From Karine Schomer and W.H. McLeod, (eds.)
The Sants
1987: Berkeley Religious Studies
Introductory Note: In this essay Bruce Lawrence (one of the most respected contemporary scholars of South Asian Islam), takes issue with W.H. McLeod’s position that the Sikh community had little or no influence from North Indian Islam, but instead drew from other Hindu sources (the Gorakhnathis and primarily the Sants).
Lawrence’s essay points both to the similarity between traditional tales of Guru Nanak’s life (the janam-sakhis) and the Sufi hagiographic literature, as well as the structural similarity in some of the poetic images used by the Sufis and the Sants such as Kabir.
He also has some interesting remarks about the nature of sacred biography itself, especially for cases when hard historical data is lacking.
THE SANT MOVEMENT AND NORTH INDIAN SUFIS
BRUCE B. LAWRENCE
Considering the vast popularity of the Sant movement, the number of important figures which it produced, and the lives of countless devotees (both Hindu and Muslim) whom it affected, one must marvel that so little can be said with assurance about the origin, early development and geographical provenance of the Sants. Most attempts to construct a defensible historical preamble to the literary legacy of the Sant movement focus on the biographies of medieval figures who presaged the beginning of a new direction in Indian spirituality. Notwithstanding the importance of Maharashtrian and Kashmiri poets (of whom Namdev and Lalla, respectively, rank as the major lyrical exemplars) the majority of early Sants belonged to that part of present-day India known as the Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, and in its barest outline the formative period of the Sant movement seems to have been shaped by two fifteenth/sixteenth century figures, Kabir and Guru Nanak. Both have assumed legendary status in the literary and religious history of the South Asian subcontinent. Recently, new luster has been added to their names by the critical studies of two contemporary Western scholars, Charlotte Vaudeville and W.H. McLeod.
Yet neither Kabir nor Nanak can be described historically with a modicum of the satisfaction that derives from tracing their legendary attainments. In each case the legend dwarfs, even as it distends, the kernel of historical truth. Preliminarily, it might be asked: why are \ Western scholars so preoccupied with 'historical' questions in the face of a tradition which until quite recently never concerned itself with the problem of ascertaining what is factual and capable of objective verification ? That problem, as it applies to the study of religious texts and traditions, derives from the European Enlightenment and the methodology introduced into Biblical scholarship by late nineteenth/early twentieth-century giants such as Julius Wellhausen and Albert Schweitzer. The 'very assumption of an implicit opposition between 'legend' and 'fact', for instance, derives from Western investigations of canonical scripture.
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Hence McLeod, in his brilliant but cautious reconstruction, of Guru
Nanak's biographical profile, notes that legends do have significance
since they "serve to communicate, in. some measure, an impression of
the power [of great religious figures] to attract and inspire," yet he
quickly adds that in his own study, "legend must wherever possible be
'identified and set aside" since "the strict, at times ruthless, approach is
as much required in a quest for the historical Nanak as it has been re-
quired in the quest of the historical Jesus."1
Despite the tacit theological assumptions that inform McLeod's (and also Vaudeville's) investigations of non-Biblical, non-Western religious texts, one must applaud their efforts to answer the unanswerable questions about the seminal figures of the Sant movement. Vaudeville bravely titles the second chapter of her major book on the Sant of Magahar, "Kabir's Biography in History and Legend." In effect, however, she is compelled to compare legends about Kabir in order to reconstruct an internally consistent calendar of his major activities, for there is no kernel of historical fact apart from the myriad legend about Kabir. Summing up the results of her investigation, Vaudeville deduces that "the hinduization of Kabir's legend" has tended "to make him conform to the ideal of Vaisnava sanctity as depicted in sectarian writings from the seventeenth century onwards."2 Similarly, McLeod concludes his biography of Guru Nanak by lamenting "the [cycle of] assumption and conjecture" that has plagued his attempt to periodize the life of the Sikh leader.3
Underlying the historical uncertainty of both Kabir and Guru Nanak are two issues — one methodological, the other contextual — which must be treated before the relationship of either of these Sants to individual Sufis and the Sufi tradition can be evaluated. The methodological issue concerns the disparity between poetry and prose as literary media. All the primary evidence for reconstructing the life of Kabir is set forth in sakhls or dohas which, as Vaudeville explains, are short, rhymed poems of didactic quality that were set to music.4 How does one decide which verses are authentic compositions of the fifteenth-century Sant of Maga-
1. W.H. McLeod, Gurii Nanak and the Sikh Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), p. 68. The concluding remark is an oblique reference to Albert Schweitzer's The Quest of the Historical Jesus, the first English edition of which was published in 1911 (London: A. and C. Black).
