The Yogi's Way of War

WILLIAM R. PINCH

Never have I seen such yogis, brother. They go about mindless and n.eglTiey’wage war deviously. Are they ascetics or archers?

Kabir, Bijak, ramaini 69, vv.

There are two types of men in this world who go on to pierce the beautiful disc of the sun:

He who has been following the path of yoga from birth and fights with calm indifference.

And he whose passion is roused by the battle and fights to the death then and there. Padmakar, ‘Himmatbahadurvirudavali', v. 105^{[248] [249]}

The warrior ascetic has a long pedigree in India. The most famous examples are Viswamitra in the Ramayana and Dronacharya in the Mahabharata, tutors in the arts of war to Rama and Arjuna. Indeed, the Ramayana has an extended disquisi­tion on Viswamitra's power-generating asceticism (tapas), attesting to its thematic importance in classical Indian thought. This occurs early in the epic while explaining the development of (and the troubled relationship between) the Kshatriya Viswamitra and his rival, the brahman sage Vasistha.^[250] Long before the days of Rama, Visvamitra wandered the earth looking for realms to conquer, when he came upon the ashram of Vasistha. After receiving the sage's hospitality, Visvamitra expressed a desire for the brahman sage's magical, wish-fulfilling cow. Vasistha demurred (as did the cow). A battle ensued, resulting in the utter destruction of Visvamitra and his family. Dejected, he made his way to the Himalayas where he performed great tapas and was granted a boon by Siva. He chose weapons; the battle was thus rejoined. But Vasistha remained too powerful. In Visvamitra's own dejected phrasing, ‘The power of the Kshatriyas is no power at all. Only the power of a brahman's energy is power indeed. All my weapons have been destroyed by a single brahman's staff.'^[251] So Viswamitra chose to undertake yet even greater tapas, but the goal now was to become a brahman - and at this he succeeded, to everyone's astonishment.

These stories are commonplace cultural referents in modern India. Viswamitra's asceticism remains a popular subject for calendar art, especially via replicas of Raja Ravi Varma's nineteenth-century paintings. And in 1948 Nathuram Godse, Gandhi's assassin, told the courtroom that just before he gunned down the Mahatma he pressed his palms together and saluted him - just as Arjuna had saluted his guru Dronacharya before slaying him on the field of battle. According to one of the judges, there was not a dry eye in the room and had the audience been constituted into a jury, Godse would have been acquitted - despite his confession.^[252]

The automatic equation of asceticism with power - including the power to kill - is difficult for Westerners to understand. It seems like a confusion of categories. This is due to a millennium of Christian devotionalism, which has infused asceticism with monastic virtue, including a strong dose of pacificism. Gandhi drew on this Christian pacificism, most famously as outlined by Tolstoy, alongside an admix­ture of Jain notions of ahimsa and Vaishnav bhakti, in honing his doctrine of non-violence. In the West Gandhian non-violence remains deeply appealing, but the enduring resonance of figures like Viswamitra and Dronacharya in India are a reminder that Gandhi was a modern departure from, or an innovation of,^[253] longer Indian understandings. The asceticism of Viswamitra and Dronacharya hewed closer to the original, pre-Christian meaning of asceticism - as askesis, self-discipline or training.

In this chapter I explore the phenomenon of warrior asceticism in early modern India, a subject I have explored in much greater depth in my book Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires. Sadly we possess very little direct infor­mation about warrior asceticism from the point of view of warrior ascetics themselves.

Expansion

If the classical idea of the warrior ascetic was grounded in an ancient struggle between the Kshatriya and the brahman, the modern explanation for the emergence of warrior asceticism in the more recent past is often understood in terms of a presumed age-old conflict between Hindu and Muslim. Modern oral tradition thus holds that peaceful Hindu sanyasis (or ‘renouncers') were suffering persecution and harassment from Muslim ghazis, and consequently sought and received permission to arm themselves from none other than the Mughal emperor Akbar. This oral tradition reflects the increasing purchase of ‘communalist' historical understandings in the nineteenth century and the firming up of Hindu nationalist sentiments in the twentieth.

