Religion in the Subjunctive Vaisnava Na

The Journal of Hindu Studies 2013;6:52–72

doi:10.1093/jhs/hit013

Religion in the Subjunctive: VaiX>ava Narrative,
Sufi Counter-Narrative in Early Modern Bengal
Tony K. Stewart*
Vanderbilt University
*Corresponding author: tony.k.stewart@vanderbilt.edu

Abstract: When VaiX>avas in 16th century Bengal first recognised KPX>a
Caitanya (1486–1533) as divine, they attributed to him all the forms of the
pur@>ic KPX>a, starting with the yug@vat@ra as the corrective for the ills of the
Kali age. These and related martial forms quickly yielded to more comforting
and benign images of divinity that ultimately emphasised the erotic sentiment
in the play of R@dh@ and KPX>a, embodied in Caitanya as the androgyne. With
Mughal ascendancy, the political landscape seemed to run counter to the
successful implementation of the yug@vat@ra’s mission until Satya Par—a
figure with allegiance to both VaiX>ava and Sufi ideals—arrogated to himself
that now-vacated roˆle. In this new form of devotion, VaiX>avas and Sufis were
united in finding a common solution to the decline. Though Satya Par was only

a fictional character, his tales circulated widely, prompting numerous attempts
to reconcile Hindu and Muslim theologies. One example each from the 16th,
17th, and 18th centuries will illustrate the novel strategies as authors tried to
imagine a world wherein the multiple religious traditions of Bengal could share
the land with a common cosmology and a common devotion, an innovative
speculation that is subjunctive in its impulse yet explicit in its suggested
solutions.
The pur@>ic master narrative of decline
The hyperbolic declension narrative that marked the pur@>ic literary treatments
of the final cosmic cycle, the Kali age, seemed to gain traction in VaiX>ava circles
in late 15th century Bengal. A few years later, touting this trope and the need for
god, KPX>a, to descend to set right the world, a small group of devotees in
Navadvapa celebrated one of their own as the corrective. Ne´ Vis´vambhara Mis´ra
(1486–1533 CE), this young br@hma>a encountered a charismatic guru in the person
of `s´vara Pura who initiated the young man into the VaiX>ava fold during a trip to
Gay@ where he had gone to perform the obsequies for his father. When he returned Vis´vambhara was god-maddened and his charisma fuelled the imagination
of the VaiX>ava community of Navadvapa. For about a year these devotees met
regularly as a group, singing the glories of KPX>a, dancing in private, and even in
ß The Author 2013. Oxford University Press and The Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. All rights reserved.
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Tony K. Stewart

53

processions on the streets. At the height of these ecstasies, the local VaiX>avas
began to see Vis´vambhara differently: they recognised in him the presence of
divinity and openly proclaimed that he was KPX>a, brought to earth as the
divine descent of the Kali age (yug@vat@ra) by the call of the senior devotee
Advait@c@rya.1 He was svaya: bhagav@n, God Himself. His earliest hagiographers
openly championed him as KPX>a, descending to right the ills that beset humanity
in this degraded period that marks the winding down of the universe as the end of
time cascades towards a cataclysmic end.2 While initially popular, this was a roˆle
for Caitanya that would fade over the course of the 16th century, leaving it to
others to discharge. The circumstantial evidence for his followers’ decision to
vacate this form of avat@ra seems likewise to signal a dramatic change in the
actual function of the yug@vat@ra, making Muslims central to the restoration of
moral order, rather than implicated in its decline.
A close reading of the pur@>ic rhetoric of the demise of the civilised Hindu
world in the Kali age and the hagiographical tradition devoted to Caitanya does

not actually pinpoint the aetiology of decline in the Kali age because degradation is
teleological, projected as inevitable given the nature of KPX>a’s universe. What the
texts do cite are indicators of it, especially the misconduct of br@hma>as, of women,
of the lower social order, and the constant references to the blood sacrifices of the
S´@ktas. The 16th century hagiographical record stands in direct contrast to the
contemporary narratives, for the bulk of the scholarship generated in the 20th
century—when Hindu–Muslim conflict often took dramatic violent form—tended
to imply, if not outright name, Muslims as the cause of the problems. The categories of Hindu and Muslim that emerged in the late 19th century from agglomerating these diverse groups into political identities had been naı¨vely read back
onto the literatures of the earlier centuries, in spite of the dearth of references in
the original set of hagiographies themselves, which are curiously mute.3 The only
significant passage in the hagiographical tradition that so names Muslims as part
of the proof of the ills of the Kali age, but by no means the only one, comes from
the popular (not sectarian) Caitanya man˙gala of Jay@nanda—actually the term
Jay@nanda uses is mleccha or ‘foreigner’ (not musalm@n), more precisely ‘foreign
babbler’, i.e. he who speaks incomprehensibly and does not know Sanskrit.4 There
was no concise formula, many were the indicators of the Age’s degradation, but
the earliest texts of Caitanya’s hagiographical corpus present a unified voice in
their insistence that the world was ailing, just as the pur@>as had intimated, and
that Caitanya offered a remedy through the offices of the yug@vat@ra.
Changing the emphasis of Gaunaya VaiX>ava theology

Much to the chagrin of the devotees in Navadvapa, in less than a year after they
had declared him to be KPX>a, the young Vis´vambhara formally renounced the
world and became a sa:ny@sa, taking the initiated name of KPX>a Caitanya. He
departed Navadvapa for good, a departure likened to KPX>a’s departure to Mathur@

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Religion in the Subjunctive

to slay King Ka:sa, as numerous poets and singers lamented—but this is where the
expectations of Caitanya as the yug@vat@ra were stymied, for contrary to the earlier
predictions, after taking his formal vows of renunciation, Caitanya did not set out
to slay demons or use celestial martial power to right the moral order. For most of
the next six years he would make pilgrimage around India, returning to Puri where
he passed most of the final eighteen years of his life near the temple of Jagann@tha.
In his final years he became increasingly lost in the mysteries of KPX>a’s love for
R@dh@.5
For at least a half century the hagiographers in Bengal did not seem to register the implications of the shift in emphasis regarding the nature of Caitanya’s
divinity and the concomitant forms of ritual practice, such was the apparent
disconnect between the various groups in Bengal and the community in Puri.

