāmakrsna.
Swāmī Tyagānanda Puri Ramakrishna monk. Hindu chaplain of Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

V
Name Notability
Swāmī Vadirāja Tīrtha Dvaitavādin.
Swāmī Vasudevānanda Sarasvatī Wandering monk, spiritual teacher, author.
Swāmī Venkateśānanda Sarasvatī Disciple of Śivānanda; founder of Sivananda Ashrams in South Africa and Mauritius.
Swāmī Vidyānāthānanda Puri Ramakrishna monk and mathematician.
Swāmī Vidyāranya Tīrtha Jagadguru Śankarācārya of Śrngeri.
Swāmī Vidyātmānanda Puri Ramakrishna monk.
Swāmī Vijayendra Sarasvatī Disciple and designated successor of Jayendra Sarasvatī.
Swāmī Vijayendra Tīrtha Dvaitavādin.
Swāmī Vijñānānanda Puri Disciple of Rāmakrsna.
Swāmī Vimalānanda Puri Disciple of Vivekānanda.
Swāmī Vipulānanda Puri Srī Lankān Ramakrishna monastic and Hindu revivalist.
Swāmī Virajānanda Puri President of the Ramakrishna Mission.
Swāmī Vireshwarānanda Puri President of the Ramakrishna Mission.
Swāmī Vishnu Tīrtha Siddhayoga teacher.
Swāmī Vishnudevānanda Sarasvatī Yogī. Peace activist. Most famous disciple of Svāmī Śivānanda Sarasvatī (the two of them are the most well-known members of the Sarasvati sub-order). Founder of the worldwide Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centres. Authored The Complete Illustrated Book of Yoga. Airplane pilot.
Swāmī Vishuddhānanda Puri President of the Ramakrishna Mission.
Swāmī Vishwadevānanda Puri Teacher of Advaita Vedānta.
Swāmī Vivekānanda Puri Most famous of disciples of Ramakrishna (the two of them are the most well-known members of the Puri sub-order). Most famous figure at first Parliament of the World's Religions (Chicago, 1893). Organizer of the Ramakrishna Mission. One of the six disciples of Rāmakrsna who were regarded as iśvarakoti.
Swāmī Vyāsa Tīrtha Dvaitavādin.
Swāmī Vyāsachalamahādevendra Sarasvatī Pīthādhipati of Kamakoti Math, Kanchipuram.
Y
Name Notability
Swāmī Yatīśwarānanda Puri Ramakrishna monk. Spiritual teacher and meditation instructor.
Swāmī Yogānanda Giri[29] Founder of Self-Realization Fellowship. Author of Autobiography of a Yogi.
Swāmī Yogānanda Giri Leading Hindu of Italy. Disciple of Gītānanda.
Swāmī Yogānanda Puri One of the six disciples of Rāmakrsna who were regarded as iśvarakoti.


Notes

1. The Tridandi sannyāsins continue to wear the sacred thread after renunciation, while Ekadandi sannyāsins do not.
2. Ek means "one", ekadandi means "of single staff", tridandi means "of three staffs".
3. This resembles the development of Chinese Chán during the An Lu-shan rebellion and the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period (907–960/979), during which power became decentralized and new Chán-schools emerged.[19]
4. The following Sanskrit Verse among Smarthas provides the list of the early teachers of the Vedanta in their order:[web 10][28] "नारायणं पद्मभुवं वशिष्ठं शक्तिं च तत्पुत्रं पराशरं च व्यासं शुकं गौडपादं महान्तं गोविन्दयोगीन्द्रं अथास्य शिष्यम्
श्री शंकराचार्यं अथास्य पद्मपादं च हस्तामलकं च शिष्यम् तं तोटकं वार्त्तिककारमन्यान् अस्मद् गुरून् सन्ततमानतोऽस्मि
अद्वैत गुरु परंपरा स्तोत्रम्"
"nārāyanam padmabhuvam vasishtam saktim ca tat-putram parāśaram ca
vyāsam śukam gauḍapāda mahāntam govinda yogīndram athāsya śiṣyam
śri śankarācāryam athāsya padmapādam ca hastāmalakam ca śiṣyam
tam trotakam vārtikakāram-anyān asmad gurūn santatamānato’smi
Advaita-Guru-Paramparā-Stotram",
The above advaita guru paramparā verse salute the prominent gurus of advaita, starting from Nārāyaṇathrough Adi Sankara and his disciples, up to the Acharyas of today.
5. the famous redactor of the vedas, he is also traditionally identified with Bādarāyaṇa, the composer of the Brahmasūtras
6. e.g.: śrī, shri, shrii, shree, śrī śrī, śrī śrī śrī, śrīla, śrīman, jī, jiew, joo, jiu, swāmījī, mahātma, mahārsi, mahāyogī, mahāsaya, mahārāj, mahārājjī, prabhu, prabhujī, mahāprabhu, gurudev, gurujī, guru mahārāj jī, sāheb, sāhebjī, bābā, bābājī, mā, māta, mātajī, bhagvan, prabhupāda, bhaktipāda. Aside from these, "Paramahamsa" is also one of the most abused honorifics. Many unfit characters want to claim it; many adoring disciples apply it to their guru. It was used by the ISKCON rtvik/guru-ācāryas. However, the case of Swāmī Yogānanda Giri is a unique one, since his appellation "Paramahansa" was not given to him by adoring disciples.

References

Written references


1. Yogananda, Paramhansa (1946). "Autobiography of a Yogi - Chpt 24: I Become a Monk of the Swami Order - pg 218". http://www.CrystalClarity.com.
2. Journal of the Oriental Institute (pp 301), by Oriental Institute (Vadodara, India).
3. Govind Sadashiv Ghurye, Indian Sadhus
4. Lalit Kishore Lal Srivastava, Advaitic Concept of Jīvanmukti
5. A. C. Bhaktivedānta Swāmi, Śrīmad Bhāgavatam
6. Michaels 2004, p. 40-41.
7. Michaels 2004, p. 40.
8. Nakamura 2004, p. 687.
9. Van Buitenen; The Mahabharata – 1; The Book of the Beginning. Introduction (Authorship and Date)
10. Swāmi Parmeshwarānand, Encyclopaedia of Śaivism, p.82
11. Shanmuga Velayutham Subramanian, Heritage of the Tamils: temple arts, p.154
12. Bhagwati Charan Verma, Socio-religious, Economic, Literary Condition of Bihar
13. R. Tirumalai, The Pandyan Townships : The Pandyan townships, their organisation and functioning
14. Michaels 2004, p. 41-43.
15. Michaels 2004, p. 41.
16. michaels 2004, p. 41.
17. White 2000, p. 25-28.
18. Michaels 2004, p. 42.
19. McRae 2003.
20. Karigoudar Ishwaran, Ascetic Culture
21. Wendy Sinclair-Brull, Female Ascetics
22. H.A. Rose, Ibbetson, Denzil Ibbetson Sir, and Maclagan, Glossary of the Tribes and Castes of the Punjab and North West Frontier Province, page 857
23. Nakamura 2004, p. 782-783.
24. Nakamura 2004, p. 680.
25. Nakamura 2004, p. 680-681.
26. A history of Dasnami Naga Sanyasis, Sir Jadunath Sarkar, Sri Panchayati Akhara Mahanirvani, Allahabad, http://dspace.wbpublibnet.gov.in:8080/j ... 20108p.pdf
27. Naga sadhus steal the show at Kumbh, Nandita Sengupta, TNN Feb 13, 2010://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2010-02-13/india/28140014_1_naga-sadhus-juna-akhara-holy-dip
28. Book: Shri Gowdapadacharya & Shri Kavale Math (A Commemoration volume). P. 38.
29. Known by honorific "Paramahansa."

Web-references

1. Devasthananam, Sankara Acarya Biography: Monastic Tradition
2. Kalyanagiri
3. Prajnana Mission
4. "Adi Shankara's four Amnaya Peethams". Archived from the original on 26 June 2006. Retrieved 20 August 2006.
5. The maṭhas of Dasanami Sanyasis of Lalitpur, Kathmandu Valley
6. Nagas: Once were warriors. Gautam Siddharth, TNN Jan 15, 2013
7. Prem Panicker, Where did the Akharas come from?
8. divinerevelation.org, Kumbh Melas in Haridwar and Ujjain
9. "The Advaita Vedânta Home Page — Advaita Parampara". Advaita-vedanta.org. 5 May 1999. Retrieved 10 September 2012.
10. Under Page: BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES ABOUT SANKARA AND GAUDAPAD
11. The Dashanami Sampradaya- the Monastic Tradition

Sources

• McRae, John (2003), Seeing Through Zen. Encounter, Transformation, and Genealogy in Chinese Chan Buddhism, The University Press Group Ltd, ISBN 9780520237988
• Michaels, Axel (2004), Hinduism. Past and present, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press
• Nakamura, Hajime (2004), A History of Early Vedanta Philosophy. Part Two, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers Private Limited

External links

• Sringeri Math
• advaita-vedanta.org, Danasami Sampradya- The monastic tradition
• Devasthanam, The Monastic Tradition

***************************

Fighting Ascetics, Excerpt from Traditional Military Practices in North India
©  Traditional Military Practices in North India, 2020
https://indianfight.com/fighting-ascetics/

"... who from going quite naked, close shaved and well rubbed with oil are so slippery that no one can seize them while they force their way with a dagger pointed at both ends and held by the middle."


Back in the early 20th century, Ascetics were actively hired by the Maharajas to collect taxes. Trade of precious stones, corals, raw silk, gold and silver was concentrated in their hands. They guarded trade routes, which were related to pilgrims routes, controlled the trade from Tibet to South India. Activity of ascetics was comparable with activities of medieval European chivalric orders. James Todd, a British political agent in Rajasthan, in the early 19th century wrote as follows:

The Gosains who profess arms, partake of the character of the knights of St. John of Jerusalem. They live in monasteries scattered over the country, possess lands, and beg, or serve for pay when called upon...


We first heard of an Armed Ascetic in the treatise Mahabhasya, dated 2nd century B.C. This treatise describes a hermit as a wandering ascetic, wearing an animal skin and al all-metal spear. [A] biography of the ruler of Northern India of [the] 7th century describes two ascetics, [who] served in the personal guard of the ruler "taking first rows in battle."

Documented history of armed monastic orders started with a description of the battle between Shaiva ascetics and Yogis, which was observed by Akbar I The Great in Thanesar in 1567...

During the traditional celebrations of Kumbh Mela there were mass bloody clashes between various groups of ascetics for the right to perform the rite first.

Medieval Indian poet Kabir wrote as follows:

Oh, brother, never have I seen Yogi like these!...
When did Dattatreya attack his enemies?
When did Sukdeva lay a cannon?
Or Vasudeva wind a horn?
They who fight are of little wisdom;
Shall I call such ascetics or bowmen?


As mercenaries, ascetic soldiers served maharajas, common landowners, and the British too. Almost every Zamindar had a bodyguard detachment of ascetics... In the first half of [the] 20th century, ascetics still guarded the gate of the palace in Udaipur. In general, their role in the military life of India was quite comparable to that of Swiss mercenaries in Europe. Their strict command hierarchy, fortitude, devotion to death to their leaders, combined with excellent combat skills, especially melee, made them a coveted part of any military until the 19th century.

Image
Ascetic and his wife, Tanjavur, 1805

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The ascetic with a double-sided dagger made of antelope antlers, 1755.

Image
Gosains in the Maratha camp, Rajasthan, 1809

Image
High-ranking ascetic, 1660, British Library J.16, 2

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A Battle between two rival groups of Sannyasis at Thanesar, Painted 1590-1595 @ Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Image
High-ranking ascetic, 16th century

Image
Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Image
The fighting ascetics in the Jaipur Army, 1900

Image
Armed Ascetic, 1825

Image
The tongs for fire "chimta". Sometimes it was sharpened and used in melee like a small sword.

Image
The ascetic with a double-sided dagger

Image

Image
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Re: Freda Bedi Cont'd (#3)

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Abhinav Bharat Society [Nitra Mela]
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 4/29/21



[Helena Blavatsky] is reported to have been with the Italian patriots Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807-82) and Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-72); the latter she apparently met in London in the year 1851. She claimed to have participated with volunteers at Garibaldi’s [1867] battle of Mentana (in an attempt to capture Rome) in the year 1867 (Cranston and Williams, p. 79).

Theosophy (in the early broad sense of teachings about this and the divine worlds) was known in Italy before the formation of the Theosophical Society. The Italian philosopher Antonio Rosmini Serbati (1797-1855), a Catholic priest, wrote a large work in eight volumes with the title Teosofia, published in 1859 after his death, and condemned by the Catholic Church. The first Theosophical Center was established in Milan (1890) by J. Murphy, helped by Alfredo Pioda, who also established the first Theosophical Center in Locarno (Switzerland) and commenced the magazine La Nuova Parola. The first Lodge and lending library was organized in Rome (1897) through the efforts of C. A. Lloyd and Decio Calvari, who was the secretary of the Italian Parliament. This Lodge translated and published several Theosophical books, among which were The Occult World and Esoteric Buddhism by Alfred P. SINNETT. At about the same time, Lodges were established at Genoa and Palermo through the efforts of the British Consul, Macbean Reginald Gambier. Later Isabel COOPER-OAKLEY helped to form Lodges in Florence, Milan, Naples, Rome, and Torino. The Italian Section of the Society was established on February 1, 1902, in the presence of Charles W. LEADBEATER, with Oliviero Boggiani as its first General Secretary. At Trieste, the first Lodge was established in 1908, after a visit by Annie BESANT, but a Theosophical center may have existed earlier and been visited by the famous explorer and British Consul at Trieste Richard Francis Burton (1821-90) who translated The Thousand Nights and a Night (1885-88), popularly known as The Arabian Nights, into English.

-- Theosophy in Italy, by Theosopedia


Abhinav Bharat Society (Young India Society) was a secret society founded by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and his brother Ganesh Damodar Savarkar in 1904.[1] Initially founded at Nasik as "Mitra Mela" when Vinayak Savarkar was still a student of Fergusson College at Pune, the society grew to include several hundred revolutionaries and political activists with branches in various parts of India, extending to London after Savarkar went to study law. It carried out a few assassinations of British officials, after which the Savarkar brothers were convicted and imprisoned. The society was formally disbanded in 1952.[2][3]

History

Vinayak Savarkar and Ganesh Savarkar started Mitra Mela, a revolutionary secret society in Nasik in 1899. It was one among several such melas (revolutionary societies) functioning in Maharashtra at that time, which believed in the overthrow of British rule through armed rebellion.[4] In 1904, in a meeting attended by 200 members from various towns in Maharashtra, Swantraveer Vinayak Savarkar renamed it Abhinav Bharat, taking after Giuseppe Mazzini's Young Italy.

In 1906, Vinayak Savarkar left to London to study law. In the same year, he compiled a volume called Mazzini Charitra, a translation of the Italian revolutionary Mazzini's writings with a 25-page introduction added.[5] The book was published in Maharashtra in June 1907 and the first edition of 2000 copies is said to have sold out within a month.[6] Mazzini's techniques of secret societies and guerilla warfare were fully embraced by Savarkar. He wrote regular newsletters to his compatriots in India as well as carrying out revolutionary propaganda in London.[7]

Activities

Savarkar's revolutionary thoughts led to the assassination of Lt. Col. William Curzon-Wyllie, the political aide-de-camp to the Secretary of State for India, by Madanlal Dhingra on the evening of 1 July 1909, at a meeting of Indian students in the Imperial Institute in London. Dhingra was arrested and later tried and executed. A. M. T. Jackson, the district magistrate of Nasik, was assassinated in India by Anant Laxman Kanhare in 1909 in the historic "Nasik Conspiracy Case".[7][8]

The investigation into the Jackson assassination revealed the existence of the Abhinav Bharat Society and the role of the Savarkar brothers in leading it. Vinayak Savarkar was found to have dispatched twenty Browning pistols to India, one of which was used in the Jackson assassination. He was charged in the Jackson murder and sentenced to "transportation" for life. Savarkar was imprisoned in the Cellular Jail in the Andaman Islands in 1910.[7]

References

1. Jayapalan 2001, p. 21; Bapu 2013, p. 96
2. Jaffrelot 1996, p. 26
3. Teltumbde 2005, p. 212
4. Bapu 2013, pp. 95-96.
5. Sharma 2006, p. 157.
6. Joglekar 2006, p. 49.
7. Bapu 2013, p. 96.
8. "Nasik Conspiracy Case - 1910". Bombay High Court. Archived from the original on 9 April 2009. Retrieved 3 March 2015.