We get a markedly different picture of origins from an account of Rajendragiri (d. 1753), the progenitor of the most successful ascetic army of the eighteenth century. According to this story, which was told by the

6 This is not to say that there were not earlier premonitions of the devotionalist redirection of asceticism in India. The poem attributed to Kabir, which begins this chapter, is one indication that religious reformers were challenging the idea of the weaponised ascetic and asserting that his proper role was to engage only in religious devotion and medita­tion (what Christians would call prayer).

Unlike the early twentieth-century origin tale involving Akbar and the remembered Hindu desire to mount a defence against an external enemy (Muslims), the story of Rajendragiri's yogic transformation suggests an internal dynamic to account for the rise of warrior asceticism in the early modern era. This transformation is in keeping with the ancient complemen­tarity of asceticism and power (the logic of tapas) noted above, but is also cognisant of the bhakti critique of the warrior yogi ascribed to Kabir. Indeed, the intensity of the critique may be taken as an implicit acknowledgment of the fact that warrior ascetics were becoming an increasingly common feature of the religious and political topography of eighteenth-century north India.

If we strip away its communalist veneer, the early twentieth-century oral tradition about Akbar was true in one respect: the emperor did encounter Hindu ascetics who appealed to him to mediate a conflict. This occurred in 1567 at the shrine of Thaneswar, north of Delhi. However, the conflict in question was not between Hindus and Muslims but between two bands of Hindu ascetics (yogis and sanyasis), and the Persian accounts make it clear that these ascetics were well armed long before the emperor happened upon them. The armed ascetic bands encountered by Akbar and other observers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries consisted of modest numbers of men (and some women) armed with rudimentary weapons. Akbar's historians and artists depicted a 1567 skirmish that involved swords, spears, clubs, bow and arrow, and stones. Other writers, European and Indian, make reference to wandering bands of yogis with long, matted hair who wander from village to village begging (or demanding) alms, for which they encourage compliance by carrying swords, spears, iron-tipped staves and iron discs - chakras - which they throw with deadly accuracy.

Gradually, as the seventeenth century drew to a close, the numbers grew and a degree of tactical diversification set in; by the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries we begin to read about ascetic soldiers employed as a fairly regimented component of state power, with divisions between infantry and cavalry. According to a document held in Jaipur, the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb issued a decree in 1692-3 authorising five bairagi commanders ‘to move freely about the whole Empire with standards and kettledrums, at the head of companies both of horse and foot'. Local land­lords and military officials were warned ‘that no obstacle or hindrance be put in their way, so that they may travel without molestation from one province to another'.^[255] The French traveller Careri, who visited western India in 1695-6, likewise observed ‘jogi' armies that ‘march in companies with banners, lances and other weapons'.^[256] These descriptions imply considerably larger numbers than the earlier accounts of wandering yogi bands.

We begin to get abundant documentary references to warrior ascetics in English records in the 1760s, after the British gained control of Bengal and Bihar. Warrior ascetic bands posed a threat to the sovereignty of the English East India Company (hereafter the Company) since they claimed the right to levy contributions from the villages through which they passed in their seasonal wanderings.^{[257] [258]} Their resistance to Company attempts to eradicate them would be remembered as a decades-long sanyasi and fakir rebellion.11 Company correspondence makes frequent reference to the tactical and strategic capabilities of the ascetic bands that the British encountered in Bengal. On several occasions, Company units thought they had the jump on the ascetic armies, only to be lured into traps where they exhausted their ammunition before being cut to pieces. A typical scene is the one that played out in 1767 when a ‘body of 5,000 Sinnasees' entered Saran District in north­west Bihar and handily defeated two companies of sepoys sent by the local commander to meet them. ‘The Sinnasees stood their ground and after the sepoys had fired away part of their ammunitions, fell on them, killed and wounded near eighty and put the rest to flight.'^[259]