The shift was slow and timid as they began to explore more openly and with
greater interest the erotic element; Locana D@sa’s Caitanya man˙gala marked the
turning point, followed shortly by the Caitanyacandrodaya of Kavikar>ap+ra. It was
only with KPX>ad@sa’s Caitanya carit@mPta, composed about three quarters of a
century after Caitanya’s demise that the new story of Caitanya’s later life and
his experience of the love of R@dh@ emerged in its fully developed form.
According to that text, by the end of Caitanya’s life in 1533 CE, Caitanya was
understood to manifest exclusively the love of R@dh@. There was no more hint
of martial forms of avat@ra.
This shift coincided with several major changes in the political landscape of
Bengal, Orissa, and the Gangetic plain. By the middle of the 16th century, the
previously patchworked sultanate of Bengal was militarily pacified and administratively regularised under Mughal rule, but as Eaton has convincingly argued, not
with the intention of converting anyone to Islam.6 In 1541, the last major Hindu
king in the region was subdued, ending the Gajapati dynasty which ruled in Utkal
and Kalin˙ga south of Bengal for over a century, and whose kings functioned as the
worldly emissary of Lord Jagann@tha in Puri. By 1568 the parade of interim pretenders yielded to a Mughal authority. It was during this period of transition to
eventual control of the land by a Mughal administration that the images of
Caitanya’s divinity reported by the hagiographers likewise changed trajectory.
The apparent empowerment felt by VaiX>ava groups across north India during
the Sultanate period settled into a less aggressive religious outlook of non-confrontation, if not outright cooperation and collaboration with governing authorities. The Mughals not only did not seek to convert, they actively encouraged

VaiX>avas, who were renowned for their honesty as teachers and merchants and
who had increasingly easy access to the courts.7 The earlier favoured images of
divinity that emphasised a theology predicated on a violent militarism required to
overcome evildoers—the well-known animal and theriomorphic avat@ras of the
pur@>as, such as the favourite Man-Lion Narasi:ha or Var@ha the Boar, or the
more remote multi-armed celestial lords N@r@ya>a and ViX>u with whom Caitanya
was identified in early hagiographies—all these were prominent in Bengal prior to

Tony K. Stewart

55

the period of the much more cosmopolitan and culturally synthesising
Sultanate dynasty of Husain Sh@h (r. 1494–1538). These martial images began to
yield to more pacifying forms during the reign of Husain Sh@h and even more so
in the Mughal period; devotees began to favour the baby B@l@gop@la, and most
of all the loving two-armed form of the flute-playing, gopa-flirting cowherd
Govinda.8
The reign of divine kingship and righteous rule of the world conveyed through
those early celestial images gradually surrendered to an erotic theology that was

accessible through refined emotion, an experience that cultivated a distinctly
apolitical interiority that was played out in the minds and hearts of devotees.
The locus of devotional activity in Bengal shifted away from dependence on the
costly and politically potent permanent structures of the royal temple compound
to something more personal and more mobile. Even during Caitanya’s life this shift
seemed to be presaged by the insistence of the hagiographers that the massive
Jagann@tha image in Puri, which was known as acala jagann@tha or immobile sovereign of the world, was twinned by Caitanya himself, who was the sacala
jagann@tha or mobile Jagann@tha, the new image of divinity.9 During this great
theological transition of the mid- to late-16th century, marked by a swelling of the
ranks of VaiX>avas across northern India, there was a noticeable corresponding
shift in the nature of the favoured icons: the large fixed temple-based icon
(m+lamurti) seems to have given way to the smaller processional forms (utsava
murti) as the most common image installed in temples and home altars.10 These
images were conveniently mobile; they could be easily transported and when
times were unsettled, hidden away for safe keeping.11
While it is impossible to establish an unequivocal causal link to account for this
this dramatic turn in the form of the image, it seems more than just circumstantial, for most VaiX>avas of this period—in Bengal and across north-central India—
clearly shifted the focus of their experience of divinity away from the martial
imagery of the yug@vat@ra to something more benign. Caitanya as yug@vat@ra was
deemed of little import; by the end of the 16th century, the hagiographies tell us

that the raison d’eˆtre of his descent was to experience for himself the sublime love
that R@dh@ tasted. Caitanya was now understood to be an androgyne, R@dh@ and
KPX>a forever fused in union, yet mysteriously remaining separate.12 The point of
his descent to earth was no longer this-worldly, it was not to heal the world’s
ailments by force, but to create a momentary utopia that would serve to transport
devotees away from this earth to heavenly Vraja, a different solution to what they
had previously imagined for their afflicted world. All other theories regarding the
form of the avat@ra—more than a dozen in all—were deemed incidental to the real
reason for KPX>a’s descent as Caitanya and were declared merely coincidental in
timing—and that suggests that the consumers of this theology no longer felt the
yuga- and related avat@ras addressed their needs. The historical reality of Caitanya
did not meet the expectations of the mythology of the yug@vat@ra, a theological
shift that denoted a religious response to the Realpolitik of the time. The result