Sources

• Bapu, Prabhu (2013), Hindu Mahasabha in Colonial North India, 1915-1930: Constructing Nation and History, Routledge, ISBN 978-0-415-67165-1
• Jayapalan, N (2001), History Of India (from National Movement To Present Day), IV, New Delhi, India: Atlantic Publishers & Distributors, ISBN 81-7156-928-5
• Jaffrelot, Christofer (1996), The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics, C. Hurst & Co. Publishers, ISBN 1-85065-301-1
• Sharma, Jyotirmaya (2006), Hindutva: Exploring the Idea of Hindu Nationalism, Penguin Books India, ISBN 0143099639
• Teltumbde, Anand (2005), "Hindutva Agenda and Dalits", in Ram Puniyani (ed.), Religion, Power and Violence: Expression of Politics in Contemporary Times, SAGE, pp. 208–224, ISBN 0761933387
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Bal Gangadhar Tilak [Keshav Gangadhar Tilak]
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 4/23/21



Image
Bal Gangadhar Tilak
Born: 23 July 1856, Ratnagiri district, Bombay State, British India (present-day Maharashtra, India)[1]
Died: 1 August 1920 (aged 64), Bombay, Bombay State, British India (present-day Mumbai, Maharashtra, India)
Nationality: Indian
Occupation: Author, politician, freedom fighter
Political party: Indian National Congress
Movement Indian Independence movement
Spouse(s): Satyabhamabai Tilak
Children 3[2]

Bal Gangadhar Tilak (or Lokmanya Tilak; 23 July 1856 – 1 August 1920), born as Keshav Gangadhar Tilak, was an Indian nationalist, teacher, and an independence activist. He was one third of the Lal Bal Pal triumvirate.[3]

Lal Bal Pal (Lala Lajpat Rai, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, and Bipin Chandra Pal) were a triumvirate of assertive nationalists in British-ruled India in the early 20th century, from 1906 to 1918. They advocated the Swadeshi movement involving the boycott of all imported items and the use of Indian-made goods in 1907 during the anti-Partition agitation in Bengal which began in 1905. Lala Lajpat Rai had a famous dialogue during Swadeshi movement:

"Soon You will enter to my special room and I'll squeeze you to the last drop"


The final years of the nineteenth century saw a radical sensibility emerge among some Indian intellectuals. This position burst onto the national all-India scene in 1905 with the Swadeshi movement - the term is usually rendered as "self reliance" or "self sufficiency"

Lal-Bal-Pal mobilised Indians across the country against the Bengal partition, and the demonstrations, strikes and boycotts of British goods that began in Bengal soon spread to other regions in a broader protest against the Raj.

The nationalist movement gradually faded with the arrest of its main leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak and retirement of Bipin Chandra Pal and Aurobindo Ghosh from active politics.[1] While Lala Lajpat Raisuffered from injuries, due to British police superintendent, James A. Scott, ordered the British Indian police to lathi (baton) charge and personally assaulted Rai; he died on 17 November 1928 with a heart attack.[5]

-- Lal Bal Pal, by Wikipedia


Tilak was the first leader of the Indian Independence Movement. The British colonial authorities called him "The father of the Indian unrest." He was also conferred with the title of "Lokmanya", which means "accepted by the people (as their leader)".[4] Mahatma Gandhi called him "The Maker of Modern India".[5]

Today, it will surprise many to know that under British rule, a saint had demanded Swaraj in the year 1876, much before Bal Gangadhar Tilak. He was Swami Dayanand. He was the father of India’s Independence movement. If we study the history of India’s independence movement, we could know that most of the leaders, patriots and revolutionaries of that period who sacrificed their lives for freedom, were influenced by the personality and teachings of Swami Dayanand. Among the Indian revolutionaries, Shyamji Krishna Verma, Swami Shraddhanand and Lala Lajpat Rai were his disciples and ardent devotees. Even revolutionary patriots like Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Bipin Chandra Pal, Gendalal Dixit, Swami Bhavani Dayal, Bhai Parmanand, Bhagat Singh, Ramprasad Bismil, Yashpal and Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi had imbibed patriotism from the Arya Samaj. Not only this, even Mahatma Gandhi was substantially influenced by Dayanand’s teachings and vision. The remarkable thing is that Mahatma Gandhi’s Guru Gopalakrishna Gokhale and Gokhale’s Guru Justice Govind Ranade were not only the ultimate disciples of Dayanand but also the distinguished office bearers of the Paropakarini Sabha founded by Dayanand.

-- The Saint who Declared Swaraj, by Rajendra Chaddha


Tilak was one of the first and strongest advocates of Swaraj ("self-rule") and a strong radical in Indian consciousness. He is known for his quote in Marathi: "Swarajya is my birthright and I shall have it!". He formed a close alliance with many Indian National Congress leaders including Bipin Chandra Pal, Lala Lajpat Rai, Aurobindo Ghose, V. O. Chidambaram Pillai and Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

Early life

Image
Tilak's birthplace

Keshav Gangadhar Tilak was born on 23 July 1856 in an Marathi Hindu Chitpavan Brahmin family in Ratnagiri, the headquarters of the Ratnagiri district of present-day Maharashtra (then Bombay Presidency).[1] His ancestral village was Chikhali. His father, Gangadhar Tilak was a school teacher and a Sanskrit scholar who died when Tilak was sixteen. In 1871 Tilak was married to Tapibai (Née Bal) when he was sixteen, a few months before his father's death. After marriage, her name was changed to Satyabhamabai. He obtained his Bachelor of Arts in first class in Mathematics from Deccan College of Pune in 1877. He left his M.A. course of study midway to join the LL.B course instead, and in 1879 he obtained his LL.B degree from Government Law College .[6] After graduating, Tilak started teaching mathematics at a private school in Pune. Later, due to ideological differences with the colleagues in the new school, he withdrew and became a journalist. Tilak actively participated in public affairs. He stated: "Religion and practical life are not different. The real spirit is to make the country your family instead of working only for your own. The step beyond is to serve humanity and the next step is to serve God."[7]

Inspired by Vishnushastri Chiplunkar, he co-founded the New English school for secondary education in 1880 with a few of his college friends, including Gopal Ganesh Agarkar, Mahadev Ballal Namjoshi and Vishnushastri Chiplunkar. Their goal was to improve the quality of education for India's youth. The success of the school led them to set up the Deccan Education Society in 1884 to create a new system of education that taught young Indians nationalist ideas through an emphasis on Indian culture.[8] The Society established the Fergusson College in 1885 for post-secondary studies. Tilak taught mathematics at Fergusson College. In 1890, Tilak left the Deccan Education Society for more openly political work.[9] He began a mass movement towards independence by an emphasis on a religious and cultural revival.[10]


Political career

Tilak had a long political career agitating for Indian autonomy from the British rule. Before Gandhi, he was the most widely known Indian political leader. Unlike his fellow Maharashtrian contemporary, Gokhale, Tilak was considered a radical Nationalist but a Social conservative. He was imprisoned on a number of occasions that included a long stint at Mandalay. At one stage in his political life he was called "the father of Indian unrest" by British author Sir Valentine Chirol.[11]

Indian National Congress

Tilak joined the Indian National Congress in 1890.[12] He opposed its moderate attitude, especially towards the fight for self-government. He was one of the most-eminent radicals at the time.[13] In fact, it was the Swadeshi movement of 1905–1907 that resulted in the split within the Indian National Congress into the Moderates and the Extremists.[9]

During late 1896, a bubonic plague spread from Bombay to Pune, and by January 1897, it reached epidemic proportions. British troops were brought in to deal with the emergency and harsh measures were employed including forced entry into private houses, the examination of occupants, evacuation to hospitals and segregation camps, removing and destroying personal possessions, and preventing patients from entering or leaving the city. By the end of May, the epidemic was under control. They were widely regarded as acts of tyranny and oppression. Tilak took up this issue by publishing inflammatory articles in his paper Kesari (Kesari was written in Marathi, and "Maratha" was written in English), quoting the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, to say that no blame could be attached to anyone who killed an oppressor without any thought of reward. Following this, on 22 June 1897, Commissioner Rand and another British officer, Lt. Ayerst were shot and killed by the Chapekar brothers and their other associates. According to Barbara and Thomas R. Metcalf, Tilak "almost surely concealed the identities of the perpetrators".[14] Tilak was charged with incitement to murder and sentenced to 18 months imprisonment. When he emerged from prison in present-day Mumbai, he was revered as a martyr and a national hero.[15] He adopted a new slogan coined by his associate Kaka Baptista: "Swaraj (self-rule) is my birthright and I shall have it."[16]

Following the Partition of Bengal, which was a strategy set out by Lord Curzon to weaken the nationalist movement, Tilak encouraged the Swadeshi movement and the Boycott movement.[17] The movement consisted of the boycott of foreign goods and also the social boycott of any Indian who used foreign goods. The Swadeshi movement consisted of the usage of natively produced goods. Once foreign goods were boycotted, there was a gap which had to be filled by the production of those goods in India itself. Tilak said that the Swadeshi and Boycott movements are two sides of the same coin.[18]

Image
Lala Lajpat Rai of Punjab, Bal Gangadhar Tilak (middle) of Maharashtra, and Bipin Chandra Pal of Bengal, the triumvirate were popularly known as Lal Bal Pal, changed the political discourse of the Indian independence movement.

Tilak opposed the moderate views of Gopal Krishna Gokhale, and was supported by fellow Indian nationalists Bipin Chandra Pal in Bengal and Lala Lajpat Rai in Punjab. They were referred to as the "Lal-Bal-Pal triumvirate". In 1907, the annual session of the Congress Party was held at Surat, Gujarat. Trouble broke out over the selection of the new president of the Congress between the moderate and the radical sections of the party. The party split into the radicals faction, led by Tilak, Pal and Lajpat Rai, and the moderate faction. Nationalists like Aurobindo Ghose, V. O. Chidambaram Pillai were Tilak supporters.[13][19]

When asked in Calcutta whether he envisioned a Maratha-type of government for independent India, Tilak answered that the Maratha-dominated governments of 17th and 18th centuries were outmoded in the 20th century, and he wanted a genuine federal system for Free India where everyone was an equal partner.[20] He added that only such a form of government would be able to safeguard India's freedom. He was the first Congress leader to suggest that Hindi written in the Devanagari script be accepted as the sole national language of India.[21]

Sedition Charges

During his lifetime among other political cases, Tilak had been tried for sedition charges in three times by British India Government—in 1897,[22] 1909,[23] and 1916.[24] In 1897, Tilak was sentenced to 18 months in prison for preaching disaffection against the Raj. In 1909, he was again charged with sedition and intensifying racial animosity between Indians and the British. The Bombay lawyer Muhammad Ali Jinnah appeared in Tilak's defence but he was sentenced to six years in prison in Burma in a controversial judgement.[25] In 1916 when for the third time Tilak was charged for sedition over his lectures on self-rule, Jinnah again was his lawyer and this time led him to acquittal in the case.[26][27]

Imprisonment in Mandalay

See also: Alipore bomb case

On 30 April 1908, two Bengali youths, Prafulla Chaki and Khudiram Bose, threw a bomb on a carriage at Muzzafarpur, to kill the Chief Presidency Magistrate Douglas Kingsford of Calcutta fame, but erroneously killed two women traveling in it. While Chaki committed suicide when caught, Bose was hanged. Tilak, in his paper Kesari, defended the revolutionaries and called for immediate Swaraj or self-rule. The Government swiftly charged him with sedition. At the conclusion of the trial, a special jury convicted him by 7:2 majority. The judge, Dinshaw D. Davar gave him a six years jail sentence to be served in Mandalay, Burma and a fine of ₹1,000 (US$14).[28] On being asked by the judge whether he had anything to say, Tilak said:

All that I wish to say is that, in spite of the verdict of the jury, I still maintain that I am innocent. There are higher powers that rule the destinies of men and nations; and I think, it may be the will of Providence that the cause I represent may be benefited more by my suffering than by my pen and tongue.


Muhammad Ali Jinnah was his lawyer in the case.[27] Justice Davar's judgement came under stern criticism in press and was seen against impartiality of British justice system. Justice Davar himself previously had appeared for Tilak in his first sedition case in 1897.[25] In passing sentence, the judge indulged in some scathing strictures against Tilak's conduct. He threw off the judicial restraint which, to some extent, was observable in his charge to the jury. He condemned the articles as "seething with sedition", as preaching violence, speaking of murders with approval. "You hail the advent of the bomb in India as if something had come to India for its good. I say, such journalism is a curse to the country". Tilak was sent to Mandalay from 1908 to 1914.[29] While imprisoned, he continued to read and write, further developing his ideas on the Indian nationalist movement. While in the prison he wrote the Gita Rahasya.[30] Many copies of which were sold, and the money was donated for the Indian Independence movement.[31]

Shrimadh Bhagvad Gita Rahasya, popularly also known as Gita Rahasya or Karmayog Shashtra, is a 1915 Marathi language book authored by Indian social reformer and independence activist Bal Gangadhar Tilak while he was in prison at Mandalay, Burma. It is the analysis of Karma yoga which finds its source in the Bhagavad Gita, a sacred book for Hindus. According to him, the real message behind the Bhagavad Gita is Nishkam Karmayoga (selfless action), rather than Karma Sanyasa (renouncing of actions), which had become the popular message of Gita after Adi Shankara. He took the Mimamsa rule of interpretation as the basis of building up his thesis.

This book consists of two parts. The first part is the philosophical exposition and the second part consists of the Gita, its translation and the commentary.

The book was written by Tilak in pencil with his own handwriting while being imprisoned at the Mandalay jail from 1908 to 1914. The more-than-400 pages of script was written in less than four months and is hence in itself considered as "remarkable achievement". Although the writing was completed in the early years of his term, the book was only published in 1915, when he returned to Poona. He defended the ethical obligation to the active principle or action, as long the action was selfless and without personal interest or motive.

In a speech on his, Gita Rahasya Tilak said "Various commentators have put as many interpretations on the book, and surely the writer or composer could not have written or composed the book for so many interpretations being put on it. He must have but one meaning and one purpose running through the book, and that I have tried to find out". He finds the message of the subservience of all yogas to Karmayoga or the yoga of action rather than the yoga of sole knowledge (jnanayoga) or of devotion (bhaktiyoga).

-- Shrimadh Bhagvad Gita Rahasya, by Wikipedia


Life after Mandalay

Image
Bal Gangadhar Tilak

Tilak developed diabetes during his sentence in Mandalay prison. This and the general ordeal of prison life had mellowed him at his release on 16 June 1914. When World War I started in August of that year, Tilak cabled the King-Emperor George V of his support and turned his oratory to find new recruits for war efforts. He welcomed The Indian Councils Act, popularly known as Minto-Morley Reforms, which had been passed by British Parliament in May 1909, terming it as "a marked increase of confidence between the Rulers and the Ruled". It was his conviction that acts of violence actually diminished, rather than hastening, the pace of political reforms. He was eager for reconciliation with Congress and had abandoned his demand for direct action and settled for agitations "strictly by constitutional means" – a line that had long been advocated by his rival Gokhale.[32] Tilak reunited with his fellow nationalists and rejoined the Indian National Congress during the Lucknow pact 1916.[33]

Tilak tried to convince Mohandas Gandhi to leave the idea of Total non-violence ("Total Ahimsa") and try to get self-rule ("Swarajya") by all means.
Though Gandhi did not entirely concur with Tilak on the means to achieve self-rule and was steadfast in his advocacy of satyagraha, he appreciated Tilak's services to the country and his courage of conviction. After Tilak lost a civil suit against Valentine Chirol and incurred pecuniary loss, Gandhi even called upon Indians to contribute to the Tilak Purse Fund started with the objective of defraying the expenses incurred by Tilak.[34]

All India Home Rule League

Main article: All India Home Rule League

Tilak helped found the All India Home Rule League [Indian Home Rule Movement] in 1916–18, with G. S. Khaparde and Annie Besant. After years of trying to reunite the moderate and radical factions, he gave up and focused on the Home Rule League, which sought self-rule. Tilak travelled from village to village for support from farmers and locals to join the movement towards self-rule.[29] Tilak was impressed by the Russian Revolution, and expressed his admiration for Vladimir Lenin.[35] The league had 1400 members in April 1916, and by 1917 membership had grown to approximately 32,000. Tilak started his Home Rule League in Maharashtra, Central Provinces, and Karnataka and Berar region. Besant's League was active in the rest part of India.[36]

Thoughts and views

Religio-Political Views


Tilak sought to unite the Indian population for mass political action throughout his life. For this to happen, he believed there needed to be a comprehensive justification for anti-British pro-Hindu activism. For this end, he sought justification in the supposed original principles of the Ramayana and the Bhagavad Gita. He named this call to activism karma-yoga or the yoga of action.[37] In his interpretation, the Bhagavad Gita reveals this principle in the conversation between Krishna and Arjuna when Krishna exhorts Arjuna to fight his enemies (which in this case included many members of his family) because it is his duty. In Tilaks opinion, the Bhagavad Gita provided a strong justification of activism. However, this conflicted with the mainstream exegesis of the text at the time which was predominated by renunciate views and the idea of acts purely for God. This was represented by the two mainstream views at the time by Ramanuja and Adi Shankara. To find support for this philosophy, Tilak wrote his own interpretations of the relevant passages of the Gita and backed his views using Jnanadeva's commentary on the Gita, Ramanuja's critical commentary and his own translation of the Gita.[38] His main battle was against the renunciate views of the time which conflicted with worldly activism. To fight this, he went to extents to reinterpret words such as karma, dharma, yoga as well as the concept of renunciation itself. Because he found his rationalization on Hindu religious symbols and lines, he alienated many non-Hindus such as the Muslims who began to ally with the British for support.