Despite the high visibility of sanyasi and fakir ‘raiders' in Company correspondence during this period, the most successful and militarily important of the ascetic armies in north India was commanded by the aforementioned Rajendragiri, or rather by his disciples Umraogiri (d. 1809) and Anupgiri (d. 1804). Both men would claim the Persianate nom de guerre ‘Himmat Bahadur' (bestowed by the Nawab of Awadh in the 1750s or 1760s, depending on the source), though the title is usually associated with the younger Anupgiri. The services of these men, and the large numbers they could quickly recruit, were sought by an array of regional powers including the Nawabs of Awadh, the Marathas, the Jats and the erstwhile Mughal emperor Shah Alam II. Eventually (and ironically, given their antipathy for armed ascetics in Bengal), the British would ally themselves with Anupgiri in 1803, a decision that would prove instrumental in their capture of Delhi in that year. At the peak of their power, Anupgiri and Umraogiri commanded upwards of 20,000 men, many if not most of whom were ascetics of various stripes (and mainly gosains). Most importantly, they understood themselves first and foremost as soldiers for hire. They had no illusions about where their loyalties lay. As Umraogiri put it, when making overtures to Company officials in Delhi in the 1770s, ‘he was no

Motteseddy [pen-pushing bureaucrat] but a soldier' and ‘considered himself obliged to his sword for everything he held'.^[260]

The daring exploits of Rajendragiri, Anupgiri, Umraogiri and their men attracted frequent comment. Ghulam Hussain Khan, writing in Persian in the 1780s, describes them at Allahabad in 1751 as setting out every day ‘with the bravest ofhis people, all mounted on excellent mares... to gallop about the Afghan camp, from whence [they] never returned without having killed several of the bravest of the enemy'.^[261] Similarly, the Capuchin Marco della Tomba, writing in Italian in the early 1770s about skirmishes between the Company army and the forces of Shuja ud-Daulah in the aftermath of the Battle of Buxar (1764), described the ‘fakiri nudi' (naked fakirs) as ‘skilled cut-throats on their own account' whose opposition was ‘the strongest that the English ever had'. These ‘naked fakirs' were almost certainly gosains commanded by or connected to Anupgiri and Umraogiri, then in the service of Shuja. ‘These [men], not caring for the artillery, nor the English fire, advanced with sabres in their hands up to the bayonets'. Della Tomba claimed that but for the steadfast quality of the Company forces, the English ‘would have been undone'.^[262]

Early nineteenth-century accounts paint a similar picture. The Scottish sur­veyor Francis Buchanan wrote that ‘Nagas [are] a description of rogues who from going quite naked[,] close shaved and well rubbed with oil are so slippery that no one can seize them while they force their way with a dagger pointed at both ends and held by the middle'.1^[263] Thomas Broughton, who encountered a troop of gosains connected to Anupgiri in 1809, remarked that, ‘as soldiers, they are accounted brave and faithful'.^[264] Lieutenant Colonel Valentine Blacker included ‘gossyes' (gosains) in his reflection on the rise of infantry forces in India in the 1700s and described them as ‘a Hindoo cast of peculiar habits, scattered over different parts of India', who ‘have been always considered as good troops' on a par with Rohillah Afghans, Jats and khalsa (military) Sikhs.^[265]

Given the eighteenth-century expansion of warrior asceticism, it is likely that the ascetic orders were a major conduit through which the increased demand for manpower created by the military revolution in South Asia was satisfied. In retrospect this is not surprising: the new infantry required, as David Ralston has argued (following John Keegan), a new kind of soldier, capable of withstanding a whole new level of chaos and slaughter in battle, which ‘presupposed a much different attitude on the part of the fighting men, one stressing a sense of abnegation and even selflessness'.^[266] One is put in mind of the poet Padmakar's observation, quoted at the outset: ‘There are two types of men in this world who go on to pierce the beautiful disc of the sun: those who have been following the path of yoga from birth and fight with calm indifference, and those whose passion is roused by the battle and fights to the death then and there'. Padmakar was describing the contest between the forces of Anupgiri and his Rajput nemesis Arjun Singh at Ajaygarh in 1792, which ended with Anupgiri's victory (and, allegedly, Arjun's decapitation at his hands) and conquest of Bundelkhand; but the point is more broadly applicable. The old way of war called for passionate, one-on- one contests as a way of proving one's Kshatriya manhood. The new way of war demanded detachment, a yogic ‘calm indifference' to the chaos of battle.

