Abstract
C
Namdev is a key historical figure in the development of popular, devotional Hindu religion. He is important as an early religious poet in both Marathi and Hindi and as a religious and social thinker who served as an intellectual bridge between sagun and nirgun bhakti, and between Maharashtra and more northern regions. Although good editions exist of both Namdev’s Marathi and Hindi compositions, more and better scholarly studies of his legacy are sorely needed. Novetzke’s book—building on the work of scholars such as A. Feldhaus, A. Kamat, C. Kiehnle, Vinaymohan Sharma, S. Tulpule and E. Zelliot—represents a major advance in this direction.
Novetzke is principally concerned with the role of Namdev’s songs and his legendary biography as essential resources in the development within Maharashtra of a non-Brahmanic religious movement centred on the oral performances known as kirtan. Although he has clearly mastered the texts of Namdev’s songs, his hagiographies and other relevant historical sources, both published and unpublished, Novetzke’s book is more focused on a set of largely theoretical questions about Namdev traditions. It discusses at length questions about the mutual relations and connections of public memory, history, bhakti, oral tradition, written tradition and performance. For Novetzke, Namdev tradition is, above all, one of bhakti preserved and transmitted in memory through oral performance, a tradition that allows only a subordinate role to written texts and history. To the extent that this is an empirical question, there is little doubt that Novetzke’s analysis is correct. Nonetheless, his own decision as a scholar to pass rather lightly over questions such as Namdev’s historical dates and the nitty-gritty of textual analysis is, for me, sometimes disconcerting. I certainly do agree, however, with his emphasis on the historical value of songs composed by later authors who borrowed Namdev’s name and intellectual agenda, an issue that also arises in the cases of Kabir, Surdas, Raidas and Mira.
The distinction that Novetzke draws between public memory and history tends to make them into antagonists rather than different-but-related ways of remembrance, of reexamining the past and its relation to the present. He cites ideas of Pierre Nora, R.G. Collingword and others, to argue that memory enhances Namdev tradition in ways in which history falls short (p. 73):
Memory, by contrast [to history], gives time back; it restores the connection severed by the lapse of time and returns the observer to the immediacy of an event. Memory is the site of continuity with the historical subject, whereas history is the source of disassociation from the past through its scientific, factual mastery.
For me, this judgement is somewhat unfair to history and suggests an excessively positivist, almost Rankean, conception of what it is that historians actually do. Nonetheless, Novetzke’s use of the concept of public memory as a key to understanding the legends about Namdev—even those codified in written texts such as those of Nabhadas, Anantdas, Mahipati, Dattatreya—is insightful and convincing. The discussion of the controversial legend about Namdev having once been a robber, is particularly interesting. Here Novetzke discusses the similarity to stories about Valmiki and about the Sikh hero Bhola. He could also have cited the legend of the Rajasthani religious poet Haridas Niranjani.
Novetzke’s principal emphasis is on the role of oral performance in Namdev tradition. This includes a very good discussion of the structure of kirtan performances in their less formal (Varkari) and more formal variations (Naradiya) and also an analysis of the performative character of the notebooks (bada) containing Namdev songs used by kirtankar singers, as opposed to more formal manuscript collections (pothi). Nonetheless, songs are, of course, always an essentially oral, performative genre, even in our thoroughly modernised societies. Novetzke sees the ideological flexibility of the memory-based oral performance tradition stretching all the way back to Namdev himself as a key to the continuing relevance of Namdev and his message to his present-day followers. He associates this tradition not only to kirtan, but also to both traditional hagiographies and several of the modern films made about Namdev’s life. Novetzke also shows how these legends and films have embodied and adapted to their own times, a strong element of the political, religious and social dissent that subaltern castes have aimed against traditional representatives of authority—kings, sultans and Brahmins—and against restrictions like those concerning temple entry.
Despite the obvious merits of Novetzke’s study, I do have a few specific caveats. Since the book was written, Purushottam Agrawal has published work that effectively demolishes the argument that Ramananda belonged to the fourteenth (as opposed to the fifteenth) century. This makes it all but certain that Kabir flourished roughly in the period 1450–1520 and not earlier. Agrawal has also proposed that Ramananda and his disciples were representatives of an early-modern, indigenous ‘modernity’, an idea that Novetzke possibly could have adapted to Namdev. For me, Novetzke’s tendency to minimise the importance of the difference between nirgun and sagun bhakti seems to gloss over the value of this distinction as a somewhat inconsistent marker of a more important difference between Hindu religious currents that either support or (to varying degrees) reject caste and social hierarchy. One final small point: Novetzke translates a verse of one of Namdev’s songs as ‘The needle of memory (surati), the thread of love (prem)/Nama’s mind is woven with the Lord’s’. The subsequent discussion notes how the rendering here of surati as ‘memory’ fits very well with the argument for the centrality of oral performance and memory in Namdev tradition. Nonetheless, in Sant poetry the word surati usually does not mean ‘memory’ but rather ‘joyful mystical experience’, and in these cases (including I think here) its most likely Sanskrit derivation is from su-rati (‘higher sensual pleasure’) and not from shruti (from the verb for ‘to listen’) as Novetzke suggests (pp. 158–59).
Despite these caveats and my occasional doubts about his theoretical arguments, Novetzke’s book significantly advances the study of Namdev tradition and its importance as an essential source of present-day, popular Hindu and Sikh religions, especially of the major current tied to anti-hierarchical, social and political dissent. I highly recommend this book.