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Religion in the Subjunctive

was to leave the field for yug@vat@ra open to other claimants who, in turn, redefined its nature and function.
Satya Par, new avat@ra for the Kali age

Starting in the 16th century, the most widely acknowledged and celebrated figure
in Bengal to be attributed the roˆle of yug@vat@ra was a holy figure named Satya Par.
Like pur@>ic avat@ras, Satya Par suddenly appears in the literature a wholly mythic
figure, but with some seemingly historical roots. In the late 18th century ‘Tale of
L@lmon’ or L@lmoner k@hini of Kavi ?rif (Beng. ?ripha), his worship is actually
attributed to the daughter of Sultan Hus@in Sh@h, a story that continues to circulate.13 Satya Par has no historical basis, though his form clearly reflects the Bengali
culture of the times. He is the product of the Bengali imaginary,14 which here
seems to find a way to accommodate the increasing presence of Muslims in a
VaiX>ava world by finding in the Muslim the solution to the ills of the Kali age,
rather than attributing to the Muslim its causes, as is routinely done in the political rhetoric today. Satya Par’s hagiographic narratives are fictional, his lifespan
seems to stretch across centuries, and today he enjoys worship by devotees at
several tombs (maz@r and darg@h), the most prominent being K@lasar@ village in
B@r@sat subsdivision of twenty-four Parganas, visited by Girandran@tha D@sa in
1968 as he collected stories of the pars.15 The extent of Satya Par’s popularity is
attested by the vast literature dedicated to telling his tales. Manuscript evidence
suggests it constituted the second largest body of literature in early modern
Bengal after that dedicated to Caitanya—there are today more than 750 extant
manuscripts composed by more than hundred different authors, Muslims and
Hindus alike.16 As his name suggests, Satya Par deliberately conflated the images
of both Hindu and Muslim holy figures. In his mixed sartorial style, brahmanical

and Sufi, in his action and instruction from Qur’@n and Bh@gavata Pur@>a, and in
the style of his argument he signals an ‘exchange equivalence’ among the many
types of holy figures who populated the Bengali landscape of the day—br@hma>as,
VaiX>ava vair@gas, S´aiva sa:ny@sas, S´@kta ascetics, Habha yogas, Sufi pars and faqars,
warrior gh@zas, and even lesser gods and goddesses, the latter paired with extraordinarily devout Muslim matrons or babas and long-suffering satas. In this imaginary, where equivalence and commonality were emphasised over difference—the
efficacy of the act trumping doctrine or theology—the underlying aetiology of the
widespread disruption of righteousness that characterises the Kali age is reassessed. The fictive hagiographies of Satya Par declared that foreigners were
not the indicators of the problem of worldly degradation. Rather, Muslims, who
were by then thoroughly Bengali, provided a way to survive the calamities and set
the world back on track.
Initially, Satya Par reached out to those who found themselves populating the
fringes of the civilised Hindu world. He provided for the poor, especially among
them the worst cases of poor br@hma>as; he intervened on behalf of those who

Tony K. Stewart

57

made their livings clearing the jungles of Bengal, especially in the eastern reaches
and the Sunderban mangrove swamps, showing them how to accumulate vast

wealth. He aided merchants who worshiped him, those who found themselves
venturing out of the safe inland waterways onto the ocean to do their trade;
but he just as easily threw obstacles in their path when they failed to live up to
their moral obligations and promise to worship. Satya Par was a frequent visitor
to the courts and chambers of kings, zamindars, and petty landlords, present to
defend those who had been wronged. As a provider of wealth and a broker of peace
and justice, Satya Par embodied many of the classic ideals of the yug@vat@ra which
his followers claimed, but the emphasis was perhaps more mundane.17
Satya Par and a cohort of both mythic and historical pars could do what their
Hindu counterparts could not do, or in some instances, failed to do, that is, they
could tame and domesticate the unsettled reaches of Bengal (which were generally
off limits to traditional Hindu groups) by extending protection to devotees in
forms that were functionally familiar, if not precisely equivalent, and for whom
sectarian identity was of little concern. The pars and shaykhs, with their special
relation to the jungles and their wild inhabitants of tiger, crocodile, rhino, serpent,
and pestilence could extend protection to areas Hindus had traditionally avoided—
one hears of sa:ny@sas living in the forest, but not taming armies of tigers or
crocodiles as certain pars are reported to have done. They did not, however, displace their Hindu counterparts of gods and goddesses and holy men and women,
but extended their reach across the frontier, continuing the same kinds of activities to a new audience, largely lower classes, such as woodcutters, honey gatherers, salt manufacturers, and of course farmers. For instance, where the goddess
S´ital@ was propitiated to avert smallpox, pustular diseases, and afflictions of the
skin, the Muslim mother figure Ol@baba complemented her reach by handling
cholera, dysentery, and other water-borne diseases in a perfectly analogous fashion, even to the point that today in the Sunderbans they sit side by side to receive
p+j@.18 Authors naturalised this perspective by establishing functional equivalents
of key religious figures: larger-than-life mythic figures, such as KPX>a; historical
greats such as Muhammad and ?li; and individuals who populated the typical
classes of religious functionaries, such as Sufi pars or VaiX>ava vair@gas and
N@tha yogas.
Equivalence and complementarity: remodelling avat@ra theory
This impulse to seek equivalence matches to no formal institutional religion, no
exclusively sectarian orientation, the latter being the stock-in-trade of contemporary reformists. Rather this religious sensibility seems to function in two fundamentally different ways from formal sectarian orientation. First, the act of
seeking equivalence mythicises every character, regardless of historicity; as a
result, Muhammad is frequently elevated to the level of Khod@ or ?llah, or equated
to KPX>a or the historical Caitanya, who is himself mythicised, even more than he

