Leaving Kashi: Sanskrit knowledge and cultures of consumption in eighteenth-century South India

Over the last two decades, studies of Sanskrit scholarly life in early modern India have focused on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. ¹ Of particular interest is the conglomerate of Maharashtrian Brahmins who moved to Banaras and began to dominate its intellectual circles. ² Thriving under Mughal patronage, Brahmin scholars in Banaras developed innovations in a variety of Sanskrit systems of knowledge, from philosophy and hermeneutics to poetics and language analysis. ³ Not only did they contribute to these disciplines, they trained generations of students, within and outside the family structure, both to continue their work and chart out their own paths, to ‘disagree without disrespect’. ⁴ But what happened to these lineages in the following centuries? Why do accounts of new intellectuals, and of the role Banaras played in producing them, end here? At a time of unprecedented (and necessary) mobility for professionals of all stripes in the subcontinent, what new political and cultural contexts might have shaped the alternative careers of the post-Banaras scholarly generation? In this essay, I trace the career of Raghunātha Gaṇeśa Navahasta, as he moved from Banaras to southern Maharashtra, resurfacing as a mainstay of the Thanjavur Maratha court. I pay particular attention to Raghunātha’s Bhojanakutūhala, or Curiosities on Consumption, and what it suggested about his aspirations. ⁵ Finally, I make the case that, if Banaras was a centre of gravity, full of scholarly heavyweights operating in relative intellectual freedom, Thanjavur was a centre of levity, the site of a multilingual courtly culture that combined the southern royal culture of sensual pleasure with the Maharashtrian emphasis on Brahmanical social norms. ⁶ Thanjavur under the Marathas opened up new opportunities for Sanskrit scholars, while closing off others at the same time.

To understand Raghunātha’s movement, we also need to understand the circulation of his texts. Why did Raghunātha write the Bhojanakutūhala at all, and for whom? Was it written all at once, or compiled over time for different audiences? Most of all, how do we understand it as the product of a man on the move, from the academic centre of Banaras, to a charismatic preacher’s seminary in Maharashtra, to the multilingual Thanjavur court? What did it mean that Raghunātha studied with the Devas, one of the most prominent scholarly families in Banaras, yet made his career writing in minor, less intellectually challenging genres, but genres that required different kinds of social and political sensibility? Why did he continue to flaunt his association with the Devas across his writings? And who else besides Raghunātha made this journey, to form a new class of Maharashtrian pandits in the deep south? I conclude by comparing Raghunātha Navahasta with his close contemporary, and namesake, Raghunātha Paṇḍita. Their curious convergences demonstrate how regional devotional networks allied with political elites to carry cosmopolitan knowledge throughout the subcontinent.

The Bhojanakutūhala is most well known in the history of Indian medical literature, and among cultural historians of early modern India like the inimitable P. K. Gode. ⁷ Gode explained how this Sanskrit cookbook, written in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, provided the particular Marathi names for various dishes and delicacies, and how it spread throughout the subcontinent, as far as Kashmir, Bengal and Banaras. Its presence in Banaras made good sense, of course, given the concentration of Maharashtrian Brahmins in that city. The book even found its way into the library of the Banarasi sannyāsī Kavīndrācārya Sarasvatī, famous for negotiating tax policy with the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan. Its descriptions of foods matched accounts of everyday Brahmin life in the city written by Maharashtrians, such as Ḍhuṇḍirāja Gīrvāṇavāṅmañjarī. As an intellectual historian trained in the more ‘sophisticated’ world of Sanskrit śāstra, however, I found little inspiration in advice about the healing benefits of one-year-old ghee. Surely, I believed, this was unbecoming of Raghunātha: why would he squander an elite education in Banaras to plod away at a cookbook? My frustration, however, was revealing. What did it mean to consider one system of knowledge properly ‘intellectual’, and another ‘minor’? Even if there were such implicit hierarchies in the Sanskrit world, an equivalent scholarly focus on the ‘high’ traditions prevented me from understanding what Raghunātha was doing in writing otherwise.