Beyond the fact that ascetic hardening and a life on the move were inherently useful for soldiering, the guru-chela discipleship in the akhara (a term that originally meant ‘arena' but has come to mean ‘ascetic order' as well) seems to have meshed well with the needs of military hierarchy and discipline. The guru commanded complete obedience. As one observer put it, their leaders ‘exercise over the minds of this class of people a very peculiar kind of influence. From the singular nature of their institutions and habits, the lower orders are peculiarly in subjection to the will of their superiors, whose privileges secure them a deference and respect, especially in religious matters[,] which rank and riches alone can seldom command'.^[267] The com­plementarity of life in the akhara and soldiering is captured nicely in an oral tradition from the early twentieth century concerning Anupgiri's childhood. According to this tale, the young Anup used to play with clay soldiers. He was so transfixed with this game that it even distracted him from his chores, a fact that his guru Rajendragiri could not help but notice. Finally Rajendragiri arranged for Anupgiri’s martial training, which included ‘wrestling, sword­play, and stick fighting exercises... By the time he was approaching the age of nineteen Anupgiri had become, by the good graces of his guru, fully versed in the military sciences and horseback riding’.^[268]

Contraction

We earlier learned of Rajendragiri’s own transformation from yogi to warrior at the mouth of the cave of his guru. There is another, rather more mundane, story about this apotheosis. According to John Baillie, the British agent who orchestrated the alliance between Anupgiri and the Company in 1803, Rajendragiri had been a respectable banker in Jhansi but had been forced to leave the city due to ‘some disturbances [that] arose between the people of Rajinder Geer and certain turbulent persons’.^[269] He eventually took up soldiering, using the village of Moth in Bundelkhand as his base.

Whether an involvement in trade and banking preceded the profession of arms among gosains (and clearly the implication of Baillie’s tale is that it did), what is significant is that asceticism was conducive to both, and that this also made ascetics useful for intelligence purposes. So adept were gosains in com­merce, and so far-reaching their intelligence, that Warren Hastings relied upon them in attempting to massage trading connections with Tibetans in central Asia in the 1780s.^[270] There is even evidence that gosains were complicit in the Company capture of Bengal. In the run up to the Battle of Plassey in 1757, one Nimoo Gooseyng of Calcutta, ‘whose people go up and down the Kingdom well arm’d in great bodies, of the Facquier or religious beggar cast’, offered Company officials intelligence about the political lay of the land and even offered to assist the Company in any upcoming hostilities. There is some irony here given the hostilities that would prevail between the Company and armed ascetics in Bengal in the following decades. Warren Hastings would himself complain about sanyasis in a manner that barely concealed his admiration, emphasising in particular their mobility, speed, ruthlessness and prodigious talent for duplicity and treachery.^[271] As the collector at Dhaka observed in a letter to Hastings, ‘there are a great number of this vagrant race [sanyasis] in this city who carry on some trade and it is not improbable that many of them act as spies'.^[272]

Distrust of armed ascetics persisted well into the early nineteenth century and it even (or especially) extended to Anupgiri himself. On 4 June 1804, Thomas Brooke of Banaras wrote an unofficial letter to Governor General Wellesley's secretary in Calcutta concerning matters of intelligence. In it, he expressed his deep scepticism about the Company's 1803 alliance with Anupgiri and hinted darkly that the gosain found it ‘profitable to fish in troubled waters'. In short, Brooke insisted, ‘Himmut Behadhur is not to be trusted... A native speaking of him, said he was like a man who in crossing a river kept a foot in two boats, ready to abandon the one that was sinking'.^[273] Unbeknownst to Brooke, Anupgiri had died the previous day. John Baillie, the Company agent who had been assigned to manage the alliance and supervise the gradual British takeover of the province, had matters well in hand (from the Company point of view) despite the impending arrival of Anupgiri's brother, Umraogiri, on the scene. Baillie would orchestrate the enthronement of Anupgiri's young child, Narindragiri, as the head of the gosain army, and isolate an outraged Umraogiri in the process; over the next four years he and his successor would manoeuvre the gosain forces out of the province and into a quasi retirement.