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Religion in the Subjunctive

was in his own lifetime. The historical pars who walked among the Bengali
populations were so elevated—for example, Sh@h Jal@l of Sylhet—that their numerous miracles made them equal to any Hindu god. Religious figures become
types, and theology universalised and timeless. Second, the primary focus of
religious intervention is immediate aid to the individual plight, whether it be
the alleviation of penury or help with sick cattle, the arrangement for a proper
marriage partner or the aid of a string-pulling friend in the bureaucracies, all of
which are tantamount to the worldly powers necessary to survive in a climate
that can be alternately fructifying or inhospitable. This is popular religion, ironically usually characterised as unsophisticated and for the masses, but in fact, is
hyper-individualised and tailored to each specific individual’s needs and based
on a logic of analogous forms that proves very sophisticated. In both functional
arenas, formal systematic theology is absent, and texts become iconic, so the
Qur’@n and Bh@gavata Pur@>a (about the only two texts ever cited) become
emblematic of Truth, with distinctions and differences disregarded. Sectarian
ritual injunction is routinely ignored except in its most basic form or rejected
altogether, and that frequently as an indictment of those who hypocritically
pretend to live by its standards.19 Instead, ritual practice is reduced to basic
morality—being good—and showing respect to those with power, that is, avoiding calamity by appropriately recognising genuinely holy men and women and
by honouring the gods.
In the case of the yug@vat@ra, there are at least three different ways that equivalence is sought or established, each sharing in a commonly conceived project but
for ever-so-slightly different ends. To illustrate, we will look at three examples in a
logical order, which coincidentally turns out to be chronological as well—the S´+nya
pur@>a of R@m@i Pa>nita, the Nabava:s´a of Saiyid Sult@n, and the Satya par p@n˜c@la of
Phayajull@—the first two, respectively, show Hindu and Muslim efforts to incorporate the others’ figures; the third much more neutral in its evaluations of the
place of these gods and holy men, reaching a true functional equivalence which
favours neither formal tradition. All three of the strategies surface in these popular par literatures throughout the early modern period. But it was this last perspective that had by the late 17th century become the most common in the cycle
of par romances. Ironically that position is the least recognised today, likely the
result of the associated rituals being nearly generic in form and the associated
theological perspectives likewise undifferentiated in doctrinal terms, which makes
the propositions untenable in a world governed by the stark marking of difference
among Hindus and Muslims that began with such earnest in the reform movements starting in the early 19th century.
In the last section of the Bengali S´+nya pur@>a, a text of uncertain provenance
but estimated to be from the 15th or 16th century,20 we can see how the author,
R@m@i Pa>nita incorporates Muslim figures into his generic avat@ra theory (generic
because the figures that descend do not accrue to any one sectarian set). The
section begins with a complaint about those who laid waste the city of J@japura,

Tony K. Stewart

59

sufficient to summon Lord Dharma or Dharma ah@kura—a figure associated and
later conflated with Satya Par—to come down to earth. R@m@i wrote:21
In this fashion did the twice-born
lay waste creation—
their injustices most egregious.
In Vaiku>bha heaven Lord Dharma cried out
as he contemplated the full significance.
In the created world darkness descended.
Dharma took the form of a yavana,
a black hat on his head,
in his hand a turuska [¼Turks’] bow and arrow.
Pressed under the greatest burden
fear struck down the earth
until the singular name of Khod@ rang forth.
The Stainless One (niran˜jana) without form (nir@k@ra)
descended as an avat@ra from heaven (bhest).
From his mouth emerged the imperishable (damvad@ra).22
As many deities as there were
collectively appeared, all of like mind,
gaily wearing their loose pajamas.
Brahm@ became Muh@mmad,
ViX>u became the Messenger of God (pek@mbara),
S´+lap@>i [¼S´iva] became Adam (adamph).
Ga>es´a became the warrior-par (g@ja),
K@rtika became the magistrate (k@na),
and all the sages (muni) became mendicants (phakar).
Covering over his own magnificence
N@rada became inspired religious leader (s´ek),
Purandara became a scholar (malan@).
Candra, S+rya, and the original deities
descended as footmen to serve,
and together they played their musical instruments.
Ca>nik@ Deva herself
took the form of a H@y@ Baba [¼Eve]
and Padm@vati became Babanur [lit. Lady of Light ¼ F@tem@].
Any number of deities
came together with singular focus
and entered the city of J@japura.