Social views against women

Tilak was strongly opposed to liberal trends emerging in Pune such as women's rights and social reforms against untouchability.[39][40][41] Tilak vehemently opposed the establishment of the first Native girls High school (now called Huzurpaga) in Pune in 1885 and its curriculum using his newspapers, the Mahratta and Kesari.[40][42][43] Tilak was also opposed to intercaste marriage, particularly the match where an upper caste woman married a lower caste man.[43] In the case of Deshasthas, Chitpawans and Karhades, he encouraged these three Maharashtrian Brahmin groups to give up "caste exclusiveness" and intermarry.[a] Tilak officially opposed the age of consent bill which raised the age of marriage from ten to twelve for girls, however he was willing to sign a circular that increased age of marriage for girls to sixteen and twenty for boys. He fully supported social reforms but in his opinion self-rule took precedence over any social reform.[45][46] On the whole Tilak was not against social reforms. Though he was against the age of consent bill, he arranged his daughter's marriage at the age of fifteen. He also advocated widow marriages. He also congratulated Dhondo Keshav Karve when he married a widow after the death of their first wife. He was in the favour of social reforms but without the interference of British Government.[46]

Child bride Rukhmabai was married at the age of eleven but refused to go and live with her husband. The husband sued for restitution of conjugal rights, initially lost but appealed the decision. On 4 March 1887, Justice Farran, using interpretations of Hindu laws, ordered Rukhmabai to "go live with her husband or face six months of imprisonment". Tilak approved of this decision of the court and said that the court was following Hindu Dharmaśāstras. Rukhmabai responded that she would rather face imprisonment than obey the verdict. Her marriage was later dissolved by Queen Victoria. Later, she went on to receive her Doctor of Medicine degree from the London School of Medicine for Women.[47][48][49][50]

In 1890, when an eleven-year-old Phulamani Bai died while having sexual intercourse with her much older husband, the Parsi social reformer Behramji Malabari supported the Age of Consent Act, 1891 to raise the age of a girl's eligibility for marriage. Tilak opposed the Bill and said that the Parsis as well as the English had no jurisdiction over the (Hindu) religious matters. He blamed the girl for having "defective female organs" and questioned how the husband could be "persecuted diabolically for doing a harmless act". He called the girl one of those "dangerous freaks of nature".[41] Tilak did not have a progressive view when it came to gender relations. He did not believe that Hindu women should get a modern education. Rather, he had a more conservative view, believing that women were meant to be homemakers who had to subordinate themselves to the needs of their husbands and children.[9] Tilak refused to sign a petition for the abolition of untouchability in 1918, two years before his death, although he had spoken against it earlier in a meeting.[39]

Esteem for Swami Vivekananda

Tilak and Swami Vivekananda had great mutual respect and esteem for each other. They met accidentally while travelling by train in 1892 and Tilak had Vivekananda as a guest in his house. A person who was present there (Basukaka), heard that it was agreed between Vivekananda and Tilak that Tilak would work towards nationalism in the "political" arena, while Vivekananda would work for nationalism in the "religious" arena. When Vivekananda died at a young age, Tilak expressed great sorrow and paid tributes to him in the Kesari.[ b][c][d][e] Tilak said about Vivekananda:

"No Hindu, who, has the interests of Hinduism at his heart, could help feeling grieved over Vivekananda's samadhi. Vivekananda, in short, had taken the work of keeping the banner of Advaita philosophy forever flying among all the nations of the world and made them realize the true greatness of Hindu religion and of the Hindu people. He had hoped that he would crown his achievement with the fulfillment of this task by virtue of his learning, eloquence, enthusiasm and sincerity, just as he had laid a secure foundation for it; but with Swami's samadhi, these hopes have gone. Thousands of years ago, another saint, Shankaracharya, who, showed to the world the glory and greatness of Hinduism. At the fag of the 19th century, the second Shankaracharya is Vivekananda, who, showed to the world the glory of Hinduism. His work has yet to be completed. We have lost our glory, our independence, everything."[f]


Conflicts with Shahu over caste issues

Shahu, the ruler of the princely state of Kolhapur, had several conflicts with Tilak as the latter agreed with the Brahmins decision of Puranic rituals for the Marathas that were intended for Shudras. Tilak even suggested that the Marathas should be "content" with the Shudra status [the lowest ranked of the four varnas of the Hindu caste system and social order in India.] assigned to them by the Brahmins.

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Group Photograph of a Maratha family in the late 19th century

The Maratha caste are a Marathi clan originally formed in the earlier centuries from the amalgamation of families from the peasant (Kunbi), shepherd (Dhangar), pastoral (Gawli), blacksmith (Lohar), Sutar (carpenter), Bhandari, Thakar and Koli castes in Maharashtra. Many of them took to military service in the 16th century for the Deccan sultanates or the Mughals. Later in the 17th and 18th centuries, they served in the armies of the Maratha empire, founded by Shivaji, a Maratha by caste. Many Marathas were granted hereditary fiefs by the Sultanates, and Moghuls and for their service.

According to the Maharashtrian historian B. R. Sunthankar, and scholars such as Rajendra Vora, the "Marathas" are a "middle-peasantry" caste which formed the bulk of the Maharashtrian society together with the other Kunbi peasant caste. Vora adds that the Maratha caste is the largest caste of India and dominate the power structure in Maharashtra because of their numerical strength, especially in the rural society.

According to Jeremy Black, British historian at the University of Exeter, "Maratha caste is a coalescence of peasants, shepherds, ironworkers, etc. as a result of serving in the military in the 17th and 18th century". They are dominant in rural areas and mainly constitute the landed peasantry. As of 2018, 80% of the members of the Maratha caste were farmers.

Marathas are subdivided into 96 different clans, known as the 96 Kuli Marathas or Shahānnau Kule. The general body of lists are often at great variance with each other.

The Maratha king Shivaji founded the Maratha empire that included warriors and other notables from Maratha and several other castes from Maharashtra. This empire was the dominant in India for much of 18th century.

-- Maratha (caste), by Wikipedia


Tilak's newspapers, as well as the press in Kolhapur, criticized Shahu for his caste prejudice and his unreasoned hostility towards Brahmins. These included serious allegations such as sexual assaults by Shahu against four Brahmin women. An English woman named Lady Minto was petitioned to help them. The agent of Shahu had blamed these allegations on the "troublesome brahmins". Tilak and another Brahmin suffered from the confiscation of estates by Shahu, the first during a quarrel between Shahu and the Shankaracharya of Sankareshwar and later in another issue.[g][h]

Social contributions

Further information: Sarvajanik Ganeshotsav and Kesari (newspaper)

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Statue of Tilak near Supreme Court of Delhi

Tilak started two weeklies, Kesari ("The Lion") in Marathi and Mahratta in English (sometimes referred as 'Maratha' in Academic Study Books) in 1880–81 with Gopal Ganesh Agarkar as the first editor.[58] By this he was recognized as 'awakener of India', as Kesari later became a daily and continues publication to this day. In 1894, Tilak transformed the household worshipping of Ganesha into a grand public event (Sarvajanik Ganeshotsav). The celebrations consisted of several days of processions, music, and food. They were organized by the means of subscriptions by neighbourhood, caste, or occupation. Students often would celebrate Hindu and national glory and address political issues; including patronage of Swadeshi goods.[59] In 1895, Tilak founded the Shri Shivaji Fund Committee for the celebration of "Shiv Jayanti", the birth anniversary of Shivaji, the founder of the Maratha Empire. The project also had the objective of funding the reconstruction of the tomb (Samadhi) of Shivaji at Raigad Fort. For this second objective, Tilak established the Shri Shivaji Raigad Smarak Mandal along with Senapati Khanderao Dabhade II of Talegaon Dabhade, who became the founder President of the Mandal.

The events like the Ganapati festival and Shiv Jayanti were used by Tilak to build a national spirit beyond the circle of the educated elite in opposition to colonial rule. But it also exacerbated Hindu-Muslim differences. The festival organizers would urge Hindus to protect cows and boycott the Muharram celebrations organized by Shi'a Muslims, in which Hindus had formerly often participated. Thus, although the celebrations were meant to be a way to oppose colonial rule, they also contributed to religious tensions.[59] Contemporary Marathi Hindu nationalist parties like the Shiv Sena took up his reverence for Shivaji.[60] However, Indian Historian, Uma Chakravarti cites Professor Gordon Johnson and states "It is significant that even at the time when Tilak was making political use of Shivaji the question of conceding Kshatriya status to him as Maratha was resisted by the conservative Brahmins including Tilak. While Shivaji was a Brave man, all his bravery, it was argued, did not give him the right to a status that very nearly approached that of a Brahmin. Further, the fact that Shivaji worshiped the Brahmanas in no way altered social relations, 'since it was as a Shudra he did it – as a Shudra the servant, if not the slave, of the Brahmin'".[61]

The Deccan Education Society that Tilak founded with others in the 1880s still runs Institutions in Pune like the Fergusson College.

The Deccan Education Society is an organisation that runs 43 education establishments in Maharashtra, India. Its main branch is situated in Pune.

In 1880 Vishnushastri Chiplunkar, Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Gopal Ganesh Agarkar established the New English School, one of the first native-run schools offering Western education in Pune. In 1884 they created the Deccan Education Society with Hon. Justice Mahadev Govind Ranade, Gopal Ganesh Agarkar, Mahadev Ballal Namjoshi, V. S. Apte, V. B. Kelkar, M. S. Gole and N. K. Dharap

In 1885, the society established Fergusson College, named after the then Governor of Bombay presidency Sir James Fergusson. The college was initially operated out of Gadre Wada in Shaniwar peth area of Pune. At its inception, the college was the first indigenously run higher-education institution in Pune.
In its early years Tilak and Agharkar served as academic staff. Congress party leader, Gopal Krishna Gokhale and social reformer, Dhondo Keshav Karve were also life members of the society and taught at the college in the 1890s.

The society established many schools and colleges in Pune and other towns during following decades such as New English School of Satara in 1899. The society took over the Mawjee Madhavjee English School in Umbergaon in 1919, and the Dravid High School of Wai in 1934. In 1919, the society opened the Willingdon College in Sangli in order to satisfy demand for higher education in southern Maharashtra region. In 1939, the Society deceded to enter the field of secondary education for girls by starting the Ahilyadevi High School for Girls in the historic premises of the Holkar Wada in Pune. In 1943, the society started the Brihan Maharashtra College of Commerce, for which the Brihan Maharashtra Sugar Syndicate Ltd. gave to the Society a donation of Rs. 2,00,000. Rulers of many Princely states such as Bhor and Sangli were patrons of the society.

-- Deccan Education Society, by Wikipedia


The Swadeshi movement started by Tilak at the beginning of the 20th century became part of the Independence movement until that goal was achieved in 1947. One can even say Swadeshi remained part of Indian Government policy until the 1990s when the Congress Government liberalised the economy.[62] Tilak said, "I regard India as my Motherland and my Goddess, the people in India are my kith and kin, and loyal and steadfast work for their political and social emancipation is my highest religion and duty".[63]

Books

In 1903, Tilak wrote the book "The Arctic Home in the Vedas". In it, he argued that the Vedas could only have been composed in the Arctics, and the Aryan bards brought them south after the onset of the last ice age. He proposed a new way to determine the exact time of the Vedas.

In "The Orion", he tried to calculate the time of the Vedas by using the position of different Nakshatras.[64] The positions of the Nakshtras were described in different Vedas. Tilak wrote "Shrimadh Bhagvad Gita Rahasya" in prison at Mandalay – the analysis of 'Karma Yoga' in the Bhagavad Gita, which is known to be a gift of the Vedas and the Upanishads.

Descendants

Tilak's son, Shridhar campaigned for removal of untouchability in late 1920s with dalit leader, Dr. Ambedkar.[65] Both were leaders of the multi-caste Samata sangh.[66][67] Shridhar's son, Jayantrao Tilak (1921–2001) was editor of the Kesari newspaper for many years. Jayantrao was also a politician from the Congress party. He was a member of the Parliament of India representing Maharashtra in the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Indian Parliament. He was also a member of the Maharashtra Legislative Council.[68]

Rohit Tilak, a descendant of Bal Gangadhar Tilak, is a Pune-based Congress party politician.[69] In 2017, a woman with whom he had an extra-marital affair accused him of rape and other crimes. He is currently out on bail in connection with these charges.[70][71]

Legacy

On 28 July 1956, a portrait of B. G. Tilak is put in the Central Hall of Parliament House. The portrait of Tilak, painted by Gopal Deuskar, was unveiled by the then Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru.[72][73]

Tilak Smarak Ranga Mandir, a theatre auditorium in Pune is dedicated to him. In 2007, the Government of India released a coin to commemorate the 150th birth anniversary of Tilak.[74][75] The formal approval of the government of Burma was received for the construction of clafs-cum-lecture hall in the Mandalay prison as a memorial to Lokmanya Tilak. ₹35,000 (US$490) were given by the Indian Government and ₹7,500 (US$110) by the local Indian community in Burma.[76]

Several Indian films have been made on his life, including: the documentary films Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1951) and Lokmanya Tilak (1957) both by Vishram Bedekar, Lokmanya: Ek Yugpurush (2015) by Om Raut, and The Great Freedom Fighter Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak - Swaraj My Birthright (2018) by Vinay Dhumale.[77][78][79]

Notes

1. As early as 1881, in a few articles Bal Gangadhar Tilak, the resolute thinker and the enfant terrible of Indian politics, wrote comprehensive discourses on the need for united front by the Chitpavans, Deshasthas and the Karhades. Invoking the urgent necessity of this remarkable Brahmans combination, Tilak urged sincerely that these three groups of Brahmans should give up caste exclusiveness by encouraging inter sub-caste marriages and community dining."[44]
2. THE RELATIONS OF TILAK AND VIVEKANANDA The personal relations between Tilak and Swami Vivekananda (1863– 1902) were marked by great mutual regards and esteem. In 1892, Tilak was returning from Bombay to Poona and had occupied a seat in a second-class railway compartment. Some Gujaratis accompanied Swami Vivekananda who also came and sat in the same compartment. The Gujarati introduced the Swami to Tilak and requested the Swami to stay with the latter.[51]
3. 93. Among the Congressmen there was one exception and that was Bal Gangadhar Tilak, whose patriotism was marked by 'sacrifice, scholastic fervour and militancy.'94 Tilak a great scholar, was also a fearless patriot, who wanted to meet the challenge of British imperialism with passive resistance and boycott of British goods. This programme came to the forefront in 1905-7, some years after the death of Swami Vivekananda. It would be useless to speculate what Swamiji would have ...[52]
4. Here it will not be out of place to refer to Tilak's views of Swami Vivekananda whom he did not know intimately; but Swamiji's dynamic personality and powerful exposition of the Vedantic doctrine, could not fail to impress Tilak. When Swamiji's great soul sought eternal rest on 4 July 1902, Tilak, paying his tributes to him, wrote in his Kesari: "No Hindu who has the interest of Hinduism at his heart, can help feeling grieved over Swami Vivekananda's Samadhi"[53]
5. According to Basukaka, when Swamiji was living in Tilak's house as the latter's guest, Basukaka, who was present there, heard that it was agreed between Vivekananda and Tilak that Tilak would work for nationalism in the political field, while Vivekananda would work for nationalism in the religious field. Tilak and Vivekananda Now let us see what Tilak had himself to say about the meeting he had with Swamiji. Writing in the Vedanta Kesari (January •934), Tilak recalled the meeting.[54]
6. ... Vivekanand was another powerful influence in turning the thoughts of Tilak from western to eastern philosophy. No Hindu, he says, who, has the interests of Hinduism at his heart, could help to feel grieved over Vivekananda's samadhi. ...Vivekananda, in short, had taken the work of keeping the banner of Advaita philosophy forever flying among all the nations of the world and made them realize the true greatness of Hindu religion and of the Hindu people. He had hoped that he would crown his achievement with the fulfillment of this task by virtue of his learning, eloquence, enthusiasm, and sincerity, just as he had laid a secure foundation for it; but with Swami's samadhi, these hopes have gone. Thousands of years ago, another saint, Shankaracharya, showed to the world the glory and greatness of Hinduism. At the fag of the 19th century, the second Shankaracharya is Vivekananda, who, showed to the world the glory of Hinduism. His work has yet to be completed. We have lost our glory, our independence, everything.[55]
7. This connection with the British has tended to obscure an equally important significance in Shahu's exchanges with Tilak, especially in the dispute over the Vedokta, the right of Shahu's family and of other Marathas to use the Vedic rituals of the twice-born Kshatriya, rather than the puranic rituals and shudra status with which Tilak and conservative Brahman opinion held that the Marathas should be content.[56]
8. The anti-durbar pressin kolhapur aligned itself with Tilak's newspapers and reproved Shahu for his caste prejudice and his unreasoned hostility towards Brahmins. To the Bombay government, and to the Vicereine herself, the Brahmins in Kolhapur presented themselves as the victims of a ruthless persecution by the Maharaja. .....Both Natu and Tilak suffered from the durbar's confiscation of estates – first during the confiscation of estates in Kolhapur – the first during a quarrel between Shahu and the Shankaracharya of Sankareshwar. S ee, for example, Samarth, 8 August 1906, quoted in I. Copland, 'The Maharaja of Kolhapur', in Modern Asian studies, vol II, no 2(April 1973), 218. In 1906, the 'poor helpless women' of Kolhapur petitioned Lady Minto alleging that four Brahmin ladies had been forcibly seduced by the Maharaja and that the Political Agent had refused to act in the matter. Broadsheets were distributed maintaining 'no beautiful woman is immune from the violence of the Maharaja...and the Brahmins being special objects of hatred no Brahmin women can hope to escape this shameful fate'...But the agent blamed everything on the troublesome brahmins.[57]