1. Charlotte Vaudeville, Kabir, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), p. 47.
3.McLeod, Gurii Nanak, p. 229.
4.Vaudeville, Kabir, pp. 51-54.
har and which ire the spurious inventions of later devotees? The magnitude of the problem in. analyzing the sakhis of Kabir has led Vaudeville to assert that "there is no evidence that Kabir ever composed a single ! word or even wrote a single verse — though a large number of works have been attributed to him by the Kabir-panthis."6 All a biographer of Kabir can. do, therefore, is to try to determine which of the verses . attributed to him have the ring of authenticity. In analyzing material from the Bijak and the Adi Granth (the Guru Granth Sahib), Vaudeville applies internal criteria to decipher what appears to be Kabir's own verse. Diligently, she assembles the least legendary elements of his biography, not siphoning off history from legend but rather choosing among the autobiographical verses (none of which may actually have been spoken by Kabir those which sound most plausible to her, at the same time as she rejects the evidence of other verses in which a too literal or fanciful portrait has been projected by Kabir's followers.
Unlike the life of Kabir, the life of Guru Nanak may be gleaned from prose accounts in the Sikh janam-sakhis or hagiographic accounts composed in Punjabi and written in the Gurmukhi script. The language of the janam-sakhis, however, is both inflated and opaque, with the result that McLeod, following Vaudeville, has been compelled to adopt a set of internally consistent criteria for separating true from false passages, accepting those biographical details which can be regarded as probable, \ while discarding the improbable. Only in the case of Guru Nanak's ) alleged encounters with the Lodi monarch Daulat Khan and the Mughal Emperor Babar—leaving aside the facetious Baghdad inscription — can McLeod apply external criteria to his evaluation of the janam-sakhis.1 Yet McLeod does enjoy a relative certainty in the wealth of genealogical material which he can and does use to trace both the ancestry and the offspring of Guru Nanak. He is also aided by the proximity of the last decades of Nanak's life to the time when the earliest janam-sakhis were authored (the beginning of the seventeenth century). However, like the Kabir-panthis' eulogistic accounts of Kabir (which Vaudeville discounts in their entirety), the janam-sakhis of Nanak were all composed within the Sikh community for the benefit of those who were loyal to, and engaged in worship of, Guru Nanak. For this reason, as McLeod himself avers, they are highly ^unsatisfactory as historical sources.
5.Ibid., p. 4?.
6.McLeod, Guru Nanak, pp. 68-69.
7.Ibid., pp. 8ff.