The narrative follows the logic of VaiX>ava avat@ra theory: when God descends to
earth he brings with him his entire retinue, his dh@ma, in order to set right the
world.23 In this case Dharma ah@kura is understood to be Niran˜jana [the stainless
one] and Khod@ [?llah]. R@m@i Pa>nita proposes that the equivalence is actually
one of identity, effected through an incarnational strategy that appropriates the
Islamic characters not as equivalents, but as manifestations of forms; they are

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well-known gods with different names and appearances, leaving little doubt regarding their legitimacy. From his Hindu perspective, the presence of the Muslims
simply extends what avat@ras always do: they come down from heaven to save the
world and its populations. The seemingly opposed religious traditions are easily
rectified, the theology sufficiently general to embrace the historical peculiarities,
and Islam is not only made understandable, but necessary—hardly the stuff of
conflict as is assumed in the post-colonial world, though the perspective operates
according to an appropriation of Muslim religious lore to nominally Hindu ends,
correcting the failures and excesses of this particular group of twice-born (who are
routinely named as deficient and mean-spirited).
Less than a century after R@m@i Pa>nita’s work, poet Saiyid Sult@n composed his
grand history of the lineage of the Prophet Muhammad, the Bengali Nabava:s´a.24
In this text he reverses the approach used by R@m@i Pa>nita and incorporates
Hindu figures into the line of prophets or nabas. Brahm@, S´iva, R@ma, and KPX>a
were all nabas in the great line alongside Noah, Moses, and Abraham. By incorporating popular Hindu gods, the author acknowledged their reality and presence, but
subordinated them to Muhammad, who is of course the Seal of the Prophets. In
this schema, Muhammad was designated an avat@ra, the etymological sense of
which is ‘descent from above’ with the implication again of redressing the ills
of the world—the perfect Bengali word for what Muhammad was believed to have
done. Significantly, the cosmogony notes the tale of the Vedas and the earth’s plea
for relief, a common trope to initiate descent in VaiX>ava texts.25 The Light of
Muhammad, nur muhammadi, is instrumental to creation, but `s´vara and P@rvata
are incorporated into the cosmogony side-by-side with M@rica and M@rij@ta.26 By
accommodating the Hindu pantheon to the extent that he did, even when some of
the figures, especially KPX>a, are deemed to be less than righteous and sent to
mislead the world (interestingly, much as the Buddha in the das´@vat@ra system),27
Saiyid Sult@n adopts a vocabulary to describe the Prophet’s lineage that is not only
consistent with general avat@ra theory, but actually appropriates it by asserting
that Muhammad, rather than KPX>a Caitanya, is the avat@ra of the Age.28 Muhammad, of course, takes centre stage in this depraved age. In R@m@i Pa>nita’s S´+nya
pur@>a, the gods assume human forms as Muslims, granting Muhammad and his
followers the ontological status of worldly forms of divinity. Somewhat conversely,
in his Nabava:s´a, Saiyid Sult@n grants Hindu gods and historical figures discrete
ontological status, but they too are created by God, yet are hierarchically subordinate to Muhammad and his retinue. The conceptual underpinnings of these two
sets of proposals regarding the identities of Hindu and Muslims figures are coherent and compatible, but inconsistent one with the other in their emphases.29 These
are among the first experiments in rectifying what appear to be on the surface
competing theological and ritual systems. The textual evidence suggests that
within decades of Saiyid Sult@n’s work, the accommodation of the two systems
was widespread and less and less in the service of one institutional religious
community or the other, though regional differences, such as in Chittagong

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61

where there is a very strong Muslim presence and concomitant emerging separate
identity. But in central Bengal, R@nha, and all through the southern reaches of the
Sunderban mangrove swamps, what had previously been either Hindu or Muslim
perspectives on these religious figures and gods became something altogether
different and decidedly more generic by the late 17th century.
This third—and what becomes the most common approach to this popular
strategy of seeking equivalence—can be sampled from the Satya par p@n˜c@la of a
late 18th century text by a poet named Phayajull@, which has been chosen to
illustrate the trend because of its clarity. What makes this particular text a
good illustration of the trend is not only its approach to a full equivalence of
functional types of religious figures, but its indirect critique of the historical
activities of warrior-pars (gh@za and g@ja), whose actions are no longer compatible
with the consolidating religious sensibility. Writing in the southern R@nha district
of what is now West Bengal, Phayajull@ composed a popular tale about the holy
figure of Satya Par in a Bengali performance genre called p@n˜c@la. He begins by
paying respect to a host of luminaries, enjoining the listener to follow his lead.30
Starting with Par Nir@n˜jana—the Stainless One—then to Muhammad, to ?la, to the
four friends of rasul and to the four im@ms, and of course to Ibrahim. Then
Phayajull@ names several locally important historical figures: Ism@‘il Gh@za of
Gana M@nd@rama and Bana Kh@n Murid Mian˜. He rhetorically asks how it would
be possible for him to name all the pars, who number in excess of one hundred
eighty thousand. He bows to the feet of female pars and a hundred times more to
the feet of Baba F@tim@. He then glorifies the Hindu deities ah@kura Gopan@tha of
Kh@n@kula and Dharma ah@kura. Veneration is offered to the site of VPnd@vana on
the banks of the Yamun@ and to KPX>a and Balar@ma who lived there, and to
Navadvapa where Caitanya was born from the womb of S´aca. He bows to
Pan˜c@nan of Kum@rah@bi, then praises R@ma and LakXma>a, the sons of
Das´aratha. Next comes eulogy to the goddesses LakXma, Sarasvata, and G@n˙g@
Bh@giratha. He bows to Sat@deva and other satas like her, to Daivaka, Rohina, and
again S´aca Deva, who bore Gor@c@nd [¼Gauracandra]. The ordering sets up two lists
in parallel, a clear projection of Muslim and Hindu equivalence. Phayajull@ then
praises Satya Par as the supreme lord and admonishes his reader:
. . . Satya Par S@heb, you do good for all without discriminating. You are Brahm@,
you are ViX>u, and you are N@r@ya>a. O brother g@ja, pay heed to this conjunction [of divinity] and go pay your respects to the par who resides here in your
midst. Leave off the idea of pilgrimage to Makk@ and come here instead—this is
what Phayajull@ advises you to do.