References

Citations


1. Bhagwat & Pradhan 2015, pp. 11–.
2. Anupama Rao 2009, pp. 315–.
3. Ashalatha, Koropath & Nambarathil 2009, p. 72.
4. Tahmankar 1956.
5. "Bal Gangadhar Tilak", Encyclopedia Britannica
6. Inamdar 1983.
7. Brown 1970, p. 76.
8. Karve 1961, pp. 206–207.
9. Guha 2011, p. 112.
10. Edwardes 1961, p. 322.
11. Inamdar 1983, p. 20.
12. Singh et al. 2011, p. 43.
13. Brown 1970, p. 34.
14. Metcalf & Metcalf 2006, p. 154.
15. Popplewell 2018, p. 34.
16. HY Sharada Prasad (2003). The Book I Won't be Writing and Other Essays. Orient Blackswan. p. 22. ISBN 9788180280023.
17. Vohra 1997, p. 120.
18. Shanta Sathe (1994). Lokmanya Tilak, his social and political thoughts. Ajanta. p. 49.
19. Wolpert 1962, p. 67.
20. Mahesh Kumar Singh (1 January 2009). Encyclopaedia on Tilak. Anmol Publications. p. 3. ISBN 978-81-261-3778-7.
21. Chaturvedi, p. 144.
22. "FIRST TILAK TRIAL – 1897". Bombay High Court. Retrieved 29 February 2016.
23. "SECOND TILAK TRIAL – 1909". Bombay High Court. Retrieved 29 February2016.
24. "THIRD TILAK TRIAL – 1916". Bombay High Court. Retrieved 29 February 2016.
25. "On Tilak's hundredth death anniversary, what governments can learn from his two trials". The Indian Express. 1 August 2020. Retrieved 11 August 2020.
26. "Jinnah, Tilak and Indian independence movement". DAWN.COM. 17 March 2010. Retrieved 11 August 2020.
27. "Where Jinnah defended Tilak". Hindustan Times. 3 March 2010. Retrieved 11 August 2020.
28. "Remove portrait of judge who sentenced Bal Gangadhar Tilak". Indian Express. Mumbai. 17 August 2012. Retrieved 7 January 2013.
29. Tilak 1988, p. 98.
30. Davis 2015, p. 131.
31. "Sukh Karta Dukh harta". 17 September 2011.
32. "From the Archives (May 10, 1919): Mr. Tilak and the Indian Situation". The Hindu. 10 May 2019. ISSN 0971-751X. Retrieved 12 January 2020.
33. N. Jayapalan (2001). History of India. Atlantic Publishers & Dist. p. 78. ISBN 978-81-7156-917-5.
34. "From the Archives (June 3, 1919): Mr. Tilak's Service. Mr. Gandhi's Speech". The Hindu. 3 June 2019. ISSN 0971-751X. Retrieved 10 August 2019.
35. M. V. S. Koteswara Rao 2003, p. 82.
36. Tarique 2008.
37. Harvey 1986, pp. 321–331.
38. Harvey 1986, pp. 322–324.
39. Jaffrelot 2005, p. 177.
40. P.V. Rao 2008, pp. 141–148.
41. Figueira 2002, p. 129.
42. P.V. Rao 2007, p. 307.
43. Omvedt 1974, pp. 201–219.
44. Gokhale 2008, p. 147.
45. Cashman 1975, pp. 52–54.
46. Jayapalan 2003, p. 97.
47. Forbes 1999, p. 69.
48. Lahiri 2000, p. 13.
49. Chandra 1996, pp. 2937–2947.
50. Rappaport 2003, p. 429.
51. Varma & Agarwa 1978.
52. Bhuyan 2003, p. 191.
53. Vedanta Kesari 1978, p. 407.
54. Yuva Bharati 1979, p. 70.
55. Bhagwat & Pradhan 2015, p. 226.
56. Shepperdson & Simmons 1988, p. 109.
57. Johnson 2005, p. 104.
58. Britannica 1997, p. 772.
59. Metcalf & Metcalf 2006, p. 152.
60. Gellner 2009, p. 34.
61. Chakravarti 2013, p. 125.
62. Globalisation versus Swadeshi – A tricky problem for Vajpayee | South Asia Analysis Group. Southasiaanalysis.org. Retrieved on 20 December 2018.
63. Robert 1986.
64. Tilak 1893.
65. Sanjay Paswan; Pramanshi Jaideva (2002). Encyclopaedia of Dalits in India. Gyan Publishing House. pp. 123–124. ISBN 978-81-7835-128-5.
66. Anupama Rao 2009, p. 315.
67. Sukhdeo Thorat. "9th Dr. Asghar Ali Engineer Memorial Lecture on 5th August 2017 "Why Untouchability, Caste Discrimination and Atrocities still persists despite Law? Reflections on Causes for Persistence and Solutions"" (PDF). Centre for Study of Society and Secularism. Retrieved 19 March 2018.
68. "Rajya Sabha Web Site" (PDF). p. 5. Retrieved 9 January 2011.
69. Shoumojit Banerjee (16 March 2017). "Mukta Tilak, MBA, is Pune's first BJP mayor". The Hindu.
70. Archana More (11 August 2017). "ROHIT TILAK'S BAIL IN RAPE CASE EXTENDED BY COURT". India Times.
71. Shalaka Shinde (19 July 2017). "Great grandson of Bal Gangadhar Tilak charged with rape in Pune". Hindustan Times.
72. https://rajyasabha.nic.in/rsnew/picture ... al_gan.asp
73. http://164.100.47.194/loksabha/PhotoGal ... ntral+Hall
74. "Tilak family awaits 3 lakh coins". Indian Express. Pune. 5 August 2007. Retrieved 7 January 2013.
75. "Flawed 'Tilak coin' upsets many". Pune: Zee News. 2 August 2007. Retrieved 7 January 2013.
76. "Lok Sabha Debates" (PDF), eparlib.nic.in, Second, II, p. 6, 1957
77. Ashish Rajadhyaksha; Paul Willemen (10 July 2014). Encyclopedia of Indian Cinema. Routledge. p. 274. ISBN 978-1-135-94318-9.
78. "Lokmanya Ek Yugapurush: A film on Lokmanya Tilak". Indian Express. Mumbai. 21 November 2014.
79. "Decade-long wait over, Bal Gangadhar Tilak film hits the screen". The Times of India. 2 August 2018.

Sources

• The New Encyclopædia Britannica: Solovyov – Truck, 11, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1997, ISBN 9780852296332
• The Vedanta Kesari, 65, Ramakrishna Math, 1978
• Yuva Bharati, 7, 1979
• Ashalatha, A.; Koropath, Pradeep; Nambarathil, Saritha (2009). "6 – Indian National Movement" (PDF). Social Science: Standard VIII Part 1. Government of Kerala • Department of Education. State Council of Educational Research and Training (SCERT).
• Bhagwat, A.K.; Pradhan, G.P. (2015), Lokmanya Tilak – A Biography, Jaico Publishing House, ISBN 978-81-7992-846-2
• Bhuyan, P. R. (2003), Swami Vivekananda: Messiah of Resurgent India, ISBN 978-81-269-0234-7
• Brown, Donald Mackenzie (1970), The Nationalist Movement: Indian Political Thought from Ranade to Bhave, University of California Press, ISBN 9780520001831
• Cashman, Richard I. (1975), The myth of the Lokamanya : Tilak and mass politics in Maharashtra, Berkeley: University of California Press, ISBN 978-0520024076
• Chakravarti, Uma (2013), Rewriting History: The Life and Times of Pandita Ramabai, Zubaan Books, ISBN 9789383074631
• Chandra, Sudhir (1996), "Rukhmabai: Debate over Woman's Right to Her Person", Economic and Political Weekly, 31 (44): 2937–2947, JSTOR 4404742
• Chaturvedi, R. P., Great Personalities, Upkar Prakashan
• Davis, Richard H. (2015), The Bhagavad Gita: A Biography, Princeton University Press, ISBN 9781400851973
• Edwardes, Michael (1961), A History of India, New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy
• Figueira, Dorothy M. (2002), Aryans, Jews, Brahmins: Theorizing Authority through Myths of Identity, State University of New York Press, ISBN 9780791455326
• Forbes, Geraldine Hancock (1999), Women in Modern India, 2, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 9780521653770
• Gellner, David (2009), Ethnic Activism and Civil Society in South Asia, SAGE, ISBN 9789352802524
• Gokhale, Sandhya (2008), The Chitpavans: social ascendancy of a creative minority in Maharashtra, 1818–1918, Shubhi Publications, ISBN 978-81-8290-132-2
• Guha, Ramachandra (2011), Makers of Modern India, Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
• Harvey, Mark (1986), "Secular as Sacred? – The Religio-Political Rationalization of B.G. Tilak", Modern Asian Studies, 20 (2): 321–331, doi:10.1017/s0026749x00000858, JSTOR 312578
• Inamdar, N. R. (1983), Political Thought and Leadership of Lokmanya Tilak, Concept Publishing Company
• Jaffrelot, Christophe (2005), Dr. Ambedkar and Untouchability: Fighting the Indian Caste System, Columbia University Press, ISBN 9780231136020
• Jayapalan, N (2003), "8:Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856-1920)", Indian Political Thinkers:Modern Indian Political Thought, Atlantic Publishers and Distributers, ISBN 81-7156-929-3
• Johnson, Gordon (2005), Provincial Politics and Indian Nationalism: Bombay and the Indian National Congress 1880–1915, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-61965-3
• Karve, D. D. (1961), "The Deccan Education Society", The Journal of Asian Studies, 20 (2): 205–212, doi:10.2307/2050484, JSTOR 2050484
• Lahiri, Shompa (2000), Indians in Britain: Anglo-Indian Encounters, Race and Identity, 1880–1930, ISBN 9780714649863
• Metcalf, Barbara D.; Metcalf, Thomas R. (2006), A Concise History of India(2nd ed.), Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0521682251
• Omvedt, Gail (1974), "Non-Brahmans and Nationalists in Poona", Economic and Political Weekly, 9 (6/8): 201–216, JSTOR 4363419
• Popplewell, Richard James (2018), Intelligence and Imperial Defence: British Intelligence and the Defence of the Indian Empire 1904-1924, Routledge, ISBN 9781135239336
• Rao, Anupama (2009), The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India, University of California Press, ISBN 978-0-520-25761-0
• Rao, M. V. S. Koteswara (2003), Communist parties and United Front experience in Kerala and West Bengal, Prajasakti Book House, ISBN 978-81-86317-37-2
• Rao, P.V. (2007), "Women's Education and the Nationalist Response in Western India: Part I-Basic Education", Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 14 (2), doi:10.1177/097152150701400206, S2CID 197651677
• Rao, P.V. (2008), "Women's Education and the Nationalist Response in Western India: Part II–Higher Education", Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 15 (1), doi:10.1177/097152150701500108, S2CID 143961063
• Rappaport, Helen (2003), Queen Victoria: A Biographical Companion, ABC-CLIO, ISBN 9781851093557
• Robert, Minor (1986), Modern Indian Interpreters of the Bhagavad Gita, State University of NY press, ISBN 0-88706-298-9
• Shepperdson, Mike; Simmons, Colin (1988), The Indian National Congress Party and Political Economy in India, 1885–1985, ISBN 9780566050763
• Singh, Vipu; Dhillon, Jasmine; Shanmugavel, Gita; Basu, Sucharita (2011), History And Civics, Pearson Education, ISBN 9788131763186
• Tahmankar, D. V. (1956), Lokamany Tilak: Father of Indian Unrest and Maker of Modern India (1st ed.), John Murray
• Tarique, Mohammad (2008), Modern Indian History, Tata McGraw-Hill Education, ISBN 978-0-07-066030-4
• Tilak, Bal Gangadhar (1988), Embree, Ainslie Thomas (ed.), Encyclopedia of Asian History, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons and Macmillan Publishing Company, ISBN 9780684186191
• Tilak, Bal Gangadhar (1893), Orion, or Researches into the Antiquities of the Vedas
• Varma, Vishwanath Prasad; Agarwa, Lakshmi Narain (1978), The Life and Philosophy of Lokamanya Tilak: With Excerpts from Original Sources
• Vohra, Ranbir (1997), The Making of India: A Historical Survey (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, Inc)
• Wolpert, Stanley A. (1962), Tilak and Gokhale: revolution and reform in the making of modern India

External links

• Media from Wikimedia Commons
• Quotations from Wikiquote
• Texts from Wikisource
• Data from Wikidata
• "Tilak, Bal Gangadhar" . Encyclopædia Britannica (12th ed.). 1922.
• Newspaper clippings about Bal Gangadhar Tilak in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW
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Re: Freda Bedi Cont'd (#3)

Postby admin » Sun May 09, 2021 7:37 am

Young Italy
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 5/9/21



Image
Giovine Italia
Formation: July 1831
Type: Conspiratorial organization
Purpose: Italian unification
Key people: Giuseppe Mazzini

Young Italy (Italian: La Giovine Italia) was a political movement for Italian youth (under age 40) founded in 1831 by Giuseppe Mazzini. After a few months of leaving Italy, in June 1831, Mazzini wrote a letter to King Charles Albert of Sardinia, in which he asked him to unite Italy and lead the nation. A month later, convinced that his demands did not reach the king, he founded the movement in Marseille. It would then spread out to other nations across Europe.[1] The movement's goal was to create a united Italian republic through promoting a general insurrection in the Italian reactionary states and in the lands occupied by the Austrian Empire. Mazzini's belief was that a popular uprising would create a unified Italy.[2] The slogan that defined the movement's aim was "Union, Strength, and Liberty". The phrase could be found in the tricolor Italian flag, which represented the country's unity.[3]

Overview

The Giovine Italia was founded in France, in July 1831 when Mazzini was in exile. Its members adopted nicknames taken from figures of the Italian Middle Ages. Every member of the brotherhood had to recite an Oath, where they would pledge to make Italy a united, free, independent, republican nation, where every man would be considered equal.[4] The movement garnered about 60,000 members around 1833.[5] On that same year, many of the members who were plotting a revolt in Savoy and Piedmont were arrested and executed by the Sardinian police. In Austria, having links with the movement was seen as treason. The crime was punishable by death.[6]

After another failed Mazzinian revolt in Piedmont and Savoy of the February 1834, the movement disappeared for some time, reappearing in 1838 in England. Further insurrections in Sicily, Abruzzi, Tuscany, Lombardy-Venetia, Romagna (1841 and 1845), Bologna (1843) failed. Also short-lived was the Roman Republic of 1848–49, which was crushed by a French Army called in to help by Pope Pius IX. That Pope was initially hailed by Mazzini as the most likely paladin of a liberal unification of Italy, but he turned into the leader of the reactionaries.