For to write about food (bhojana) in early modern South India was to enter a political world in which consumption and enjoyment (bhoga) was the order of the day. According to the authors of Symbols of Substance, the pre-eminent study of cultural politics in Nāyaka-period South India, ‘the new model embodies a telos with existential features, that is “enjoyment” (bhoga)—not the investment of the suddenly abundant cash resources in shoring up the refashioned political centre…but their exhaustion in various playful and sensuous modes’. ⁸ Food, then, was but one stop on a long journey of sense-pleasures, finally and inevitably culminating in sex. The relationship between food and sex was expressed widely in Sanskrit literature, and with extreme satirical crudity, especially by Raghunātha’s contemporaries. Consider two examples from opposite sides of the subcontinent in the seventeenth century. First is Harijīvana Miśra’s Palāṇḍumaṇḍana Prahasana, a farce perhaps best translated as Veggie Tales, written at Ram Singh’s court in Jaipur. The Palāṇḍumaṇḍana is about groups of greedy and lustful Brahmins who arrive to participate in a garbhādhāna, or pregnancy ceremony. The main characters are all named after foods: there is Mr Eggplant, his first wife Mrs Puran Poli, his second wife Tamarind and so on. The climactic confrontation between Mr Eggplant’s first and second wife takes place when the wafting smell of spices makes Mr Eggplant and Tamarind aroused. They are ready to get the ‘impregnation ceremony’ over with then and there. Tamarind starts suggestively eating a bulbous aphrodisiac, and Mr Eggplant drinks bhāṅg and smokes tobacco, under the pretext of receiving ashes from the sacred fire. The farce ends in a big brawl between the regional Brahmins, who insult each other in olfactory terms: the Bengalis smell of fish, and the Tamilians of garlic and onion. The second example comes from the court of Vijayarāghava Nāyaka in Thanjavur, just a few decades before the beginning of Maratha rule. The Annadānamahānāṭakamu, a multilingual Telugu drama that Narayana Rao calls ‘Love in the Soup-Kitchen’, similarly features bumbling Brahmins intoxicated by cooking and courtesans, and by the possibility of a share in all the pleasures of royal beneficence. As the authors of Symbols of Substance comment:

Most obvious … is the ‘Bakhtinian’ side of this play—the obsession with food and sex (rather than love), the emphasis being, clearly, on the pursuit of oral appetites; or, more generally, with the body’s assorted apertures.… [T]he Annadāna is, in a sense, deliberately keyed to the dramas of courtly life and love in a way that allows it to serve as reflexive commentary upon them. It even follows the same structure that we find in the abhyudaya-kāvyas, with their twin foci of conspicuous feasting and love-making; these are the two major subjects of our play as well. ⁹

The more I read the Bhojanakutūhala, the more I realised that these two were also the major subjects of that book. The first section, the only one published thus far, contains chapters upon chapters about pulses, fruits, vegetables, oils, grains, pickles, spices, drinks and all of their respective Ayurvedic properties. The second distinguishes between licit and prohibited foods. The third section, however, still in manuscript form, deals with different subjects entirely: luxurious living, women and sex. As I will discuss further on, it is largely a thin-lipped Brahmin ritualist’s view of the subject. But its very existence in this book demonstrates a fusion of many different sciences, from erotology and medicine to moral law and astrology, some of which were not always traditionally found in the same place. It also confirms the suggestion that the word bhojana, in the book’s title, had a wider scope than eating, extending to all forms of consumption, or consumer culture. ¹⁰

Raghunātha’s contemporary satirists reckoned that the age-old trope, brāhmaṇo bhojanapriyaḥ, or ‘Brahmins love to eat’, had sexual implications, precisely because of their orthodox fastidiousness about bodily norms. As Andrea Gutierrez points out in a fascinating essay on modes of betel consumption in early India, the tantric discourse of bhoga, one that mediated religious liberation through sensual experience, may have influenced Brahmanical legal and medical writing on material substances. ‘Betel chewing’, argues Gutierrez,

became important as a socioreligious identity marker via three modes of consumption involving bhoga—the enjoyment or experiencing of some worldly element. The modes of consumption I outline for betel bhoga are; 1) the royal mode, 2) the romantic mode, and 3) the householder mode’. ¹¹