The final injunction in this passage signals that the author is not concerned with
the outward ritual trappings or prescriptions of the institutions of mainstream
Islam; he has fully assimilated the general Hindu and explicitly Sufi concept of
hierarchising living authority in the person of the teacher over the efficacy of a

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Religion in the Subjunctive

sacred place, a position that also suggests that power is more efficacious when
derived locally. While the injunction may be read in a general way for all auditors
of the text, the message seems to be especially directed at the two warrior-pars—
Ism@‘il Gh@za of Gana M@nd@rama and Bana Kh@n Murid Mian˜—the first of whom
came directly from Mecca to tame Bengal, the second of whom is in the direct line
of one who did the same. Today, neither one of these figures is considered particularly prominent, indeed their details are sketchy at best, but both were connected to political regimes that sanctioned sectarian violence—and they no longer
seem to have purchase in Phayajull@’s cosmology of equivalence.
As attested in several chronicles, Bana Kh@n Murid Mian˜ was Sh@ykh N+r al-Dan
Qubb-i-‘?lam (d. 1415 CE), the son of the famous Sh@ykh ‘Al@’ al-#aqq and important
figure in the court of Sultan Ibr@ham Sh@h Sh@rqa of Jaunpur (r. 1402–1436 CE). It
was Qubb-i-‘?lam who, among other feats, engineered the surrender and conversion of the Hindu ruler R@j@ Ga>es´a (r. 1415–1435 CE), a major triumph for Muslim
rule in Bengal, but a victory that turned sour when Ganes´a later reneged, which is
to say that Bana Kh@n Murid Mian˜ was ultimately unsuccessful in his quest.31 So
too Ism@‘il Gh@za, who is positively identified in the early 17th c. Persian Ris@lat
ush-Shuhad@‘ composed by Par Mu$ammad Shabb@ra,32 who reported that the gh@za,
born in Mecca, had migrated to Bengal and worked in the courts of Rukn al-Dan
B@rbak Sh@h (r. 1459–1474 CE). According to this narrative, Ism@‘il Gh@za enjoyed
much success as a warrior-par, subduing the armies of various Hindu kings, most
notably the Gajapati of M@nd@rama (in Orissa) and King K@mes´vara of K@mar+pa in
the northeastern hills, the latter through particularly miraculous deeds. Eventually
he was betrayed by a jealous courtier and executed by his emperor, who subsequently repented for his mistake, but not before Ism@‘il Gh@za had demonstrated
miraculous power even after his beheading. Credited with continuing to fight long
after his head was separated from his body, Ism@‘il Gh@za’s head, torso, and four
limbs were eventually buried separately, each considered a legitimate tomb
(darg@h) and pilgrimage point in Rangpur, northeast of Ghor@gh@ba.
If the stories of these two gh@zas are stories of conquest by foreigners, they
portray rather Pyrrhic victories. They seem oddly out of place when Phayajull@ has
argued that Satya Par as the yug@vat@ra appealed to both Muslims and Hindus by
championing reconciliation, where Muslims and Hindus were understood to worship the same God by different names, but for the same ends. In his opening
statement Phayajull@ articulated a different religious sensibility diametrically
opposed to the two warrior-pars and their failures seem to be precisely the
point: the warrior ways of earlier pars and gh@zas failed to establish Islam as the
sole religious practice, because it was not necessary. The new world was one of
rapprochement, attested by the fact that each of the other figures so named represent participation in a universal religious truth—and this is evidenced in large
parts of the Bangla-speaking region in the tales of a host of pars, whose audiences
seemed to know no sectarian boundaries. The gh@zas’ desire to fight in the name of
Islam no longer represents a necessary or even viable religious activity. Phayajull@

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63

signals that Islam had discovered a religious landscape that was receptive to its
message in universal terms, a landscape that had made it its own, accommodated
it, and appropriated it without being dominated by it. Islam had become Bengali.
These two warrior-pars, seemingly considered by Phayajull@ to be less than
glorious, lived just before the great historical period when Bengali emerged as
the language of local culture, the literary vehicle for translations of Sanskrit and
Persian as well as new creations. This was the period that began with the reign of
Hus@in Sh@h, who is celebrated as the great patron of Bengali literature and a
promoter of Bengali language; it continued through the 16th and 17th centuries of
Mughal rule. This was the time of the great VaiX>ava transformation initially
inspired by Caitanya whose followers abandoned the martial prospect in favour
of a more benign and accommodating belief. Indeed, even Caitanya is reputed to
have proposed that the Bh@gavata Pur@>a and the yavana s´@stra [¼Qur’@n]
espoused equivalent truths in his frequently cited encounter with a Sufi par as
he was leaving Vraja.33
Phayajull@’s opening encomia signal a religious sensibility that bound VaiX>avas
to Sufis in a new world, a world where practitioners were visibly marked as
different, but whose discursive practices were compatible, where the warriorpar—whose very existence was predicated on conflict—ceased to be celebrated.
Is it a coincidence that this rapprochement emerges when Bengali vernacular
began to gain ascendancy as a literary language, representing a perspective
common to Hindu and Muslim alike? But this perspective was neither formalised
in theology nor in sectarian ritual, which is to say it was popular, but never
institutionalised in the same manner that the sectarian traditions were. This
lack of overt institutionalisation inevitably makes the religious prospect generic,
that is, there can be no formal theology or doctrine, nor are there any formal
liturgical practices because there is no developed institutional authority to sanction them—worship is nearly universally generic with the offering of simple s´ar>i
(s´inni, that is, rice flour, sugar, milk, and spices rolled into a ball) in the manner of
p+j@. The result leaves little by way of historical records apart from vast numbers
of manuscripts telling the ‘tales’ of these figures. Institutions ultimately vest authority in the archive of their own activities through art and architecture, through
textual injunction, and historical chronicles and other records—while the religious
impulse that seeks to establish the kinds of equivalences found in the Satya Par and
other par stories (kath@) lives nearly exclusively in fictional or mythic literatures
that are dismissed as ‘popular’ and therefore granted little credence as religious
documents.
Invisibility and the subjunctive
Today mainstream, institutionalised Hindu and Muslim traditions do not recognise
the kind of world envisioned by Phayajull@, for it violates the construction of any
and all sectarian orthodoxy. The common image of Satya Par in Phayajull@’s and