The jaundiced view of Anupgiri has seeped into modern historical writing. Jadunath Sarkar, the leading historian of India in the first half of the twentieth century, resorted to such terms as ‘faithless', ‘unscrupulous' and ‘selfish' to describe the gosain. According to Sarkar, ‘Himmat Bahadur lacked personal courage and bore a low character for his faithfulness [sic] and love of secret intrigue'.^[274] With the comfort of post-nationalist hindsight, it is easy to see how Anupgiri's political and military instincts were perfectly normal for the time, how if anything he was emblematic of the military entrepreneurs in a fast-dwindling ‘ancient regime', who constituted the grease between the cumbersome gears of the alliance-seeking states.^[275]

Ghulam Hussain Khan, quoted above for his description of the daring raids carried out by the ‘saniassi-fakir' Rajendragiri and his men at Allahabad in 1751, also noted that Rajendragiri ‘spent his time in his devotions to Maha-deoo'. Maha-deoo, or Mahadeva, was and is a common way of referring to Siva. Usually the term gosain referred, in a martial context, to Saiva (Siva-oriented) ascetics, whereas bairagi referred to armed Vaishnava ascetics (that is, those of a Vishnu orientation, usually in the avatar forms of Rama or Krishna). Given the rise to prominence of Rajendragiri in the region in mid-century, and the rising stars of Anupgiri and Umraogiri following Rajendragiri's death in 1753, gosains were congregating in Banaras in ever greater numbers. One estimate in 1810 held that they made up fully one-quarter of the male population of the city, or roughly 20,000 men. This probably had much to do with the recent and ongoing demobilisation of the gosain armies following the deaths of Anupgiri and Umraogiri in 1804 and 1809, respectively.^[276] Gosains seem to have out­numbered bairagis to the east as well. The Company correspondence regard­ing the suppression of the ascetic bands in Bengal and Bihar in the last three decades of the eighteenth century usually referred to ‘fakirs' and ‘sanyasis' (spelled frequently as ‘sunnasies' or variations thereof). ‘Sanyasi' generally connoted a Saiva orientation. ‘Fakir' was mostly used to indicate Sufi ascetics, though often it was used generically for any ascetic or mendicant, and not infrequently it referred to Nath yogis as well (not least because of the frequent interaction between Naths and Sufis). According to the deposition of ‘Govindgeer', who was captured in northern Bengal in 1794, the army he served with numbered ‘above one thousand people, of which number there are four hundred Mussulmaun Fakeers, one hundred Hindoo Sonassies, four hundred Seapoys, twenty Byragies and the rest are people of different descriptions'.^[277] Govindgeer reported that he himself was from Surat, over 2,000 kilometres to the west, on the Arabian Sea. His name, or rather the suffix ‘geer', indicates that he was a gosain. He reported that he ‘was enrolled with' the party of ‘one hundred Sonassies', which would confirm that sanyasis in Bengal were roughly identical with gosains further west.

West from Banaras, especially beyond Delhi, bairagis were more frequently encountered. Thus the portrait of a Naga trooper in James Skinner's ‘Tashrih al-Aqvam' reported that he belonged to the ‘vairagis'.³1 Bairagis had been a major component of the army of the maharajas of Jaipur, most famously serving under the command of Balanand Swami and his disciple, Ramakrishna Mahant. Even though their numbers were smaller, bairagis were gradually making inroads into the region around Allahabad, Banaras, and its hinterland in what is now eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, in the eighteenth century. The best evidence for this is the rising profile of the pilgrimage town of Ayodhya, where by the late 1700s a structure known as ‘Hanuman Garhi', or the fortress of Hanuman, was constructed as a headquarters of the warrior bairagis of the Ramanandi order. This structure received considerable support from the nawabs of Awadh and their principal Kayastha ministers (the latter are said to have been staunch Vaishnavas).