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In sum, there is an obvious and a less obvious aspect to the methodological issue raised by Sant hagiographic sources. The inescapable, basic point is that neither the sakhis of Kabir nor the janarn-sakhis of Nanak provide apt grist for objectively-minded, fact-oriented historical biographers. Of the two bodies of material, however, the accounts of Nanak appear to be more plausible than the anecdotes about Kabir. The latter are all narrated in poetry, as noted above, and to the extent that they were good poetry, they were intentionally anagogic and ambiguous, relying more on suggestive undertones than, public declarations. The merit of the Kabir sakhis requires, even as it offsets, their concomitant inadequacies as biographical source material and theo- logical proof texts.8 It is to be expected therefore that, of the two, Kabir is the more baffling figure. Vaudeville has noted "the strangely allusive, esoteric language in which many of his [Kabir's] utterances were couched''9 while McLeod, in describing the difference between their respective notions of ultimate union (sahaja), has suggested that in Guru Nanak's works ''one can distinguish with much greater clarity the means whereby this spiritual sight is acquired and the path to God followed. There is in his thought relative clarity at a point where in the thought of Kabir we are obliged to grapple with mystery."10
Beyond the methodological problem of reconstructing biographiesout of verses (Kabir) or inflated prose texts (Nanak), there is the con-textual problem posed by Indian biographical literature. What antecedents are there in the religious traditions of the South Asian subconti- nent for compiling a quasi-historical biography, however much it may be distorted by legendizing propensities within a particular religious community? Other than the Buddha (whose biography is dependent on Chinese as well as Indian records, Ashoka (who left his own edicts on stone tablets, and certain royal personages from the first millenium a.d., e.g., Harshavardhana, (who are known from court chronicles they commissioned about themselves), are there extant historical biographies that describe major Hindu or Buddhist religious figures? Shankara's life is shrouded in mythical obscurity, as is Ramamija's and Madhava's. Can one locate any Indian religious leader prior to Kabir
8.Concerning the theological 'inconsistencies' which both Kabir and Nanak
exhibit (though in a different degree, according to McLeod, p. 149), consult the
brilliant discussion of love and death in Vaudeville, Kabir, pp. 343-48 and the com-prehensive doctrinal survey in McLeod, Guru Naiiak, pp. 14$ff.
9.Vaudeville, Kabir, p. 23.
10. McLeod, Guru Nanak, p. 194.
and Guru Nanak whose biography can be more securely traced than either of theirs?
The thrust of these rhetorical questions is to underscore the fact that hagiography rather than religious biography based on a modicum of factual content was characteristic of medieval Indian society — with one exception. We do have information of verifiable correctness about the lives of many of the earliest Sufi saints in northern India. Some of the data has been gathered from epigraphic and inscriptional records.11 Most of it is derived from literary documents produced 'not only within the community loyal to a particular saint by his followers but also outside that community by those attracted to him and/or his tomb.
As in the cases of Kabir and Guru Nanak, there is also legendary material, some of it originating from a date almost contemporaneous with the Sufi saint in question.12 The legendary material about Indo-Muslim Sufis does not, however, swallow up or distort beyond recognition the non-legendary details of their lives, and that itself is astonishing. Since there was no fixed standard for historical writing in the medieval Islamic world, one must ask why the biographies of Sufi saints came to be compiled with what can only be termed, in the Indian context, a scrupulous concern for factual accuracy. Part of the motivation lies with the trans-Indian, inter-continental loyalties of Muslims: it was important, at least for the elite members of the pre-Mughal, Mughal and provincial Islamic ruling dynasties, to be able to trace their ancestry through to a non-Indian, preferably Arab, lineage. Genealogical charts required accuracy with respect to names, dates and places, and the same care was taken in compiling spiritual biographies.
Another motivation for accurate biographical writing among Muslims relates to the discipline of hadith collection. The problem which Vaudeville and McLeod faced in determining the legitimate "sayings' of Kabir and Guru Nanak, respectively, confronted members of the Muslim community in the early centuries after Muhammad's death. The
11.The best source for epigraphic and inscriptional data on the entire Indo-
Musliin period is Zia ud-din Desai, ed., Epigraphia Indica: Arabic and Persian
Supplement, published annually by the Archaeological Survey of India.
12.For spurious material presented in the form of malfuzat, see Mohammad
Habib "Chisbti Mystics^_Records of the Sultanate Period," in Khaliq A. Nizami,
ed., Politics and Society during the Early Medieval Period, vol. 1 (New Delhi : People's
Publishing House, 1974), pp. 401-33; and Bruce Lawrence, "Afzal al-fawaid — A
Reassessment," in Zoe Ansari, ed., The Life, Times and Works of Amir Khusrau
Dehlan (New Delhi: National Amir Khusrau Society, 1975), pp. 119-31.