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Religion in the Subjunctive

many other texts clearly signals this rapprochement: Satya Par wears a br@hma>a’s
sacred thread, the chain belt and dagger of the warrior-par, the ascetic’s patchwork
garb common to all mendicants, and he carries the Bh@gavata Pur@>a of the
VaiX>avas and the Qur’@n, while teaching that ?llah and Bhagav@n or KPX>a are
not different. It is, no doubt, in the eyes of many today, an unholy abomination; a
misguided folk construction that has little or no legitimacy for either community.
Satya Par and others like him, straddle what today are considered to be mutually
exclusive worlds of Hindu and Muslim. As a result, those few contemporary scholars within the tradition and religious leaders who do reckon his tradition look
with disdain and denounce him (thereby inadvertently acknowledging his presence and power) by classifying his followers as heretics. He is an abomination, or
deemed irrelevant, and therefore to be ignored, for reasons that are familiar to us
now. The story behind this categorisations are now well recognised—the 18th and
19th centuries Orientalists’ definition of religious traditions in India as an orgy of
mindless confusion; the purification movements spawned by various reformers,
both Hindu and Muslim; the active intervention of the colonial administration
with the census, which assigned for the first time discrete religious identities
that then became political identities, with concomitant legal reforms and legislative quotas, and so forth. In short, the construction of the categories of knowledge
left no positive place for the likes of Satya Par or Phayajull@’s notion of equivalence. The same result inheres in theories of Sanskritisation and Arabicisation,
which mindlessly assume the so-called ‘high standard’ is commensurate with
sophisticated theology and is automatically assumed to articulate the desirable
goal of every religious or social practice for Hindus and Muslims, respectively. The
result: Satya Par and similar figures are prejudicially dismissed as unlettered folk
religion—an Islam that is accused of being popular, rural, peasant, naı¨ve, rustic, or
plainly stupid.34 For the last two centuries, Islamic reformers have not granted
Satya Par the status of being Muslim at all, and because he is a par, Hindu reformers
today reject him as well. With this systematic denigration, the exploits of Satya Par
and his cohort of mythic g@jas, babas, and pars seem to be slipping from our learned
view, caught between the hegemonic discourse of modern Hindu reformers and
the equally dominating Islamists’ Arabic-centric discourse of history, theology, and
law. This blindspot is important because I do not think the Bengal case is unique.
The nature of public discourse on religion in South Asia has effectively hidden
this Bengali innovation from our contemporary scholastic view, in spite of the
empirical evidence in the form of extant manuscripts, ongoing p+j@s, and functioning darg@hs. This great experiment by Phayajull@ and others in seeking functional equivalents for Hindu and Muslim traditions gives us an opportunity to
examine the resulting contours of our ignorance—the structure of what we do
not know, or seem not to know. The nature of ignorance has in philosophical
terms been relegated to a subfield of epistemology.35 But for the study at hand—
and for engaging religious traditions in their cultural and literary histories—the
issue more rightly falls into the sociology of knowledge and power, as Foucault and