Not surprisingly considerable enmity existed between the gosains and the bairagis. This is often interpreted as a sectarian - which is to say, religiously inspired - animosity, though one can surmise that at least some of the rivalry was fuelled by competition for patronage in a time of decreasing employment opportunities. Sital Singh ‘Bikhwud', a munshi or Persian writer in the court of the Maharaja of Banaras in the early nineteenth century, reported that gosains, whom he called ‘Sanyasi Nagas' (and classified as Saiva), ‘hold a heartfelt enmity towards the Beragi Nagas' (classified as Vaishnava), ‘so that mostly between the two divisions there is a field of armed battle'. These conflicts occurred ‘to such an extent that hundreds are killed and injured on both sides'. Both groups, he reported, are ‘armed with military weapons... like swords, muskets, spears etc.', wear their hair ‘matted on their heads', and sport beards and moustaches. Whereas the Saivas (gosains) rub their naked bodies with ash, the Vaishnava (bairagis) rubbed their bodies with ‘yellow rose' and ‘wore a loincloth below on the waist to veil their private parts'.^{[278] [279]} Gosains and bairagis frequently came to blows at the periodic pilgrimage festival gatherings at Allahabad, Hardwar, Nasik and Ujjain, otherwise known as the Kumbha Mela. These disputes were sometimes mediated by the reigning power, whether the Marathas in the early and mid eighteenth century or the British in the nineteenth century.

Death

How did warrior ascetics understand themselves? A major source of their identity was based on their martial accomplishments. As Umraogiri had informed a British agent in 1775, ‘he was no Motteseddy but a soldier' and ‘considered himself obliged to his sword for everything he held'. However, there are clues that speak to their own ascetic sensibilities. One comes from an episode in 1785, when the relationship between Anupgiri and the Maratha warlord Mahadji Scindia was beginning to sour. Scindia had stationed a mounted guard over the gosain's tents. According to the British agent at the camp,

Himmet Behadre went immediately to [Scindia's] Durbar [court] with a very small retinue, instead of the numerous armed attendants, with which he used of late to be accompanied, and after declaring to Sindia that he was determined to relinquish all worldly pursuits, and attach himself in future to the observances of religious duties[,] he presented him with all the sunnuds [titles] he holds for his several possessions.^[280]

Scindia decided that this was no idle boast on Anupgiri's part and immedi­ately restored him to favour, and returned his sanads too, claiming that he was simply testing the gosain's loyalty.

Part of what may have convinced Scindia that Anupgiri was not making an idle boast was the fact that Anupgiri's brother Umraogiri himself claimed to be doing precisely what Anupgiri was suggesting. We learn this from a petition from Umraogiri to the Company in 1806, that as the senior disciple of their guru Rajendragiri he had retreated from ‘worldly concerns' in the 1780s and ‘passed my time on the banks of the Ganges in the full and undisturbed exercise of my religious duties', either in Sivarajpur (near Kanpur) or in Banaras (or, more likely, in both locations).^[281] It is not clear how long his religious retreat lasted. Though he claimed in his 1806 petition that he had been focused on his religious duties for twenty years, other sources make it clear that he had travelled to Almorah in the Garwhal hills in 1790-1 to conspire with the Nepal raja against the local hill chieftains. In 1799 he was implicated in the murder of a Company official in Banaras and put under ‘house arrest', from which he was released in 1803 courtesy of a stipulation in the treaty between Anupgiri and Wellesley.^[282]