Brahmins are proscribed betel in many circumstances, but in the last of these modes, ‘those permitted to participate in the experience of eating betel also participate in Brahmanical religious rites’, the reasoning being that ‘the second āśrama (life stage) of the householder is the one that most embodies bhoga and allows full participation in a material existence’. ¹² In the Palāṇḍumaṇḍana, Mr Eggplant’s consumption of pleasurable substances in the very midst of an act of religious consecration highlights the tensions that bhoga presented in Brahminical life, and turns the juxtaposition into a joke. ¹³

In what remains, I will discuss Raghunātha’s life and works. I locate the composition of the Bhojanakutūhala in the context of his early education and his attempts to broaden his scholarly range. I also critically investigate the extent of his relationship with the charismatic Marathi preacher Rāmdās. Next, I offer some details from the unpublished third section of the Bhojanakutūhala. ¹⁴ I explain why Raghunātha might have inserted a legalistic section on women’s duties (strīdharma) in a medicalised discussion of the female body and sexual performance. Finally, I briefly discuss the Maharashtrian scholar Raghunātha Paṇḍita, who possessed an almost identical intellectual and geographical trajectory as that of Raghunātha Navahasta. I suggest that their example shows us that Banaras at the turn of the eighteenth century was no longer an academic utopia of uninterrupted research and teaching. Instead, our Raghunāthas had to re-invent their skill set, and to satisfy the desires of a new ruling class far away from home.

We know about Raghunātha Gaṇeśa Navahasta, or Navathe, from his adult life onward. He was a student of Anantadeva (fl. 1650 ce), who was a member of the Deva family of Maharashtrian Brahmins in Banaras. Anantadeva’s father and grandfather were scholars of Vedic and Vedāntic hermeneutics. They also wrote polemical treatises on the subject of bhakti, urging Brahmins in the city to participate in public acts of devotional piety, such as singing the name of God. Anantadeva traced his family heritage to Eknāth, whom some have equated with none other than the Marathi poet-saint. I have written elsewhere about how the Devas may have been trying to refract Eknāth’s way of being Brahmin in a different cultural and social world. ¹⁵ For unlike Eknāth, they were staunch supporters of dharmaśāstra, or the social and moral codes of orthodox Brahmanical life. Anantadeva himself was a prominent participant in the city’s dharmasabhās, assemblies of pandits who judged matters of religious and social import, usually having consequences for regional caste communities in the Deccan. Anantadeva was a co-signatory of many such official judgments, or nirṇayapatras, public documents that may have sought to imitate the authority and form of the Islamic fatwa. The Devas formed part of the Maharashtrian stronghold in Banaras, a community of southerners at once respected for their scholarly accomplishments and yet suspected of partisan motivations. Although I will emphasise the difference in their careers, the Devas’ scholarly way of being prefigured Raghunātha’s, in a way. They were very attentive to social and theological developments around them, an attention reflected in the incremental changes they inaugurated in the Sanskrit scholastic disciplines within which they worked. They were, moreover, intimately connected with regional bhakti networks from Mathura to Maharashtra. It is more than likely that it was through such networks, and perhaps through Raghunātha himself, that their writings reached the south of India.