Similar movements were set up around Europe by Mazzini himself. La Giovine Italia became affiliated with the movement Giovine Europa (created in 1835), an internationally oriented association, together with similar movements such as Junges Deutschland, Młoda Polska, Young Turks and Giovine Svizzera. It also inspired Mlada Bosna, early-20th-century Serbian revolutionary movement in occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina.[7]

Mazzini's movement was basically evicted after a last failed revolt against Austria in Milan in 1853, crushing hopes of a democratic Italy in favor of the Piedmontese monarchy. It achieved national unification in 1860 under the leadership of Count Cavour.

The most famous member of Young Italy was Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–1882). He joined the movement around 1833, after meeting Mazzini through social and political reforms back in Geneva. Additionally, he was part of a failed revolt led by Mazzini in Piedmont. As a consequence, he was sentenced to death. After learning his fate, Garibaldi fled to Marseilles.[8]

Later on, similar nationalist movements for youth appeared in Europe's colonies in various Asian and African countries from the mid 19th century to the period of decolonization in the late 20th century.[9]

See also

• Carbonari
• Unification of Italy
• Vincenzo Gioberti
• Giuseppe Garibaldi
• Attilio and Emilio Bandiera
• Carlo Pisacane
• Francesco Bentivegna
• Raffaello Carboni
• Young America Movement

References

1. Fabiani, Ulisse. "La Scuola per i 150 anni dell'Unità d'Italia – I movimenti, i valori, i libri". http://www.150anni.it (in Italian). Retrieved 2018-12-06.
2. Enrico Dal Lago (2013). William Lloyd Garrison and Giuseppe Mazzini: Abolition, Democracy, and Radical Reform. LSU Press. pp. 57–63. ISBN 9780807152072.
3. "Italy 1848 – italian revolutionary developments". http://www.age-of-the-sage.org. Retrieved 2018-12-06.
4. Mazzini, Giuseppe (1872). Joseph Mazzini: his life, writings, and political principles. New York: Hurd and Houghton. pp. 71–74. hdl:2027/hvd.32044082219429.
5. "Giuseppe Mazzini. Italian revolutionary". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 2018-12-06.
6. "Giuseppe Mazzini biography : Young Italy Risorgimento". http://www.age-of-the-sage.org. Retrieved 2018-12-06.
7. Yonatan Eyal (2007). The Young America Movement and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, 1828–1861. Cambridge UP. p. 94. ISBN 9781139466691.
8. "Giuseppe Garibaldi". pub1.andyswebtools.com. Retrieved 2018-12-06.
9. Fabrizio De Donno and Neelam Srivastava. "Colonial and Postcolonial Italy". Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies (2006) 8#3: 371–379.

Further reading

• Denis Mack Smith (2008). Mazzini. Yale UP. p. passim. ISBN 978-0300177121.

External links

• "Young Italy" . New International Encyclopedia. 1905.
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Re: Freda Bedi Cont'd (#3)

Postby admin » Mon May 10, 2021 10:37 am

Vedic priesthood [Hotar]
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 5/10/21


1. Come, Agni, praised with song, to feast and sacrificial offering: sit
As Hotar on the holy grass!
2. O Agni, thou hast been ordained Hotar of every sacrifice,
By Gods, among the race of men.
3. Agni we choose as envoy, skilled performer of this holy rite,
Hotar, possessor of all wealth...
10. To him, who dealeth out all wealth, the sweet-toned Hotar-priest of men,
To him like the first vessels filled with savoury juice, to Agni let the lauds go forth....
7. Thou, Agni, art the homestead's Lord, our Hotar-priest at sacrifice.
Lord of all boons, thou art the Hotar, passing wise. Pay worship, and enjoy the good!...
1. Present oblations, make him splendid: set ye as Hotar in his place the Home's Lord, worshipped
With gifts and homage where they pour libations! Honour him meet for reverence in our houses....
2. To Agni, to the Hotar-priest offer your best, your lofty speech,
To him ordainer-like who bears the light of songs...
4. Anger not him who is our guest! He is the bright God Agni, praised by many a man,
God Hotar, skilled in sacrifice.
...
2. With offerings of our own we choose thee, Agni, as our Hotar priest,
Piercing and brightly shining-at your glad carouse-served with trimmed grass at sacrifice. Thou waxest great....
9. Agni I deem our Hotar-priest, munificent wealth-giver, Son of Strength, who, knoweth all that is, even as the Sage who, knoweth all...
4. Made pure by this man's urgent zeal and impulse, the God hath with his juice the Gods pervaded.
Pressed, singing, to the sieve he goes, as passes the Hotar to enclosures holding cattle....
1. Come, Agni, praised with song to feast and sacrificial offerings: sit
As Hotar on the holy grass!...
1. Agni we choose as envoy, skilled performer of this holy rite,
Hotar, possessor of all wealth....
3. Bring the Gods hither, Agni, born for him who trims the Sacred grass:
Thou art our Hotar, meet for praise!...
3. Agni, the Hotar-priest who fills the assembly full, waker of wisdom, chief controller of the thought--
Thee, yea, none other than thyself, doth man elect priest of the holy offering, great and small, alike...
1. Agni, well kindled bring the Gods for him who offers holy gifts;
And worship them, pure Hotar-priest!...
1. Made pure by this man's urgent zeal and impulse, the God hath with his juice the Gods pervaded.
Pressed, singing, to the sieve he goes, as passes the Hotar to enclosures holding cattle...
2. May Agni who is Hotar-priest among mankind accept our songs,
And worship the celestial folk!...
1. O Agni, thou hast been ordained Hotar of every sacrifice, By Gods, among the race of men.
So with sweet-sounding tongues for us sacrifice nobly in this rite:
Bring thou the Gods and worship them...
1. Immortal, Hotar-priest, and God, with wondrous power he leads the way,
Urging the congregations on....
2. The Gods made him the Hotar-priest of sacrifice, oblation-bearer, passing wise.
Agni gives wealth and valour to the worshipper, to man who offers up his gifts....

3. I pray to Agni -- may he hear! -- the Hotar with sweet tones, the Priest,
Wondrously splendid, rich in light...
1. Agni, come hither with thy fires; we choose thee as our Hotar; let
The proffered ladle filled with offerings balm thee, best of priests, to sit on sacred grass!...
1. Agni, inflamed with fuel, in my song I sing, pure bright, and stedfast set in front at sacrifice.
Wise Jatavedas we implore with prayers for grace, the Sage, the Hotar-priest, bounteous, and void of guile...
1. To him who dealeth out all wealth, the sweet-toned Hotar-priest of men,
To him, like the first vessels filled with savoury juice, to Agni let the lauds go forth!...
3. May he be our beloved King and excellent sweet-toned Hotar may
We with bright fires be dear to him...
3. Yea, Indra, like the Hotar-priest, will in the early morning drink,
At pleasure, of the milky juice...
1. Agni I deem our Hotar priest, munificent wealth-giver, Son of Strength, who knoweth all that is even as the Sage who knoweth all.
Lord of fair rites, a God with form erected turning to the Gods, he when the flame hath sprung forth from the holy oil, the offered fatness, longs for it as it grows bright.
2. We, sacrificing, call on the best worshipper thee eldest of Angirasas, singer! with hymns, thee, brilliant one! with singers' hymn;
Thee, wandering round, as 'twere the sky, thee who art Hotar-priest of men, whom, Bull with hair of flame, the people must observe, the people that he speed them on.

-- Hymns of the Samaveda, by Ralph T.H. Griffith


Priests of the Vedic religion are officiants of the yajna service. Yajna is an important part of Hinduism especially the Vedas.[1] Persons trained for the ritual and proficient in its practice, they were called ṛtvij ("regularly-sacrificing"). As members of a social class, they were generically known as vipra "sage" or kavi "seer". Specialization of roles attended the elaboration and development of the ritual corpus over time. Eventually a full complement of sixteen ṛtvijas became the custom for major ceremonies. The sixteen consisted of four chief priests and their assistants.

Chief priests

Further information: Yajna § Rituals

The older references uniformly indicate the hotṛ as the presiding priest, with perhaps only the adhvaryu as his assistant in the earliest times. The phrase "seven hotars" is found more than once in the Rigveda. Hymn 2.1.2 of Rigveda states it as follows,

तवाग्ने होत्रं तव पोत्रमृत्वियं तव नेष्ट्रं त्वमग्निदृतायतः । तव प्रशास्त्रं त्वमध्वरीयसि ब्रह्म चासि गृहपतिश्च नो दमे ॥२॥[2]

Thine is the Herald's task and Cleanser's duly timed; Leader art thou, and Kindler for the pious man. Thou art Director, thou the ministering Priest: thou art the Brahman, Lord and Master in our home.

— Rigveda 2.1.2[3]


HYMN I. Agni.

2 Thine is the Herald's task and Cleanser's duly timed; Leader art thou, and Kindler for the pious man.
Thou art Director, thou the ministering Priest: thou art the Brahman, Lord and Master in our home.

— Rigveda 2.1.2, The Rig Veda, translated by Ralph T. H. Griffith


The above hymn enumerate the priests as the hotṛ, potṛ, neṣṭṛ, agnīdh, prashāstṛ (meaning the maitrāvaruna) and adhvaryu.

The hotṛ was the reciter of invocations and litanies. These could consist of single verses (ṛca), strophes (triples called tṛca or pairs called pragātha), or entire hymns (sukta), drawn from the ṛgveda. As each phase of the ritual required an invocation, the hotṛ had a leading or presiding role.
The adhvaryu was in charge of the physical details of the sacrifice (in particular the adhvara, a term for the Somayajna). According to Monier-Williams, the adhvaryu "had to measure the ground, to build the altar, to prepare the sacrificial vessels, to fetch wood and water, to light the fire, to bring the animal and immolate it," among other duties. Each action was accompanied by supplicative or benedictive formulas (yajus), drawn from the yajurveda. Over time, the role of the adhvaryu grew in importance, and many verses of the ṛgveda were incorporated, either intact or adapted, into the texts of the yajurveda.[4]
The udgātṛ was a chanter of hymns set to melodies (sāman) drawn from the sāmaveda. This was a specialized role in the major soma sacrifices: a characteristic function of the udgātṛ was to sing hymns in praise of the invigorating properties of soma pavamāna, the freshly pressed juice of the soma plant.
• The brahman was the reciter of hymns from the atharvaveda who was largely silent and observes the procedures and uses Atharvaveda mantras to 'heal' it when mistakes have been made.

The term Brahman in the above hymn 2.1.2 refers to deity Agni of hymn 2.1.1.[5]

The rgvedic Brahmanas, Aitareya and Kausitaki, specify seven hotrakas to recite shastras (litanies): hotṛ, brāhmanācchamsin, maitrāvaruna, potṛ, neṣṭṛ, agnīdh and acchāvāka. They also carry a legend to explain the origin of the offices of the subrahmanya and the grāvastut.

Purohita

The requirements of the fully developed ritual were rigorous enough that only professional priests could perform them adequately. Thus, whereas in the earliest times, the true sacrificer, or intended beneficiary of the rite, might have been a direct participant, in Vedic times he was only a sponsor, the yajamāna, with the hotṛ or brahman taking his stead in the ritual. In this seconding lay the origins of the growing importance of the purohita (literally, "one who is placed in front"). It was not unusual for a purohita to be the hotṛ or brahman at a sacrifice for his master, besides conducting other more domestic (gṛhya) rituals for him also. In latter days, with the disappearance of Vedic ritual practice, purohita has become a generic term for "priest".

Assistants

In the systematic expositions of the shrauta sutras,[6] which date to the fifth or sixth century BCE, the assistants are classified into four groups associated with each of the four chief priests, although the classifications are artificial and in some cases incorrect:

• With the hotṛ:
o the maitrāvaruna
o the acchāvāka
o the grāvastut (praising the Soma stones)
• With the udgātṛ:
o the prastotṛ (who chants the Prastâva)
o the pratihartṛ ("averter")
o the subrahmanya
• With the adhvaryu:
o the pratiprasthātṛ
o the neṣṭṛ
o the unnetṛ (who pours the Soma juice into the receptacles )
• With the brahman:
o the brāhmanācchamsin
o the agnīdh (priest who kindles the sacred fire)
o the potṛ ("purifier")

This last classification is incorrect, as the formal assistants of the brahman were actually assistants of the hotṛ and the adhvaryu.

Philological comparisons

Comparison with the sacred texts of Zoroastrianism, a distinct religion with the same origins, shows the antiquity of terms for priests such as *atharwan (Vedic atharvan; cognate to Avestan āθrauuan / aθaurun) and *zhautar (Ved. hotar; Av. zaotar) "invoker, sacrificer". While *zhautar is well understood, the original meaning of *atharwan is unknown. The word atharvan appears in the Rig Veda (e.g., in RV 6.16.13 where Agni is said to have been churned by Atharvan from the mind of every poet). In the Younger Avesta, āθrauuan / aθaurun appears in a context that suggests "missionary," perhaps by metathesis from Indo-Iranian *arthavan "possessing purpose." However, a recent theory indicates that Proto Indo-Iranian *atharwan likely represents a substrate word from the unknown language of the BMAC civilization of Central Asia. It can be analyzed as BMAC *athar- plus the Indo-Iranian possessive suffix *-wan, in which case *atharwan would be "one who possesses *athar". Though the meaning of *athar is unknown, Pinault speculates that it meant "superior force" and connects it to the Tocharian word for "hero". In the Upanishads, atharvan appears for example in atharvāngiras, a compound of atharvan and angiras, either two eponymous rishis or their family names.

In present-day Indian Zoroastrian (Parsi) tradition the word athornan is used to distinguish the priesthood from the laity (the behdin). These subdivisions (in the historical Indian context, castes), and the terms used to describe them, are relatively recent developments specific to Indian Zoroastrians and although the words themselves are old, the meaning that they came to have for the Parsis are influenced by their centuries-long coexistence with Hinduism. It appears then that the Indian Zoroastrian priests re-adopted the older āθrauuan / aθaurun (in preference to the traditional, and very well attested derivative āsron) for its similarity to Hinduism's atharvan, which the Parsi priests then additionally assumed was derived from Avestan ātar "fire". This folk-etymology may "have been prompted by what is probably a mistaken assumption of the importance of fire in the ancient Indo-Iranian religion".[7]

The division of priestly functions among the Hotar, the Udgatar and the Adhvaryu has been compared to the Celtic priesthood as reported by Strabo, with the Druids as high priests, the Bards doing the chanting and the Vates performing the actual sacrifice.

See also

• Agnihotra
• Agnistoma
• Brahmin
• Namboothiri
• Śrāddha

References

1. DHARMI, SANATAN. "What is Hinduism??". Retrieved 2020-08-03.
2. Rigveda 2.1.2 (Sanskrit) Wikisource
3. Ralph T. H. Griffith (Translator), Rigveda 2.1.2 Wikisource
4. DHARMI, SANATAN. "What are Vedas?". Retrieved 2020-08-03.
5. Ralph T.H. Griffith (Translator), Rigveda 2.1.2 Wikisource
6. Shānkhāyana SS 13.4.1, Āsvalāyana SS 4.1.4-6.
7. https://iranicaonline.org/articles/atravan-priest

External links

• The Turning-Point in a Living Tradition
• What are Vedas??
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Re: Freda Bedi Cont'd (#3)

Postby admin » Mon May 10, 2021 11:33 pm

Part 1 of 2

Chapter V. The Three Bureaus of Information, Excerpt from "Influential Centres of Disaffection": Indian Students in Edwardian London and the Empire that Shaped Them
by William H. Cowell
2015

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Hara Prasad Shastri ... is most known for discovering the Charyapada, the earliest known examples of Bengali literature.

The Charyapada is a collection of mystical poems, songs of realization in the Vajrayana tradition of Buddhism.

-- Charyapada, by Wikipedia


Shastri studied at the village school initially and then at Sanskrit College and Presidency College in Calcutta (now Kolkata)...

Shastri ... received a BA in 1876 and Honours in Sanskrit in 1877.. he was conferred the title of Shastri when he received a MA degree...He then joined Hare School as a teacher in 1878....

He became a professor at the Sanskrit College in 1883... [and] worked as an Assistant Translator with the Bengal government. Between 1886 and 1894... he was the Librarian of the Bengal Library. In 1895 he headed the Sanskrit department at Presidency College.

During the winter 1898-99 he assisted Dr. Cecil Bendall during research in Nepal...