LUI
364LAWRNCE
science of hadith criticism evolved precisely to distinguish true from questionable statements attributed to, or reported about, the Prophet Muhammad. By compiling a generation to generation list of bona fide
transmitters of a particular hadith or tradition, Muslim scholars-strove to assemble a composite profile of the sunnah or custom of Muhammad that could be defended as accurate historical data and cited as valid legal evidence.
It is no accident that the most widely accepted biography of Indo-Muslim Sufis was authored by a scholar whose primary renown was in the field of hadithcollection and criticism. In the late sixteenth century, out of a concern for accuracy abetted by genuine affection for Sufis, 'Abd al-Haqq Muhaddith Dehlawi compiled the Akhbar al-akh-yar (asrar al-abrar), giving full biographical details of the major Sufi shaikhs of medieval Hindustan but also including legendary material which he marked as dubious by adding Allah a 'lam "God is the most wise, i.e., God knows best" at the end of each questionable narrative. The Akhbar_al-akhyar still contains errors and even occasional miracles that are reported without qualifying rejoinders, but on the whole the book is a trustworthy assessment of the earliest Indo-Musliin Sufi saints, their families, their followers and their literary as well as spiritual testaments.13
Since there is no counterpart to Akhbar al-khyar in the Sant movement, it is difficult to relate particular Sants to the Sufi tradition or particular Sufi shaikhs to their Sant contemporaries. The equilibrium of historical truth claims is too heavily tilted toward the medieval Sufis. Yet there have been numerous attempts to link Kabir with the Muslim mystical tradition as well as its organizational representatives. One of the most ingenious was made by a late nineteenth-century Punjabi hagiographer and litterateur, Ghulaui Sarvar Lahori. His extensive tadhkira entitled Khazinat al-asfiya has been frequently cited in con- nection with Kabir. Ironically, though the Khazinat al-asfiya was the last of the comprehensive Sufi tadhkiras produced in the South Asian subcontinent, it was the first to identify Kabir as a Sufi, however questionable his orthodoxy. Vaudeville has pointed out that Lahori's source
13. Mohammad Mujeeb, Tlie Indian^Muslims (Toronto and London: McGill I University Press, 1967), for instance, relies mainly on Akhbar al-akhkhyar for tbe biographical data he provides of major medieval Judo-Muslim Sufis. A concise description of Akhbar al-akjtyar and Abd-al-Hacjq's numerous other writings is to be found in Khaliq A. Nizami, Hayat-i SFtapkFi 'Abd al-Haqy MuJiaJciitFi DeFiFavi (Delhi: Nadwat al-Musannifin, 1964), pp. 158-219.
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of information may not have been the antecedent Muslim tradition but rather a. modern, and Western appraisal of the Sikhs, viz., Malcolm's Sketch cf the Sikhs. Her conjecture is supported by the fact that Lahori places Shaykh Kabir Julaha, as he is titled in the Khazinat al-asfiya, within the Chishti family division, linking him to Shaykh Taqi Manikpuri and through Taqi to Shaykh Salimbin Bahaud-din Chishti, who is none other than the famed Salim Chishti of Fatehpur Sikri, a contemporary of the Mughal Emperor Akbar (reigned 1556-1605. On chronological grounds alone the alleged affiliations of Kabir with the Chishtis must be discredited. It seems likely that Lahori was prompted to add Kabir's name to the band of Taqi's disciples because of the latter's occupation: like Kabir, he was allegedly a ha'ik or weaver. In Lahori's defense one ought to note that he does describe Kabir's teaching with moderate accuracy, despite his transparent ploy to provide still another hagiographical dimension to the weaver-bard of Magahar.