Anantadeva had a fairly plum position in Banaras. His patron, Baz Bahadur Chandra, was a Rajput ally of Shah Jahan, and lived all the way out in Almora, Uttarakhand. It is not at all clear what relationship, if any, the actual content of Anantadeva’s work had to do with his patron’s desires. Anantadeva’s magnum opus was the Smṛtikaustubha, a vast compendium of dharmaśāstra topics. He dedicated the work to Baz Bahadur, but its section on kingship, ostensibly the most relevant to his absentee patron, was anything but innovative or practical. ¹⁶ Raghunātha, however, did not appear to have as much luck. Banaras was getting crowded, and perhaps, for once, being Maharashtrian did not help his cause. Whatever the case, Raghunātha was compelled to move back to Maharashtra, where he appears to have become friendly with the itinerant Marathi preacher Samartha Rāmdās. There, he spent a significant part of his career as a temple priest in Rāmdās’ seminary, or maṭha, at Chāphaḷ, in the Sātārā district. Halfway between Pune and Kolhapur, the Chāphaḷ Maṭh was the centre of Rāmdās’ activities. Evidence for Raghunātha’s tenure at the Maṭh, and of his intimate relationship with Rāmdās, came from a multivolume series published by Shankar Shrikrishna Dev in the early twentieth century. One of these volumes, Śrī Sampradāyācī Patreṃ, purportedly collected the letters, deeds, grants and other documents of the Rāmdāsī community. The front cover featured the facsimile of a letter purportedly written in Rāmdās’ own hand to Raghunātha, extolling him for his great learning (tumhī sarvajña āhā), and assuring him that his knowledge was equivalent to Rāmdās’ own (tumce je kāhī āhe te sakala mājhecī āhe). In a previous article, I took this praise for granted, following such scholars as P. K. Gode and K. V. Sarma. ¹⁷ But even a cursory analysis of the full text of the letter, given its anachronistic language and bizarrely apologetic content, almost definitively rules out the possibility that it was written by Rāmdās. ¹⁸ Whether it was an invention by Dev himself is a speculation best left for scholars of modern Marathi historiography. ¹⁹

The continued presence of the Navathe family in the Chāphaḷ region, however, suggests that Raghunātha did live there. ²⁰ And at least one of his works, a ritual manual called the Janārdanamahodaya, may have been written for a specifically Rāmdāsī audience. ²¹ But the bulk of his Sanskrit writing dealt with specific topics in the study of dharmaśāstra, including a book on expiatory rites (Prāyaścittakutūhala) and a minor Vedic oblation (Āgrayaṇaprayoga). These did not find their way into mainstream circulation. What became Raghunātha’s truly outstanding work was his first and most extensive one, a cookbook that was so much more. At first, it seems a slightly awkward book for a relatively small-town temple priest to have written, especially one whose primary constituency was a pious devotional community. Looking at the work from the perspective of a man in need of a change of scene, however, brings a different audience into the picture. The Bhojanakutūhala’s elaborate interest in food, substances, diet, seasons, and landscapes, echoes and cites a large body of Indian medical literature, or Ayurveda. The order of chapters raises more practical issues. The first four chapters deal entirely with rice, wheat and grains, not only by exhaustively classifying their types but by going into detail about the quality of food produced in ploughed fields versus wild, uncultivated soil. These chapters may have had a bit more of an imperial flavour, reminiscent of early eighteenth-century Maratha revenue records which list lands, all the different grain and vegetable crops grown for the harvests, their prices and so on. For the Marathas, this information was vital as it formed the basis of their revenue flows, whether in new territories like Malwa, or in the older heartlands. If Raghunātha had any responsibility for maintaining the Chāphaḷ Maṭh, which would have been supported by inam revenues, he may also have had some more direct exposure to this more ‘inventory of crops’ approach to the description of foods. In other words, perhaps his descriptions of different edibles were not just a rendering of Ayurvedic categories, but also a reflection of worldly engagements of this kind, which were key to the Maratha state. And perhaps he was trying to extend his services to the subcontractors of that burgeoning state. ²²

We know that the culinary chapters of the Bhojanakutūhala were completed by 1682 ce, when a manuscript of the first section was copied out for Shamji Nayak Punde, a Maratha officer in Shivaji’s employ. ²³ We get some hints here of the intended audience for the book. Raghunātha concludes the first section by saying that he wrote the Bhojanakutūhala ‘in order to please the ruling classes (īśvarāṇāṃ toṣāya)’ and to benefit even those who have ‘never studied with gurus (saṃsevitā na guravas), observed the plants of various regions (taravaś ca…yair nekṣitā janapadeṣu), or mastered a medical treatise on their own (bhaiṣajyatantram api naiva kṛtaṃ svatantraṃ)’. ²⁴ The Bhojanakutūhala was, in a way, Raghunātha’s meal ticket. If the privileged Brahmins of Banaras could get away with amply funded research on subjects that had no immediate worldly impact, people like Raghunātha had to search for other sources and other disciplines that could be rewarded. Compared to the lofty theoretical ambitions of scriptural hermeneutics, the life sciences and astrology were some of the most practical sciences around—so much so that their practitioners were perennially parodied as hacks. ²⁵