In 1894–1895 he was in Nepal and Northern India collecting oriental manuscripts for British Museum. During the winter 1898–1899 he returned to Nepal and together with pandit Hara Prasad Shastri and his assistant pandit Binodavihari Bhattacharya from the Asiatic Society in Calcutta, the team registered and collected information from palm-leaf manuscripts in the Durbar Library belonging to Rana Prime Minister Bir Shumsher J. B. Rana, and here he found the famous historical document Gopal Raj Vamshavali, describing Nepal's history from around 1000 to 1600.

-- Cecil Bendall, by Wikipedia


The Gopal Raj Vamshavali is a 14th-century hand-written manuscript of Nepal... a genealogical record of Nepalese monarchs...

One of the most important and popular chronicles in Nepalese history... Cecil Bendall found the manuscript "in the cold weather of 1898–99 in Kathmandu's Durbar Library"...

The original copy of Gopal Raj Vamshavali is now stored at National Archives, Kathmandu in an "unsatisfactory" state, in contrast to an "excellent" condition, when Prof. Cecil Bendall found it at the turn of the 19th century.

-- Gopal Raj Vamshavali, by Wikipedia


He became Principal of Sanskrit College in 1900, leaving in 1908 to join the government's Bureau of Information.

Also, from 1921–1924, he was Professor and Head of the Department of Bengali and Sanskrit at Dhaka University.

Shastri held different positions within the Asiatic Society, and was its President for 2 years. He was also President of Vangiya Sahitya Parishad for 12 years ...

Bangiya Sahitya Parishad is a literary society in Maniktala of Kolkata... to promote Bengali literature, both by translating works in other languages to Bengali and promoting the production of original Bengali literature...

Romesh Chunder Dutt was the first president...

Romesh Chunder Dutt CIE was... writer and translator of Ramayana and Mahabharata.

-- Romesh Chunder Dutt, by Wikipedia


and was an honorary member of the Royal Asiatic Society in London...

He was first introduced to research by Rajendralal Mitra, a noted Indologist, and translated the Buddhist Puranas... Shastri was also Mitra's assistant at the Asiatic Society, and became Director of Operations in Search of Sanskrit Manuscripts after Mitra's death.

Shastri was instrumental in preparing the Catalogue of the Asiatic Society's approximately 10,000 manuscripts ...

Shastri ... ended up visiting Nepal several times, where, in 1907, he discovered the Charyageeti or Charyapada manuscripts. His painstaking research... led to the establishment of Charyapada as the earliest known evidence of Bengali language. Shastri wrote about this finding in a 1916 paper... "Buddhist songs and verses written in Bengali a thousand years ago"...

He also discovered an old palm-leaf manuscript of Skanda Purana in a Kathmandu library in Nepal, written in Gupta script.

The Skanda Purana is the largest Mahāpurāṇa... The text... is of Kaumara literature... The text has been an important historical record and influence on the Hindu traditions related to the war-god Skanda...

The Skanda Purana that has survived into the modern era exists in many versions. It is considered as a living text, which has been widely edited, over many centuries, creating numerous variants....

This Mahāpurāṇa... is attributed to the sage Vyasa.

-- Skanda Purana, by Wikipedia


-- Hara Prasad Shastri, by Wikipedia


The manuscript of Ramacarita was discovered by MM. Pandit Haraprasad Sastri in 1897. It contained not only the complete text, but also a commentary of the first Canto and 85 verses of the second. The portion of the manuscript containing the commentary of the remaining verses was missing.

MM. Sastri printed the text and the commentary from this single manuscript in the Memoirs of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Vol. Ill, No. 1. The scope of his work may be described in his own words: “The commentary, as may be expected, gives fuller account of the reign of Rampala (sic) than the text. The other portion of the text is difficult to explain, and I have not attempted to make a commentary of my own. But I have tried, in my introduction, to glean all the historical information possible by the help of the commentary and the inscriptions of the Pala dynasty, and other sources of information available to me In the introduction I have attempted to write a connected history of the Palas of Bengal from their election as kings in about 770 A.D. to the end of Madanpala’s (sic) reign” (pp. 1-2).

Ever since its publication the Ramacarita has been regarded as the most important literary document concerning the history of the Pala rule in Bengal. It has formed a subject of critical discussion by notable scholars, and many of its passages have been interpreted in different ways. Scholars have, however, experienced great difficulty in dealing with the text on account of the absence of any translation either of the commented or of the uncommented portion. The difficulty was rendered all the greater by certain readings and interpretations of MM. Sastri which proved to be erroneous on a closer examination of the manuscript. A new and critical edition of the text, with a running commentary and an English translation of the whole of it, was, therefore, a great desideratum.

-- The Ramacaritam of Sandhyakaranandin


-- Savarkar: Echoes from a Forgotten Past: 1883-1924, by Vikram Sampath

-- National Indian Association, by Wikipedia

-- Personal Intelligence, from Journal of the National Indian Association in Aid of Social Progress and Female Education in India, by Sir M. Monier-Williams, KCIE

-- Northbrook Society [Northbrook Indian Society] [Northbrook Club] [Northbrook Indian Club], by The Open University: Making Britain

-- Thomas Baring, 1st Earl of Northbrook, by Wikipedia

-- Curzon Wyllie, by Wikipedia

-- William Lee-Warner, by Wikipedia

-- Victor Bulwer-Lytton, 2nd Earl of Lytton, by Wikipedia

-- Theodore Morison, by Wikipedia

-- Thomas Walker Arnold, by Wikipedia

-- John Wallinger, by Wikipedia

-- Mansfield Smith-Cumming, by Wikipedia

-- Indian Political Intelligence Office. by Wikipedia

-- India Office, by Wikipedia

-- India House, by Wikipedia

-- Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, by Wikipedia

-- Madan Lal Dhingra, by Wikipedia

-- Royal India Society [India Society] [Royal India and Pakistan Society] [Royal India, Pakistan and Ceylon Society], by Wikipedia


[The final chapter will return to the imperial government, examining what became of the India Office’s final attempt to actively control visiting students. The Bureau of Information for Indian Students remains an understudied institution that reveals a surprising amount about the government’s attitudes towards these students; namely, its shifting functions and relevance are treated as emblematic of the India Office’s changing role within a new global network of intelligence. The Bureau of Information was the empire’s spirit made flesh, the endpoint of an intelligence trajectory that began as amorphous information networks in India’s Northwestern Frontier and concluded as a single concrete building in downtown London. As the India Office incrementally centralized, systematized, and made manifest its information network, it became less useful. It’s a counterintuitive narrative: more active attempts at control and influence corresponded with less real power. Why the India Office’s methods failed is perhaps a testament to John Darwin’s decentralized view of empire, as explaining the department’s ineffectiveness requires an understanding of how it functioned within its place in a larger British society.]

“I cannot help feeling a little worried about Indian Students in this country and Cromwell Road...”1 [OIOC IOR/L/PJ/6/1707 file 6900, “Official Correspondence.”]

– E.S. Montagu, Secretary of State for India, 1920


Millions of historically-minded visitors to London pass by it every year, but the unassuming building at the corner of Cromwell Road and Cromwell Place is hardly a sight that sticks in the minds of the city’s tourists. The Natural History Museum across the street captures most of their attention, and the French flag hung outside the cornerhouse that ripples lazily at the light touch of a cool August afternoon’s breeze registers as little more than a momentary break in the sea of Union Jacks that surrounds it. 21 Cromwell Road is still a bustling government hub these days as the location for France’s consulate in England; situated deep within the affluent borough of Kensington, it stands only about two blocks south of the site where Madan Lal Dhingra and Sir William Curzon Wyllie had their deadly encounter.

Sir William Hutt Curzon Wyllie KCIE CVO (5 October 1848 – 1 July 1909) was a British Indian army officer, and later an official of the British Indian Government. Over a career spanning three decades, Curzon Wyllie rose to be a Lieutenant Colonel in the British Indian Army and occupied a number of administrative and diplomatic posts. He was the British resident to Nepal and the Princely state of Rajputana, and later, the political aide-de-camp to the Secretary of State for India, Lord George Hamilton. Curzon Wyllie was assassinated on 1 July 1909 in London by the Indian revolutionary Madan Lal Dhingra, who was a member of India House in London.

-- Sir William Hutt Curzon Wyllie, by Wikipedia


A blue plaque on its eastern exterior wall marks it as the longtime residence of nineteenth-century architect and philanthropist Charles James Freake, but the building has a significance beyond this official designation of historical heritage. The four-story building that blends seamlessly into an imposing row of identical off-white facades that stretches down the street was once the seat of another government agency, a branch of the India Office that for a few short years occupied the premises during its last attempts to establish a measure of active control over Indian students. Within its walls were private offices, a government bureau, and twenty-five beds, forming a thoroughly strange imperial space situated somewhere within the dissolving boundary between metropole and periphery. The significance of this space in the years between 1910 and 1912 has been lost on historians as completely as it is on the few passersby who glance momentarily at the unassuming, unrelated blue marker as they hurry along the sidewalk; this chapter is an attempt to bring some meaning to 21 Cromwell Road and the ghosts of its inhabitants.

With the execution of Madan Lal Dhingra, the imprisonment of Vinayak Savarkar, and the dispersal of the remaining revolutionary students who had vocally supported its extremist cause to varying degrees, the India House had effectively been demolished by 1910.
The British public still regarded Indian students with a distrustful eye, but the absence of any similar groups or high-profile events did a great deal to calm official British anxieties about the students as a whole. This absence was less a conveniently unfilled void than an actively inhospitable England; the tolerant safe haven of years past had been replaced by a decidedly unwelcoming and discouraging environment. This chapter is in part an examination of the forces that ensured another India House never took hold, and it requires backtracking to a point where Sir William Curzon Wyllie – and not just his memory – was still an active figure in Indian student affairs.

As discussed in Chapter III, the latent danger posed by the India House didn’t go unnoticed by bureaucrats in the India Office. In 1907, two years before Wyllie’s assassination, the Secretary of State for India appointed Sir William Lee-Warner to head a commission to investigate the condition of Indian students living across Britain. Tasked with quantifying the student population, identifying their problems as well as the problems they seemed to attract, and to formulate some possible solutions, the three heads of the committee spent three months travelling the island visiting universities and interviewing students, faculty, and people with a special knowledge of the issue. Upon submission of their subsequent report, its inflammatory language and provocative assessments of the problems raised concerns within the India Office about its power to galvanize educated Indians both in Britain and on the subcontinent. The report was left unpublished for over a decade, only appearing as an appendix to the report of a similarly tasked commission headed by Lord Lytton in 1922; the India Office, however, carried out most of its major recommendations. Though the commission itself was conducted in 1907, its most important effects wouldn’t be seen until after Curzon Wyllie’s death and should be considered a singularly important document in the history of India Office policy towards students, with its roots in the begrudging hands-off mentality before July 1909 and its more active effects in the years afterwards.

In particular, one implemented recommendation from the committee’s report especially illuminates both the changing role and strategy of the India Office between 1907 and the outbreak of the First World War: the Bureau of Information for Indian Students. Proposed as a paternalist arm of the India Office that would ensure students received accurate information about British education and were subtly imbued with pro-British sentiments, the Bureau’s function vacillated over the its four years of operation and its subsequent reconstitution in 1912.
Rather than an agency with an unwavering mandate, the history of the Bureau of Information is composed of three discrete chapters that form a narrative arc of their own, as its functionality quickly reached a practical zenith after Wyllie’s assassination and then experienced a prolonged slide into ineffectiveness in the years after, due in part to the benevolent ideology of the man at its head2 [Schaffel, “Empire and Assassination,” 11.] as well as to its increasing irrelevance in both an empire now straddled by an integrated intelligence network and a London no longer favorably inclined toward Indian students. Paul Schaffel argued that the Bureau of Information failed because of a linear shift in ideology from mistrust to benevolence, but this misses the underlying point: at its core, the Bureau was too reactive to succeed in a pre-Dhingra London, too voluntary to gather any meaningful intelligence afterward, and too tangible to contribute effectively as a surveillance agency within the empire’s shadowy new global information order.

It is this last point – the Bureau’s physicality – that signaled the end of the India Office’s own policy arc regarding information and Indian students. What was initially inspired by a nebulous and informal network in the Indian hinterlands had by 1912 become a single agency with a lone man in charge, located in a building in central London that advertised its presence to the very students it was intended to surveil. The India Office had systematized its own intelligence network and informally incorporated a handful of private English intermediaries with similar missions as part of its drive towards centralization. By creating its own constructed information order that was highly visible to all students but voluntary to engage with, it unavoidably exposed its own intentions and rendered itself fundamentally ineffective from the beginning.

The history of the Bureau of Information draws on all of the major themes established earlier in this thesis: the restrictiveness of liberalism, manipulations of the information order, and the role of privately-held soft power in allocating social citizenship to colonial subjects in the metropole. Its story is the story of both Indian students and imperial attitudes toward them, told in miniature; the building that it occupied in South Kensington, simultaneously home to the Bureau’s offices and private English groups as well as a temporary hostel for students, was a microcosm of the imperial dynamics at play between the three parties throughout their stormy decade-long interaction and a fitting conclusion to the India Office’s active attempts to control students.

The Lee-Warner Committee and its Imagined Bureau

Alongside Lee-Warner on the 1907 committee were William Curzon Wyllie and Theodore Morison, the latter of whom would go on to chair his own commission in 1913 regarding Indian students seeking industrial education and employment in Britain. Beginning in May 1907, the committee heard testimony in London before moving across the country to hold meetings at the universities in Oxford, Cambridge, and Edinburgh, interviewing ninety-nine people across the span of their inquest.3 [India Office, “Report of the Committee on Indian Students” (London: 1922), 73; hereafter cited as “Lee-Warner Report.”] The committee was well-staffed –- Lee-Warner and Curzon Wyllie shared a history of administrative service in India; Morison had spent nineteen years as a professor at a college in India and was regarded as an expert on Indian education reform4 [Batho, G. R.. “Morison, Sir Theodore (1863–1936).” G. R. Batho in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online ed., edited by Lawrence Goldman.] –- well-funded, and enjoyed a large pool of interviewees and documents with which to guide their work, and yet “the findings of the Lee-Warner Committee … were so embarrassing and likely to offend Indians that the publication of the report was prevented. In 1908, the Viceroy of India Lord Minto thought the publication ‘would no doubt put fat into the fire again.’”5 [Thomas Weber, Our Friend, The Enemy: Elite Education in Britain and Germany Before World War I (Stanford: Palo Alto, 2008), 218.] “Much bitter feeling would be aroused, resulting in angry discussion and agitation, which would discredit any arrangements which Government might make for protecting and helping Indian students in England, to such an extent that no student would take advantage of them … it would be nothing short of disastrous to publish the report”6 [OIOC IOR/L/PJ/6/845 “Minto to Morley” March 13, 1908] wrote in a telegram, fearing pushback against both the imperial government as a whole but also against the committee’s specific recommendations that, despite the inflammatory report, were generally considered sensible and fit for implementation.

The majority of the report is fairly inoffensive and dull reading. The committee presented the first official estimate of the Indian student population’s size –- approximately seven hundred, with over half residing in London -– and the bulk of the report’s first few chapters doesn’t amount to much beyond hazy depictions of the student experience in Britain. An early chapter reiterates public anxieties about Indian immorality and natural inclination toward vice, relaying a handful of vivid examples of young Indians who became

absolute wrecks, the short story of whose life in England consists of running with unabated energy one uniform course of the coarsest and most vicious pleasures, procured by means that would disgrace the cruellest savage, by bullying and frightening an ignorant and indulgent parent out of his last penny on earth and then rewarding his kindness by breaking his heart and ultimately sending him to his untimely grave.7 [Lee-Warner Report, 76]


Such passages stand in stark contrast to the committee’s official verdict on these types of stories: “…although the number of wrecks is not unimportant they constitute the exception … the majority of Indian students get through their time in London without disastrous results,”8 [ibid] setting the tone for a report chock full of backhanded compliments aimed at students. The imperial capital was home to the most worrying subset of the population. With its abundance of experiences unavailable in India and its myriad temptations, London could suck in any visiting student, whether an Indian from Bombay or a young Englishman from Birmingham. While students at Cambridge and Oxford fell under a great deal of university supervision, most students in London were studying for the Bar, a fairly self-motivated course of work that necessitated little in the way of frequent contact with educators who felt little need to intervene in students’ affairs unless they affected their academic standing.9 [ibid, 74]

They by and large lived freely and away from official eyes, a troubling prospect for a government now keen on monitoring them closely. Among the report’s stated consequences of the government’s inability to exercise an ideal amount of control over these semi-disappeared students was their increasing political radicalization, and it was the contents of the report’s fifth chapter – “Indian Students and Politics” – that drew most of the Viceroy, Lord Minto’s, justification for the report’s nonpublication. “We feel justified in asserting that a considerable proportion, probably a majority, of the Indian students who come to this country are imbued before leaving India with the political opinions of the advanced section of the Indian Opposition, and are animated by a feeling of discontent with British rule; and that these political opinions and this discontent are usually strengthened by their residence in England”10 [ibid 101] the committee asserted, describing a “’blood and thunder’ type of Indian” dead set in his deep-seated and long-fermented hatred of everything British. For this, the committee assigned only a modicum of blame to the British government; rather than students’ experiences with imperialism in India or mistreatment during their stay in Britain, it was allegedly the prominence of party politics in Britain and the ‘discord within harmony’ model that confused students who -– unable to distinguish party rhetoric from concrete promise –- were swept up in a tide of what appeared to them as political conflict.11 [ibid] Even then the committee placed hardly any blame upon Britain itself and rather determined that it was the -– possibly unavoidable -– naiveté born of an unfamiliarity of the workings of a democratic society that was causing the polarization among these foreigners, a paternalist pronouncement for the ages.