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65

his followers no doubt would argue. A term that has been recently coined for this
discursive ignorance, but which has not yet gained wide currency, is agnotology.36
It examines how the very structures of our knowledge hide from us possibilities
that we have difficulty even imagining. We cannot imagine it because the way we
think and prioritise knowledge does not allow it—and here we witness the shaping
power of institutionalised, sectarian religions with their systematised, if not systematic, theologies, the coercive power of doctrinal decision-making, and the injunction of ritual on basic human behaviour. As scholars we are complicit in this
cover-up because we focus on dominant forms that are made dominant by institutions that keep histories and records; folk religion, of course, fails to
institutionalise itself in this way.37
Throughout South Asia, much of the historical record of institutional Sufism in
the pre-modern period has been instantiated in the physical site of the tomb and
darg@h and reinforced by a strong literary output of teaching by both word and
example, that is, practical religious guidance through correspondence (maktub@t)
and more pointed theological perspectives laced with homiletics (ish@r@t), positions which in turn find reinforcement through, and are often redacted in, collected sayings (malf+C@t) that are in turn contextualised in hagiography (tazkirah).
The institutional edifice of course is designed largely to preserve and perpetuate
this legacy. The greater institutionalisation the greater the exclusive claim to truth
and the more difficult for alternatives to be given currency, a trend that is in turn
reinforced by contemporary scholars who rely heavily on these preserved forms of
cultural production. When the legacy of a par or s´h@ykh successfully suppresses
alternatives, it can be by design,38 but in many instances results as a by-product of
the looming presence of the institutions that legislate and govern. A court which
can claim the patronage of a famous Sufi similarly legitimates his silsila or lineage
while simultaneously legitimating the sponsoring court. That connection with
overt political power extends the reach of the institutionalised Sufi; in more general terms, political power and theology blot out those less successful in combining
the two.
Unlike these historical figures, Satya Par and his ilk have few of the trappings of
the formal silsila: no formal teachings, no collected sayings, no correspondence,
and so forth. How could any mythic figure generate those institutional foundations? While there are rituals, they are, as noted above, nearly completely generic
and of a form that is isomorphic with many rituals in any village worship in Bengal
(the offering of s´ar>i in a type of p+j@). Interestingly Satya Par does have several
darg@hs associated with his tombs, but there is no silsila to carry on his teachings
because his ‘teachings’ again are not doctrinally marked, but rather consist of
simple moral instruction about being good, showing respect to pars and other
holy figures in order to prosper in this world. His erstwhile hagiographies, however, are fictional narratives or myths that circulate in popular performances or
cheaply printed books. This is not to suggest that the hagiographies of historical
pars are historically accurate or anything other than religious propaganda. Perhaps

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Religion in the Subjunctive

because of the spotty nature of his historical record—the fact that his institutional
base is limited and falls between the more clearly demarcated mainstream Hindu
and Muslim communities today—Satya Par has been nearly invisible to the scholastic community for the last century, while his tales remain popular as ever. And
he is not alone. His fictional universe is inhabited by a host of other mythological
figures. In a curious contrastive twist, the mythology of the Hindu traditions has
been enshrined in the academy and the popular imagination as an extraordinary
record of Hindu religious sensibility, but any Muslim figure associated with mythology is automatically delegitimised, if not worse; in fact, scholars today will
strongly discourage anyone from characterising anything in the Muslim world
as mythology, as my own experience attests. But standing outside the institutional
structures of mainstream Islam has given Satya Par a unique place in the Bengali
imaginary, for it has allowed Bengalis to envision a world apart from the constraints of the doctrinally driven sectarian perspective—and therein lies much of
his power.
Though the primary figure of Satya Par is mythic or fictional, the religious
perspective promoted by Phayajull@, however generic it may appear, is a historically conditioned response to a very specific set of circumstances in Bengal in the
early modern period. The figure may be fictional, but the writing of his texts
constitutes a historical act and that act requires notice. The choice of fictional
narrative to convey this vision presses the story of Satya Par and other such figures
into the mold of vernacular ‘romance’, a medium recognised by Sufis, but only
occasionally used to convey explicit religious instruction—and that choice must be
taken seriously, interpretive strategies to make the stories make sense must account for their nature as fictions.39 The tales convey only in broadest outlines
pious practice and belief. In this they exhibit the quality of all literary fictions (as
opposed to Hayden White’s historical fictions) and I find the position of Pierre
Machery in his Theory of Literary Production to be useful for conceptualising the
issue.40 He argues that a work of fiction cannot bear the weight of theology or
ideology, for when it attempts to do so the stories revert to simple propaganda: the
grotesque assertion of ideological verities by wooden characters in predictable
action, leaving itself open to little more than mockery or parody. Fiction can
only produce a simulacrum of theology or ideology, which may well be what
Phayajull@ and his kind are doing. But the most important feature of fiction is
that it is dialogic and that signals an exploratory mode of thought and action, one
that creatively engages its context rather than dictating a structure to it.41 The
outcomes are not always predictable, the solutions though often neat, are just as
often novel. As fictions, these narratives project an open-ended exploration of
what it might mean to rely on the Muslim analogues to the Hindu gods and
holy men, how they might ingeniously set an unruly world back on course, as
the yug@vat@ra is supposed to do. The tales are filled with ‘what ifs?’ that interrogate if not challenge societal norms, from gender roles to vocation to government.
The choice by these authors to pitch their perspectives in fictional form results in

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67

a lack of doctrinal, ritual, and historical precision found in the text production of
more established traditions; what is being proposed must by definition be vague.
Yet these tales provide indirect counter-narratives to the hegemonic, or in
Bakhtin’s terms, the monologic of the Hindu discourse of the VaiX>avas and
Sunnis, and to a lesser extent S´@ktas and Sha’as that dominated the literary production of the period. We might think of this activity as ‘test-driving’ ideas that
function in a subjunctive mode, suggestive of, but not over-determined by theology.
And I would suggest that while this case is unique to Bengal, the tendency is not,
for devotional traditions across India in the early modern period were experimenting, allowing themselves to imagine a different world that offered new and better
opportunities for their followers. It may well be that in this period the efflorescence of bhakti, as it is so often described by scholars, is a modelling form of
subjunctive religion, narratives that are exploratory and often revelatory, experimental before becoming fixed in ritual and doctrine.
The efforts of Phayajull@ linger on the fringes of the master narratives of the
mainstream religious traditions, and being somewhat generic in their religious
propositions, they tend to function as invisible religion. In their openly exploratory mode, they also represent a significant cultural memory, a product of the
Bengali imaginary.42 I would suggest that the religious fictions of Phayajull@ and
others also served as a labora