Even though he was writing far away from the scholarly elite of Banaras, Raghunātha still found some purchase in invoking his academic credentials. He recalled his relationship with his teacher repeatedly and fondly in his colophons, as one ‘blessed by Anantadeva’ and ‘belonging to Anantadeva’. ²⁶ Not only did he locate himself within Anantadeva’s gracious shade, he also tried to locate his work in the illustrious legacy of Maharashtrian scholarship on dharmaśāstra. As he remarks in concluding verses to the Bhojanakutūhala, at the end of its final section, ‘May the weight/authority of my book be akin to a branch of the Pārijāta, a ray of the Kaustubha, and some peaks of the Golden Mountain’. ²⁷ Each of these italicised terms refers simultaneously to a celebrated mythical object and to the title of a work on dharmaśāstra: the Pārijāta refers both to a wish-fulfilling tree and to the Prayogapārijāta by Nṛsiṃha (ca. fifteenth century), the Kaustubha refers both to a special jewel and to the Smṛtikaustubha by Anantadeva, and the Golden Mountain refers both to the fabled mountain Meru and to Hemādri (thirteenth century), the great-grandsire of Maharashtrian dharmaśāstra. While advertising his own work as a lesser version of the great classics in the field, Raghunātha still wanted to be recognised as a contributor to that legacy and wanted his name to last just as long.

By 1683, Raghunātha had had enough of Chāphaḷ. The deaths of both Shivaji and Rāmdās within the previous two years, the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb’s incursions into the Deccan, and the chaotic rule of Shivaji’s son Sambhaji, all contributed to social and political upheavals in the region. Having left his inam to his son-in-law, Raghunātha took off for a pilgrimage to Banaras, not long after which he landed in the court of Ekojī and Dīpāmbā of the newly crowned Thanjavur Marathas. At the behest of Queen Dīpāmbā, Raghunātha switched from writing in Sanskrit to Marathi. The lines from his unpublished Narakavarṇana, or Vignettes of Hell, are worth repeating:

I loosened the traditional tie of Sanskrit, and took up the rope of Prakrit (Marathi). For the broader public, I composed the Lifting of Govardhan. Then, following Dīpāmbikā’s request, I wrote a Marathi version of women’s duties, as well as an analysis of the contours of hell as explicated in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa. ²⁸

As Julia Leslie points out in The Perfect Wife, it is quite likely that Dīpāmbā was also the special patron of Raghunātha’s exact contemporary Tryambaka Yajvan, who wrote a famous work on women’s duties, or strīdharma, in Sanskrit. ²⁹ The behaviour and qualities of women was a clear concern for the imported Marathi elite of Thanjavur. Leslie explains that among the ideal behaviours allotted to women was to listen to tales from the epics and purāṇas from learned pandits. No doubt Raghunātha’s Marathi works fit this bill, and it is not unreasonable, Leslie argues, to believe that Tryambaka’s Sanskrit Strīdharmapaddhati was read aloud as well, with free-flowing glosses in Marathi from the court pandit. ³⁰