Aside from the cursory pseudo-blame that the report allocated to British society, the majority of the problem resided with the “representatives of Extremists of Indian politics [who] spare no pains to win adherents to their cause among the Indian students as soon as the latter arrive in this country.”12 [ibid, 102] Clearly aware in 1907 of the existence and prominence of the India House and the widespread reach of the Indian Sociologist, the committee wrote with a pained tone that “while there is an active organization to create hostility against the British Government, there is no agency in existence in London which takes so much pains to get hold of Indian students or to counteract the effect of this political propaganda.”13 [ibid] Torn between the British liberalism described in chapter III and the desire to quash the spread of extremism, the committee flirted in several places throughout the report with recommending a ban on any Indian students at all coming to Britain before settling back into a familiar impotence: “Grave, however, as we recognise the situation to be, we have no specific remedy to propose,” instead issuing a minor recommendation about raising the age required for Government scholarships on the basis that older students would find less of a tendency toward political volatility. Ultimately, the committee had tacitly admitted defeat in the face of Indian extremism at home by admitting the scope of the problem –- “the men educated in England constitute an important section of the educated classes of Indian society, and their permanent alienation from the British Government would be a disaster” -– while dithering powerlessly around a series of solutions it was too scared to officially recommend and ultimately concluding that the best course of action was essentially to hope that student hotheads would mellow out with the passage of time.14 [ibid] Signed, Sir William Curzon Wyllie.

While the committee’s final report was quickly and unsurprisingly suppressed from public view, it did have some significant effects on India Office policy moving forward. Not all of its recommendations were of the ‘ban all Indian students’ variety, and most of what the report proposed was put into action within a couple years. Its three major proposals were all branches of the same general idea: subtly counteract anti-British influence by projecting goodwill in an official capacity. To achieve this, the report recommended the creation of both an Advisory Committee in London made up of Indians and Englishmen alike that students could contact with any needs or questions as well as the Bureau of Information for Indian Student that would serve as a liaison between British universities and students to ensure that prospective students were adequately equipped to apply for admission and well-prepared to adjust after enrolling. Additionally, it recommended that a pair of prominent private English clubs -– the Northbrook Society and the National Indian Association –- work together to focus their efforts and avoid redundant overlap. To further concentrate the coordination between all involved parties, the report proposed the purchase of a building that would house the Bureau of Information, provide an office space for the three private groups –- though they would receive a significant government stipend -– and serve additionally as a short-stay hostel for newly arrived Indian students in need of temporary lodgings and information about further adjusting.

This plan eventually took form in the shape of 21 Cromwell Road, a standalone building in South Kensington across the street from the Natural History Museum and within minutes of the Imperial Institute. T.W. [Thomas Walker] Arnold-– the man appointed Educational Adviser to head the Bureau -– had used the space as early as June 1909 as a venue for public receptions in the ‘at home’ style for students.15 [OIOC IOR/L/PJ/6/945, File 2294 “Proposed Reception of Indian Students by the Chairman of the Advisory Committee to be held at 21 Cromwell Road.”] The India Office and the private societies settled on the building as their shared permanent space not long after. In part the location was reportedly chosen for its proximity to established Indian student neighborhoods; a Times article announcing the building’s leasing to the government claimed that “Many young Indians live in the Western suburbs, and the house is nearer their homes than Westminster, or than the eastern end of Piccadilly, where the Northbrook rooms have hitherto been situated.”16 ["Indian Students In England." The Times (2 June 1910): 6.] In a strange quirk of London geography, the new location bore an eerie similarity to that of none other than the India House, the radical hostel at 65 Cromwell Avenue in Highgate; the two were separated by roughly seven miles and occupied entirely different streets that happened to share a name. Within its confines was the coexistence of Indian students, British government, and private English life; 21 Cromwell Road served as a unique physical space wherein three distinct spheres collided in an often uneasy balance of influence and independence. The three stages of the Bureau of Information’s history alluded to at the beginning of this chapter can each be characterized by the general conception of the Bureau in official circles at the time; this first stage was that of the ‘Imagined Bureau’ in which the new agency was a reactive body, a remedy for growing student unrest that functioned as a replication of existing hostile information structures. After Wyllie’s death, the Bureau would take on a more aggressive tone before finally lapsing into irrelevance after 1910.

Though bureaucrats would have been loathe to admit it, 21 Cromwell Street was conceived of as a government-sanctioned India House. While the India Office’s efforts had previously hinged on simply collecting information about students, India House had demonstrated that putting information in their hands was a more effective tactic. Even though Savarkar’s demands for active militancy eventually drove nationalist students away, they retained the leftist political views that the Free India Society had drilled into them, and that was perhaps more important than the few tangible actions that the group was able to carry out. The imperial government, clearly attuned to the value of information, had long recognized the importance that these England-returned students had on Indians upon their return, but had previously avoided official involvement for fear of stoking suspicion and instead left such responsibilities to private English clubs. In this light, perhaps the street address of the India Office’s 1908 physically-grounded attempt to establish a constructed information order wasn’t coincidental after all: a pro-British information hub on Cromwell Road to match the anti-British one on Cromwell Avenue.
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That the Bureau would dictate an artificial, constructed information order in reaction to India House was its imagined goal. In the subcontinental setting from which the India Office had drawn its inspiration for its intelligence strategy, the information order was an organic force; the ICS officers who used it to rule passively listened in on streams within the larger structure, rarely influencing it themselves. In contrast, the India Office’s newest efforts required them to create a new system of information flow –- a constructed information order -– that they not only had the ability to manipulate but that they had total control over. The shape of their constructed information order was expressly pro-British and flowed in two directions, both towards and away from students. Just as Savarkar could influence what information entered into, spread throughout, and left India House, so too was the India Office attempting to create a manipulable space where bureaucrats could ensure that anti-British ideas travelled in only one direction: from nationalist students to the surreptitiously surveillant government officials who could mark them for additional monitoring.

Information within the Bureau’s constructed order was designed to travel outward to students through several media. Most literally, it came published in a handbook. The National Indian Association had been putting out a series of handbooks for incoming students since 1893, offering information about Britain’s different universities and courses of study, as well as the processes of applying to them; they also emphasized seeking out the NIA’s help upon arrival in London for help in acclimating to English life.17 [OIOC IOR/L/PJ/6/845 file 233 “Bureau of Information.”] These guidebooks were widely read and had to be reprinted almost a dozen times by 1908, at which point the Bureau of Information co-opted the idea and published jointly-authored handbooks in the years after.18 [ibid. After the Bureau’s dissolution in 1912, the India Office continued to sponsor the handbooks through the Indian Students’ Department.
] While the handbooks explicitly offered to imbue students with a positive idea of English society, the Bureau’s other primary avenue of outward information flow -– guardianship -– was a subtler approach to the same destination.

The idea of guardianship as a mode of controlling Indian students had long percolated throughout India Office thought. Groups like the NIA had previously offered to place students in surrogate English homes to keep them out of nationalist circles and expose them to a sunnier side of British life. The Bureau of Information offered the India Office an institution to systematically direct students towards private guardianship rather than simply hoping that students would voluntarily submit to private supervision; 21 Cromwell’s third and fourth floors would be dedicated to the Indian Students’ Hostel. Run directly under the Bureau’s auspices, the hostel’s twenty-five beds were temporary lodgings for freshly-arrived students where they could stay until they made long-term arrangements.19 [“Indian Students’ New Hostel,” The Daily Mail (20 Oct 1910): 3.] T.W. Arnold kept a list of government-approved private homes on file at the Bureau,20 [OIOC IOR/L/PJ/845 file 233 “Bureau of Information.”] and the obvious hope was that students would transition from the government hostel to an English home that could act as a government proxy. In effect, they would remain under surveillance -– or at least the possibility of it –- for the entire duration of their stay.

Constrained by the familiar contours of liberalism, however, the converse inward information flow was largely impossible. Morley had forbidden the use of officially-sanctioned spies within seditious circles and insisted that “the whole scheme is of a purely voluntary character.”21 [Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence, 127-30; OIOC IOR/L/PJ/845 “Morley to Minto.”] Although several India Office bureaucrats made efforts to gather information about the group, their constructed information order fell short of its goal because of the glaring gaps in its knowledge about its radical opponents. Lee-Warner was acutely aware of this shortcoming and wrote that “[the Educational Adviser] cannot do this if, for fear of being called a ‘spy’, he keeps himself ignorant of...the black sheep. Notorious sedition-agents he should certainly know.”22 [OIOC IOR/L/PJ/6/1020, “Minute by W. Lee-Warner,” quoted in Katherine Watt’s “T.W. Arnold and the Re-Evaluation of Islam,” Modern Asian Studies 36 (Feb. 2002), 76.] This was easier said than done; despite attempts to unofficially infiltrate India House, the India Office’s picture of the group remained incomplete and its constructed information order only succeeded in a distributory function.23 [“Succeeded” is lofty praise for a Bureau that is universally panned as ineffective, but it really did have some success in making contact with students, even if it was unable to glean much information about them for its surveillance aims. Schaffel estimates that nearly two-thirds of all Indian students between 1909 and 1911 visited the Bureau, and the India Office admitted that the agency’s ceiling was probably at around ninety per cent of students. Schaffel, “Empire and Assassination,” 71; OIOC IOR/L/PJ/6/1120.]

Aside from its surveillance aims, a student hostel was hardly a new idea; it was only made possible in 1908 as public patience wore thin with India House. In 1903, the India Office had hosted a series of public gatherings at the Imperial Institute about the possibility of opening a government-run hostel for Indian students.24 [Visram, Asians in Britain, 89] This was before Krishnavarma had established India House and was born more out of the type of amorphous public anxieties that had precipitated the certificate of identity scheme a few years prior. Still, opinion was divided on both official and unofficial fronts. A London correspondent for The Times of India reported a general distaste for the idea in July 1903:

…[T]here was a consensus of opinion against the provision of a hostel, and some division in reference to Sir William Lee-Warner’s suggestion for the establishment of a club. The dominant note of hostility to the plan of gathering Indian sojourners here under a single roof ran through the earlier speeches of [the previous meeting] and it was not until [today] that we heard a single word in favour of a hostel.25 [“Indian Students in England: The Proposed Hostel,” The Times of India (11 Aug 1903): 4.]


Lest he slip out of view for too long, Wyllie was an important voice in this early discussion. “The hostel was said to be Wyllie’s idea” claims Rozina Visram, citing his paranoia about students’ growing disloyalty; she argues that he proposed it out of a “need for an Indian hostel to ‘make them loyal’, in other words, under control and compliant.”26 [Visram, Asians in Britain, 159] Though history perhaps vindicates Wyllie’s worry, the 1903 public rejected the idea out of fear that it would stoke suspicion among Indians. This was a predictable outcome within the established framework of British liberalism: a public ill at ease with the presence of indefinably troubling foreigners yet iller at ease with the idea of limiting their freedoms. Since unofficial anxieties at this point were founded primarily on rumors and unrepresentative samples, Indian students were allowed to hold on to their social citizenship and avoid potentially restrictive oversight.

Calls for a hostel reemerged several years later as India House was gaining notoriety, this time with more effect. A rash of newspaper editorials in British India supported expanding the cooperation between the India Office and private societies in response to Highgate’s influence. “The proper means of counteracting the pernicious teaching... is to provide more wholesome centres for these students” wrote one op-ed, insisting that “it is time that the proposal for a hostel for Indian students was reconsidered in earnest.”27 [“An Indiscreet Question,” The Times of India (1 Aug 1907): 6.] Another complained that “A systematic campaign is waged with the view of poisoning these students the moment they arrive in Europe” and advocated government subsidies for private societies.28 [“Indian Students in England,” The Times of India (3 Sept 1908): 6.] A third questioned the useful[ness] of an expanded government presence in solving the larger issue of nationalist discontent: “A ‘Glorified Northbrook’ cannot, and will not, remove the cause of disaffection among the Indian students in England... none of [the private societies] offers any real facilities for the study of Anglo-Indian problems of the day. Is there any wonder that the poor Indian youth... falls back upon questionable sources of information for his political guidance?”29 [S.M. Mitra, “Indian Students: What is to be Done?” Pall Mall Gazette reprinted in The Times of India (1 Dec 1908): 7.] As the shadow of Highgate stretched further across London, the British public was more willing to listen to ideas about restricting student freedoms, even at the cost of offending liberal sensitivities. Wyllie’s death opened the floodgates for more aggressive measures, and the Bureau of Information was one institution that benefitted from increased public acceptance after 1909.

The Aggressive Bureau

The Bureau’s first evolution, shifting from an ‘Imagined Bureau’ to an ‘Aggressive Bureau,’ came on the heels of Dhingra’s shooting and lasted until the end of 1910. Situated within the increasingly cohesive global intelligence network, the Bureau seemingly had the potential to play a critical role and more aggressively expand its influence.30 [Kaminsky, The India Office, 177-8.] Without the liberal benefit of the doubt protecting students, the attempt to enact a constructed information order within the confines of the Bureau that would feed into the larger network seemed a real possibility. That had been the goal for a while but was hampered by liberalism; without the public protecting students, the Bureau could both gather information more aggressively and put its files to use.

The 1909-10 crackdown against India House was the first step in establishing a new global imperial intelligence network in which the Bureau of Information played a key role. Wyllie’s death was the impetus for increased communication and cooperation between the European agencies and the Criminal Intelligence Department in India; what began with John Wallinger’s transfer from Simla to London blossomed into the Indian Political Intelligence (IPI), a secretive new agency that integrated information inputs from India and Britain and coordinated with police agencies that could take action on it. The IPI has been mislabelled as the Indian Secret Service in earlier works; before its files were made public in 1998, even its name was a mystery.31 [Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence and Schaffel, “Empire and Assassination” both refer to the “Indian Secret Service”; as far as I can infer, they both refer to the IPI.] A short history of the organization authored upon its closure in 1946 reveals that it worked in conjunction with Scotland Yard, MI6 and the India, Colonial, and Foreign Offices. It was created in direct response to Wyllie’s death:

The wave of violent crime connected with the intensification of the Indian Nationalist Movement during Lord Minto’s Viceroyalty included the murder of [Wyllie]. This led to the deputation from the Central Intelligence Department of the Government of India in the Home Department of an Indian Police Officer for attachment to the India Office. He was charged to co-operate with the Home Security organizations in detecting subversive activities among Indians here.32 [OIOC IOR/L/PJ/12/662 file 1681/44 “Origin and Development of the IPI,” 127.]


The IPI’s mandate included gathering intelligence about security threats to British India across the empire as well as in Britain, including compiling dossiers about notable nationalist personalities and their activities. The Bureau of Information had plenty to offer within this cooperative new system: during a 1911 review of the agency’s work, Educational Adviser T.W. Arnold reported that he kept a file on every student who visited, including correspondences between students and universities, a copy of his certificate of information, and his reported expenses.33 [OIOC IOR/L/PJ/6/1120 file 4173 “Indian Students in England.”] Arnold may have sold his own intelligence files short; a student who visited the Bureau found that the official he met with already had a thick file on him despite having never been to 21 Cromwell Road before. “Apparently my every movement had been recorded” he later wrote.34 [Lahiri, Indians in Britain, 171.] Arnold acknowledged that in addition to the aforementioned official records he kept on each student, “I receive information about [radical] students from the Secretary of State’s department as well as from [presumably CID] officers in India; notes are also sometimes attached to certificates of identity.” These red flags were used to designate specific students for additional surveillance. Arnold continued: “In the case of such students...it has been found advantageous to place them in lodgings in a district not usually frequented by Indians, under conditions favourable to the formation of friendships with English persons.”35 [OIOC IOR/L/PJ/6/1120 file 4173 “Indian Students in England.”] This can easily be read as an attempt to transpose the structured colonial encounters in India into Britain; by isolating potential troublemakers from like-minded dissidents and putting them into exclusive contact with “good English life,”36 [OIOC IOR/L/PJ/6/808 file 1296, “Memorandum by East India Association, 1907.”] the Bureau intended to reinforce ideas of British cultural superiority while controlling the range of Indian interaction.