The centrality of women to and within the Thanjavur Maratha court provides some much-needed context for the third section of Raghunātha’s Bhojanakutūhala. I have already mentioned that its primary subject is women and sex: this includes women’s duties, the psycho-physiological properties of the most eligible life-partners, methods for enhancing sexual performance, the process of pregnancy and the qualities of a good son. Some of these topics are par for the course in Ayurveda, one of the genres of the Bhojanakutūhala. But Raghunātha interweaves other discourses as well, perhaps in order to support his encyclopaedic credentials. By this time, the Bhojanakutūhala was making its rounds through Maharashtrian scholarly, administrative and devotional networks. But the manuscript history of the text leaves it open whether or not the entirety of the work was completed before Raghunātha arrived in Thanjavur. Many libraries only contain the first section on food. The second is about ritually unclean articles of food and the feeding of guests. The third gets into much more luxurious territory, a departure that is signalled at the very beginning. Raghunātha’s opening verse is opaque. He was either not a very good poet, or the awkward constructions are the result of faulty manuscript transmission. It speaks of a woman decked out in all sorts of ornaments (niḥśeṣabhūṣā) conducive to making love (suratāvatārā). Such a woman contributes to the good fortune of her beloved (dayitasya bhūtyai). But even when sex with her comes to an end, there is still ‘mokṣa’, a double entendre that means either ‘sexual release’ or the ‘removal’ of said ornaments. ³¹

Previous scholars like Gerrit Meulenbeld, working only off of manuscript catalogues, described the content of the third section in very general terms, having to do with ‘furniture and similar accessories, the physical and spiritual effects produced by different items of that description, and other miscellaneous subjects’. ³² Raghunātha titled the section vibhāvarīvilāsa, which might be translated as ‘How to Light Up the Night’. What Meulenbeld makes sound like a furniture catalogue is in fact a set up for a romantic soiree. From lampshades and bedspreads to clothes and perfumes, the first few chapters of detail the paraphernalia available to a wealthy householder. Like the section on food, it also provides Marathi glosses for Sanskrit terminology. Cotton wraps (Skt. kārpāsa) become Marathi colī or jhagā, girdles or bracelets (Skt. paṭṭikā) become the Marathi lapeṭā and turbans (Skt. uṣṇīṣa) are translated into Marathi muṇḍāsē. ³³ But the tone quickly shifts after about 12 folios to a subject that occupies a full third of the vibhāvarīvilāsa: women’s duties (strīdharma) and their characteristics (lakṣaṇa).

Although I am not a historian of Indian medicine, I understand that these two subjects are not traditionally part of the discourses of Ayurveda or erotology (kāmaśāstra), which are prone to overlap on the subject of sexuality. ³⁴ The Bhojanakutūhala’s discussion of the psycho-physiological characteristics of women, or strīlakṣaṇa, is largely derived from an astrological text called the Sāmudratilaka, written in twelfth-century Gujarat. It was obviously intended for royal use; the text is scattered with advice for kings on what they should be looking for in ideal partners. ³⁵ Strīdharma, for its part, properly belonged to the realm of dharmaśāstra. Raghunātha wanted to be known as a scholar of that field in particular, and structured his book to reflect that genre. But including a lengthy section on everything from widows, the pregnant, women whose husbands are away on business, and the importance of not hating one’s spouse, in the middle of a list of material pleasures, seemed a bit out of place. The obvious answer recalls Leslie’s argument that strīdharma literature among the Thanjavur Marathas was commissioned by elite women of the court themselves. As such, women were not so much the objects of discussion as the agents of literary production. Pandits like Raghunātha were hired not only to write about women but also for women. At the same time, unlike the Strīdharmapaddhati, which is devoted to an ideal of ascetic self-denial, the Bhojanakutuhala’s lengthy section on strīdharma is contained within an overall context of physical pleasure. The subsequent chapters on enhancing sexual performance, then, could well have aimed at an audience of male and female courtiers. These ‘miscellaneous subjects’, in Meulenbeld’s understated term, ranged from erectile dysfunction and breast augmentation to sexual stamina and hair-dyeing, all of which could be achieved with the application of the right ointments and aphrodisiacs. It is also easy to see the appeal of the practical knowledge of the remaining chapters, which mostly concern pregnancy, childcare and the signs of a boy destined for success. If Raghunātha had in fact completed this section before he arrived at the Thanjavur court, he had a clear idea of the people who would respond favourably to his expertise.

Writing on medicine in general, whether technical or narrative, was prized by the Thanjavur Marathas. After all, they continued the Nāyaka emphasis on bodily pleasure as a mainstay of cultural politics. This is most evident in the Jīvānandanam, or The Joy of Life, a play written by Ānandarāya Makhin, a close contemporary of Raghunātha at the Thanjavur court. The play allegorises the assault of King Disease on the body of King Life, a drama that unfolds at both the social and somatic level. As Anthony Cerulli notes, ‘Anandaraya was interested in demonstrating the complementarity of traditional Indian knowledge concerning medical theories about somatic care, religious practice, and civic responsibility in the everyday lives of citizens living in Thanjavur and the Maratha kingdom’. ³⁶ According to Cerulli, that the text was composed for live performance at the Bṛhadīśvara Temple festival confirms that it was intended for mass consumption and entertainment, though the temple, like its counterparts in the North, was primarily a site for Brahmin assemblies. ³⁷ In narrative form, The Joy of Life reiterated the normative claims of classical Sanskrit medical writing: physical health is a prerequisite of carrying out one’s dharma, and maintaining the proper equilibrium between worldly activity (pravṛtti) and withdrawal (nivṛtti) is necessary for both personal and social well-being. If Thanjavur was, as I’ve suggested, a centre of levity, physical comfort was still oriented towards the cohesion of self and state. Having fun was serious business.

Were the chapters on sex in the Bhojanakutūhala designed to titillate? The text does not lend itself to such an interpretation, even if the lines between Ayurveda and kāmaśāstra were often blurred. This was a ritual specialist’s view of the matter and not a poet’s—not if his opening verse was anything to go by. Raghunātha claimed to have written a book titled Curiosity on Literature (Sāhityakutūhala), which celebrated the Maratha royal family, and featured a hymn to the Mother Goddess, as well as hundreds of formally creative and allegorical poems. However, no manuscripts of this book are extant. Moreover, its contents sound suspiciously like those of the Śāhendravilāsa, a panegyric to Queen Dīpāmbā’s son Śāhajī, written by Raghunātha’s Telugu Brahmin contemporary Śrīdhara Veṅkaṭeśa Ayyāvāl. In 1693, Śāhajī granted a set of villages in Tiruviśanallūr, near Kumbakonam, to several dozen Brahmin families. A probable beneficiary of this grant, Śrīdhara Ayyāvāl was a prolific writer of prayers, poems and devotional songs. He is remembered today among Brahmin performers of the musical tradition known as the bhajana sampradāya. ³⁸ Even if he might have felt upstaged by the Ayyāvāl—one possible explanation for his gratuitous mention of having written a work on poetics—Raghunātha was not disassociated from the world of popular bhakti. As Davesh Soneji points out, contrary to modern narratives about the history of Carnatic music, the bhajana sampradāya was not the exclusive prerogative of Smārta Brahmins like Ayyāvāl, but it appropriated local traditions of devotional singing, in Marathi and other languages, belonging to Rāmdāsī communities in the South. Although Raghunātha was probably not so intimate with Rāmdās as previously believed, he was still affiliated with the preacher’s community. He was also the probable conduit by which the writings of the Deva family arrived in the south, writings that influenced the formation of the bhajana sampradāya. ³⁹ Anantadeva’s grandfather wrote a Sanskrit commentary on the Bhagavannāmakaumudī, or Moonlight of God’s Name, which was read and cited by another progenitor of the sampradāya, Bhagavannāma Bodhendra. Raghunātha was, in this sense, the Devas’ true protégé, not by reproducing and building upon their intellectual expertise, but as a scholar constantly reinventing himself: for pious flocks of devotees, for midlevel military officials and for elite men and women of the Thanjavur court.