Arnold was not always met with as much warmth by Britain’s universities as the India Office would have hoped. Though he was able to set up contacts at every major university he needed for the Bureau to function effectively, Oxford perpetually proved unsupportive, if not entirely uncooperative. The university’s vice-chancellor saw the establishment of the Bureau of Information as an implicit encouragement for Indians wishing to study in Britain and rarely missed an opportunity to voice his disagreement with the idea. “How far it is good general policy, or for their advantage to encourage them to come to this country and to reside and study at Universities here rather than to provide them, if it can be done, with all they need in their country, is a wider question which I think ought to be seriously considered,” adding that Oxford University was, at least by his estimation, home to a disproportionately high number of Indian students already and that the last thing he needed was to sift through the unqualified applications of hundreds more each year.37 [OIOC IOR/L/PJ/6/845 “Oxford to India Office.”]

Despite the university’s bluster, the India Office intended for the arrangement to work in favor of both parties and hinted at the Bureau’s primary objective immediately following Wyllie’s death. “By means of this agency it is hoped that the Education Adviser will be able to obtain all information regarding individual students which may be desired by the University and other authorities regarding individual students, and thus to meet what is understood to be a need which has made itself felt for detailed and trustworthy information as to the position, means, and character of Indian applicants”38 [ibid, “Campbell to Pargiter and Candy.”] wrote one bureaucrat in July 1909 to the contacts at Oxford and Cambridge in a particularly telling message about the disguised function of the Bureau of Information. While the new office publicly projected an image of benevolence and an outward flow of information to help students, the intelligence continued to run the same direction it always had: from colonial periphery to imperial core, but this time within the confines of Britain itself. The information about these students was useful for the developing global surveillance network and also for university admissions; by effectively weeding out applicants deemed unsuitable by Bureau findings, it simplified the decision process for universities supposedly inundated by unqualified Indian applications.

The Bureau’s function had thus already been altered in the short time since its opening: while it had been conceived of during a period in which students were afforded the liberal benefit of the doubt, Madan Lal Dhingra had opened up the possibility of the Bureau as an acceptable surveillance agency that could add consequence to its information. Spies and informants were increasingly in use by the time the Bureau moved from Whitehall to Cromwell Road, and the new Bureau opened a new avenue to intelligence gathering by providing a presumably safe space for new students that in turn capitalized on their resulting openness by surreptitiously gauging their compatibility with British society and identifying any potential troublemakers. This new approach was worked out during the weeks that followed the Curzon Wyllie assassination and doubtless reflected the newly validated paranoia that had until recently been little more than unsubstantiated anxiety.39 [Lee-Warner had at least a pair of informants within the India House that reported directly to him for some time before the Curzon Wyllie murder, and India Office records detail the expenses related to several other Indians employed to infiltrate potentially hostile student groups. Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence, 127; OIOC IOR/L/PS/8/67 “Employment and Expenses of Indian Informant Sajani Ranjan Banerjea, alias Sukasagar Dutt, to Watch Indian Students in London.” This British Library file is an extremely interesting one as it details the employment of a student spy named Suksagar Dutt from 1909 until 1913; suspiciously, an active member of India House before 1909 was named Sukh Sagar Dutt. Paul Schaffel also noticed this eerie similarity and concluded that the two were different people. Schaffel, “Empire and Assassination,” 107.]

There are a few documented instances of how spies were implanted at India House. For instance, there was an informant named Sukhsagar Dutt (which was the nom de plume of Sajani Ranjan Banerjea) who also stayed here. The DCI had engaged him as an informant from October 1909 until June 1913. His passage and outfit (£100), fees for admission to the bar (£90), final fee when called to the bar (£40), purchase of law books (£10), purchase of other books and instruments (£10), cost of a course of study at the Imperial College of Science (£124–10) and passage back to India on completing the course (£42–2–8) were fully borne by the intelligence department and paid through Thomas Cook & Sons. In addition, he was paid a monthly allowance as retainer fee for £20 for forty-five months during this period. Close to £1316 was spent on merely one informant at India House.

Dutt claims to have turned informant to pay off his family debts. He reported to the superintendent of the Special Branch, P. Quinn, and gave him regular updates. His letter dated 20 November 1912 to Quinn mentions how it was settled even before his departure to London that he should stay there till July 1913 and supply information. The approval of his science course was to ensure he came in touch with several Indian students as science was what ‘appeals to Indians with extremist tendencies’. But his studies at the Royal College of Science were discontinued after a short while when the money sanctioned for that purpose was not paid to him. Now that he was being called by the bar after finishing with the Inns of Court, he wanted to encash the money owed to him, in order to stay on for longer, so that ‘my friends here may get suspicious of my stay till June next, but if I join a barrister’s chamber for practical work for the period of six months there will be no cause for my friends to question about my stay here till June 1913’. 52 If his services were needed for a longer period, he was ‘glad to continue it for another three to six months’. His case was recommended thereafter to Sir Thomas W. Holderness, the undersecretary of state, mentioning that Dutt had ‘been of great use’ and had ‘a good knowledge of Indian seditionists’. He was assessed as having ‘the great merit of reporting, truthfully, and not making sensational statements in order to magnify his usefulness’. Dutt was ‘also eager to know if he is to put himself in touch with any official of the Criminal Intelligence Department on arrival in India. He will probably on the way back call and see Madam Cama and Virendranath Chattopadhyay in Paris and if thought advisable would go to Pondicherry to see V.V.S. Aiyar.’ 53 Dutt managed his work so adroitly that neither Vinayak nor his associates ever found out about the mole in their midst...

The British were conscious that with the closure of India House and in view of heightened police surveillance, a flight of the revolutionaries abroad was imminent. Most revolutionaries would now find safer havens in other European cities, especially Paris. In October 1909, Sajani Ranjan Banerjee, or Sukhsagar Dutt, was employed specifically for the purpose of a twenty-four-hour surveillance on Indian students who seemed suspicious. He was to act as a conduit between the DCI in India and Scotland Yard in London. It was decided to create an Indian secret service to facilitate easy communication and sharing of information between these two organizations spread across continents.


-- Savarkar: Echoes from a Forgotten Past: 1883-1924, by Vikram Sampath


While the CID and Scotland Yard were taking direct action against India House itself, India Office bureaucrats did their part to prevent any future recurrences in the way that they were most familiar with: harnessing the information order. This slightly more sinister function of the Bureau of Information, obviously never publicly acknowledged in any official releases about the new India Office branch, secretly defined the office’s role for the few years of its existence and is a lens through which the Bureau needs to be viewed. It was a unique arm of the growing global intelligence network, feeding information about potential troublemakers to the IPI. While attempts to construct an artificial information order before July 1909 had been thoroughly underwhelming, its shifting role within the new network lent it a tone of aggression; its connection with the IPI gave it teeth to back up the information it gathered and the means to collect even more valuable intelligence. It was an important and useful element of imperial surveillance for a little over a year following Wyllie’s death, but that role shrunk rapidly after 1910; it had been instrumental in helping the IPI get off the ground but had less of a part to play once it had become an established organization.

The Irrelevant Bureau

By 1911, 21 Cromwell Road was home to an Irrelevant Bureau; by the end of 1912, the Bureau had quietly been scrapped altogether. Part of the office’s rapid fall from grace was the divergent ideology of its head, and part of it was due to a shrinking niche within the empire’s global intelligence network. During the immediate aftermath of Wyllie’s death and the coordinated official crackdown on India House, T.W. Arnold had acted as a facilitator of information from student to government, passing along intelligence to authorities who could carry out actions on its recommendation. Arnold complied with government directives to make this kind of surveillance work possible, but he may not have been entirely comfortable with it; by 1911, less was being asked of him on that front and he used the lull to steer the Bureau back toward liberal shores.

With the CID and Scotland Yard coordinating efforts within the newly established IPI, the Bureau of Information wasn’t especially useful by the end of 1910. Savarkar had been arrested and extradited to India, the Highgate mansion had been resold, and the few remaining outspoken radicals had left England for either the United States or the European continent. The vitriol and pushback -– both official and unofficial -– following Dhingra’s shooting had temporarily scared potentially dissenting Indian students straight, and no new nationalist organizations were springing up in London. The explanation for this was twofold: global intelligence communication allowed the imperial government to more closely monitor the movements of troublemakers and apprehend them before they could do damage, and public opinion in Britain no longer extended the liberal benefit of the doubt for students. Though not entirely unwelcome in Britain, students no longer enjoyed the uneasy tolerance that had allowed India House to take root. As such, there simply wasn’t much intelligence to be gained from students in London; those who knew anything about revolutionaries kept quiet, but most of them actively tried to distance themselves from those anti-imperialists.

No longer pressured to spy on trusting students, Arnold had free reign to remodel The Bureau in his own image and settled on one of well-intentioned paternalism.40 [Schaffel, “Empire and Assassination,”72.] “His efforts as Educational Adviser to promote students’ interests were genuine” wrote historian Katherine Watt, and Arnold gradually renounced his role as an intelligence agent and returned to the style he was most familiar and comfortable with: the teacher.41 [Watt, “Thomas Walker Arnold and the Re-Evaluation of Islam,” 78.] The Lee-Warner Report had recommended the Bureau be governed jointly by an Educational Adviser and an advisory committee; while Arnold took his position seriously, the same could hardly be said of the committee members. They met only a few times in the Bureau’s history and by 1910 Arnold was effectively running the Bureau by himself.42 [Schaffel, “Empire and Assassination,” 67, 74-5] He used this new power to work for students rather than against them, advocating on their behalf to officials at Oxford and Cambridge and in doing so uprooting the Bureau’s earlier efforts to gain the universities’ favor with information. Watt writes that “His attitude towards students, whom he saw as ‘his babes’, was sincerely sympathetic to their ambitions and the prejudice they faced,” arguing that Arnold had been against student surveillance all along and had complied with India Office orders to do so only as long as he was asked.43 [Watt, “T.W. Arnold and the Re-Evaluation of Islam,” 79.] He had occasionally complained about what was required of him, but still passed along information that was used to monitor suspicious students. Thus, the Bureau didn’t become irrelevant because Arnold decided to operate in opposition to India Office directives as Schaffel argues, but rather changed course after it had already been rendered obsolete by the more effective methods of the IPI. Arnold’s actions were a response to a decreasing role in the global intelligence network rather than its cause.

A subtle yet notable feature of the ‘Irrelevant Bureau’ was its harmful co-optation of the two private societies. The Lee-Warner Committee’s recommendation had included the National Indian Association and the Northbrook Club (rebranded afterward as the Northbrook Society) adopting office spaces within the confines of the new building, a prospect that not everyone in the groups found ideal. In particular, a representative of the Northbrook Society wrote in 1908 to the India Office that the club was concerned about a loss of autonomy but that its members on the whole “are not averse from a scheme by which the overlapping and duplication of work would be avoided, while each society retained a separate and distinct existence.”44 [OIOC IOR/L/PJ/6/845 file 233 “Bureau of Information.”] The societies’ reservations aren’t difficult to imagine: much as the India Office was moving to focus and streamline its process for dealing with Indian students in an effort to better keep them under supervision, so too might the office be making an attempt to exercise some influence over the groups doing similar work and ensure a uniform approach to the problem. Per the committee’s recommendations, the India Office would pay half of the organizations’ rents for their spaces in 21 Cromwell Road and provide additional subsidies as necessary; coupled with the centralized office spaces, it would have been reasonable for the pair of private societies to stay fairly wary of the potential for the government to extend its influence over their own missions.

By subsidizing the private groups and housing them under the same roof as the Bureau of Information, the India Office had however unwittingly cost them their legitimacy as private intermediaries in the minds of students. Having been lumped in with the increasingly repressive imperial government, they ceased to function as the well-meaning alternatives to official agencies they had been prior to 1910 and became one and the same with the India Office. Indians looking for friendly Englishmen to advocate on their behalf in a London where private support for students was dwindling no longer considered the Northbrook Society and the National Indian Association viable options; their legitimacy had been compromised by the government’s tainting touch and no longer wielded the same power to confer social citizenship upon visiting students. “[A representative] of the National Indian Association was aware that students she befriended were regarded as spies. Two representatives at Cromwell Road believed it was the government connection that was at the root of the problem”45 [Lahiri, Indians in Britain, 171.] wrote Shompa Lahiri, providing evidence that the organizations’ leadership was aware of the government’s harmful influence. The new location also had practical drawbacks for the organizations; even with India Office subsidies, rent in Kensington was astronomical, and an inability to keep up with the required payments -– due in part, no doubt, to a decreasing membership within student circles because of their new suspicion –- was one of the factors in the NIA’s decline by 1920.46 [“21 Cromwell Road,” Making Britain Database, http://www.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/ ... mwell-road (accessed 17 March 2015).]

Conclusion

In looking at the history of Indian students after 1909, public opinion was a force perhaps even more powerful than the government in dictating the status of Indian students. After 1909, Indian students were increasingly subject to racial prejudice and their presence in universities was increasingly met with British resentment, largely on the grounds that they were stealing seats from better-qualified English students. This is at least partially explained by the collective partial revocation of their social citizenship -– India House had cost them the liberal benefit of the doubt. During a 1911 India Office investigation into the Bureau’s effectiveness, a student spoke on the recent uptick in unofficial prejudice. He claimed that ten years earlier, racism had been nearly nonexistent in the student experience, but in 1911 “The financial difficulties of some, the extreme political views of others, the commencement of anarchic crime in India and England, the hostility towards students of a certain section of the Press in both countries have contributed to the same result,”47 [OIOC IOR/L/PJ/6/1120, “Note by K.M. Singh, 1911”] namely, a growing alienation among Indians in Britain. His testimony touched on the newfound hostility of several private British intermediaries: the press, his university classmates, and even his teachers had all been defenders of Indian students’ social citizenship before the Wyllie shooting, but afterwards had become decidedly less welcoming.

This wholly moderate climate that emerged in 1909 doesn’t mean that English education didn’t produce nationalists as it had earlier; rather, it produced more nationalists of the Jagmanderlal Jaini variety and fewer like Acharya. The Jainis of the student body followed in the moderate nationalism that Naoroji had pioneered while its Acharyas had run out of liberal goodwill in England. This is an explanation that works in harmony with the role of global intelligence in ensuring that no future India Houses ever took hold in England: both the public and the government held power over students in London, and neither party was willing to afford them as much tolerance as India House had received.

21 Cromwell Road in itself was the physical manifestation that signalled the tail end of the transformative arc of the India Office’s use of the information order. What had begun in India as a nebulous network of native informants and tenuous chains had become a single building with a single man at its center; incorporating the private groups effectively signalled their end as alternative avenues and centralized the controlling influence over students in a single location. Common sense would support the India Office’s approach: an increasingly systematized and structured network intuitively lends itself to more effectiveness. The mistake was in believing that information could flow both directions through a single hub; in the minds of students, the information that the Bureau was meant to spread hardly justified interacting with what was obviously an institution designed to keep a close watch on them, especially when things like the handbooks made visiting the Bureau unnecessary. The Bureau may have had an element of well-intentioned paternalism that T.W. Arnold brought out during his tenure, but it was fundamentally an attempt to collect intelligence that pretended unconvincingly not to be.

The Bureau of Information for Indian Students was the India Office’s final attempt to actively intervene in the lives of India’s cosmopolitan intellectuals. When the Lee-Warner Committee’s Report was finally published, it was as an appendix to a similar report conducted in 1921 under the chairmanship of Lord Lytton, the son of the former Viceroy Lytton. That the investigation was conducted by the son of a past Governor-General seems apropos, as the tone of its report was a marked change from that of Lee-Warner’s in 1907 befitting a generational shift in approach. Rather than recommending thinly-veiled surveillance measures, Lytton’s report keyed on the importance of developing India’s own education system. A thoroughly liberal solution that cast an eye towards preparing India for its increasingly inevitable independence, the committee’s report represented the end of the imperial government’s efforts to control students in Britain. The India Office maintained a presence in 21 Cromwell Road’s successor -– a hostel sponsored by the Y.M.C.A. that opened in 1920 and still operates today -– but never made any pretense to running its operation.
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