It may seem that I have oversold the distinction between the ‘gravity’ of scholarship in Banaras and the ‘levity’ of intellectual production in Thanjavur. After all, as Andrea Gutierrez has shown in her dissertation on the subject, royal texts of food science (pākaśāstra) reveal highly complex culinary cultures in śāstric technical terms and place a high priority on the refined pleasures of consumption. Moreover, distinguished local Tamil and Telugu Brahmin scholars, like Śrīdhara Veṅkaṭeśa above, engaged simultaneously with bhakti texts and practices and wrote major, heavy-weight treatises on the major śāstric disciplines. The two were not mutually exclusive in the eyes of courtly patrons. Perhaps I have been too glib in terms of the relative importance of these genres, but there is still rhetorical value in the distinction. For if gravity is a force that draws one to the ground, and encourages the laying down of roots, the lightness of levity allows one to float about, to be flexible both in location and genre. For all their vaunted cosmopolitanism, the Maharashtrian elite of Banaras had for generations made the city their home. Students came from around the country to seek their instruction, and kings funded them from miles away. Even visiting families from the Deccan could spend years at a time in the city, on pilgrimage and other business. ⁴⁰ Raghunātha, on the other hand, belonged to a generation on the move, a scholarly class unused to the promise of security. They were more directly responsive to the requests of a more diverse set of patrons. And they were ready to pick up and move at the drop of a hat.

Some comparative reflections on the ‘other’ Raghunātha, another pandit of the same name at the Thanjavur court, show that his trajectory was not so unusual for scholars on the move in the long eighteenth century. Born in Chaul in western Maharashtra, Raghunātha Paṇḍita is similarly supposed to have sought his fortune in Banaras, though he does not name any particular teachers. His Sanskrit works included, in order from most to least popular, three treatises on Ayurveda, a work on poetics and two essays on metrics. ⁴¹ The essays on prosody have no extant manuscript tradition at all, and the work on poetics, the Kavikaustubha, only exists in a single copy. Despite the popularity of his work on Ayurveda, Raghunātha primarily considered himself a poet, giving himself the appellation kavi in many colophons. ⁴² The available fragments of his Kavikaustubha exhibit a tour de force of literary criticism, by which I mean the ruthless criticism of virtually all classic poets: Kālidāsa, Bhavabhūti, Bhartṛhari, Māgha, Bhāravi and so forth. In an opening salvo, Raghunātha Paṇḍita proposed to ‘explicate in toto the flaws that stick out like thorns in works of poetry, as demonstrated by earlier critics’. ⁴³ These included a laundry list of errors in both sound and sense, including ‘metre, syntax, semantics, caesuras, redundancy, style, regional customs, unconventionality, vulgarity, harshness, and lack of gravitas’. ⁴⁴ Either this book did not go over very well with the cognoscenti, or it went virtually unnoticed, killing his future in Banaras. Some references in his later works depict an embittered and disappointed man, floating from place to place and fighting with his family, not unlike an adjunct instructor of the scholarly precariat. But Raghunātha did not give up his poetic ambition. Turning his efforts to Marathi poetry, he eventually arrived at Śāhajī’s court in Thanjavur, where he became renowned for his epic poem in Marathi, the Damayantī Svayaṃvara, based on one of the most famous Sanskrit kāvyas of them all, Śrīharṣa’s Naiṣadhīyacarita. At Śāhajī’s court, Raghunātha received the title ‘Paṇḍita’, and must have become some kind of luminary. For reasons that are unclear, according to local memory, the pandit spent his last days in hardship and penury. Unable to heal himself, the physician with poetic aspiration died after a lifelong battle with poor health. ⁴⁵

The affinity between our two Raghunāthas is only too clear: thwarted by the hyper-competitive academic scene of Banaras, they plied their trade in the burgeoning regional states of the expanding Maratha empire. Perhaps unable to express their scholarly potential in sophisticated Sanskrit systems of knowledge—moral law, hermeneutics and poetics—they wrote in disciplines that emphasised practical knowledge—medicine, astrology and sexology. They could teach about the intricacies of Brahmanical social propriety but did not fail to recommend the pleasures of the body and of interior decoration. Their use of Marathi was indexed to the multilingual cosmopolitanism of the Thanjavur court and was particularly responsive to its elite women. And they both had some relationship with the itinerant preacher Rāmdās; also attributed to Raghunātha Paṇḍita is a short, colourful Marathi tableau of the saint, shown with pen and paper in hand, dispensing cough medicine to his followers. In the end, these men were trying to fashion a new scholarly habitus in a new regional setting, where they at once worked creatively within literary and scientific traditions, and reached back plaintively for a time when one could still be a scholar of wide renown.