Many observers concluded that Anupgiri and Umraogiri's asceticism was simply a kind of pretence, a foil or cover for their political and military activities. Conversely, from their point of view, they did not see politics and asceticism as an either/or choice, that there was nothing unusual about being a Saiva ascetic, a military entrepreneur and a political deal maker - all three rolled into one. In any case, the best evidence that Anupgiri and Umraogiri were not simply pretending a commitment to Saiva asceticism is their behaviour at the time of death. When Anupgiri died on 4 June 1804, Umraogiri quickly came to Banda. He deputed two of his ‘sons' along with fifty horsemen to take the body north across the Yamuna ‘for the purpose of interment on the banks of the Ganges at Sewrajpur agreeably to the directions of the deceased'.^[283] This instruction indicates that Anupgiri was interred according to Saiva funerary rites in ‘samadhi' rather than being cremated as per standard Hindu practice.

Samadhi interment is specific to Saiva ascetics and involves placing the body in cross-legged position, or padmasana, and placing it into an excavated chamber approximately 1.5 metres cubed. Over the chamber a structure is built, the nature of which can vary widely; it can be a simple stupa-like structure of clay and dirt, a large plinth or a small temple. The practice reflects the belief that the individual has achieved immortality.^[284] An ascetic buried in samadhi is understood to be still present, hovering proximate to the shrine, and even capable of interceding in the worldly affairs of his followers - or punishing those who ignore or disrespect him.^[285]

Anupgiri's influence was such that he is said to have two additional samadhis to the one said to exist (according to Baillie's correspondence, cited above) at Sivarajpur: one in Vrindaban, in a small temple called Himmatgir Mandir situated at the base of the structure that was his palace/fort; and the other in Kalwara, outside Banda, where his army was headquartered. All three sites are still visited and considered sites of power, at least as of 2002. The samadhi in Vrindaban was so active that the priest who officiates at the temple there told of having been visited by Anupgiri at night and chastised for having covered the samadhi marker with a permanent structure.³⁹ He also told of a visitor who decided to spend the night in the inner sanctum of the temple, where an image of Krishna stands next to a picture of Anupgiri. This visitor was physically lifted and heaved out by an unseen presence, whom the priest presumed to be the undead warlord himself.

Conclusion: Violence and Non-violence

By the mid nineteenth century Anupgiri and Umraogiri were increasingly consigned to the past, their armies demobilised and their officers and their descendants pensioned off. The rank and file were left to fend for themselves in pilgrimage centres such as Banaras, Allahabad and Hardwar. A lucky few had been recruited into the Company army. The akharas would occasionally attract notice during the great periodic Kumbha Mela, when regiments of ash-besmeared naga sadhus would compete against one another for ritual precedence in astrologically timed processions. Sometimes these competi­tions would result in spectacles of bloodshed; more often questions of disputed precedence would be mediated by an increasingly powerful, mod­ernising state. Gradually the imposing fortress-palaces built by Anupgiri and Umraogiri in the late eighteenth century would fall into disrepair and be sold off or encroached upon. They too would soon be forgotten by all but the most ardent devotees.

But oddly enough, warrior asceticism would experience a second com­ing. In the early 1880s the Bengali writer Bankim Chandra Chatterji produced a novel entitled Anandamath, or ‘Abbey of Bliss', that depicted warrior ascetics of the late eighteenth century as patriotic Hindu insur­gents struggling against foreign (mainly Muslim) tyranny. Bankim did not look to Anupgiri and Umraogiri for inspiration however - indeed, he

(Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1989), pp. 252-3. Coccari includes mention of warrior ascetics among those who are deified in Banaras.

39 See Pinch, Warrior Ascetics, p. 26.

probably had never even heard of them. Rather, he drew his under­standing of asceticism from the Bhagavadgita and the idea of karmayoga or selfless action, and the canvas upon which he painted his newly conceived political asceticism was the ‘Sanyasi and Fakir Rebellion' in late eighteenth-century Bengal. Bankim's novel was wildly popular and was soon translated into numerous languages, including English, in the early decades of the twentieth century. By 1952 it had been made into a film, and in 1974 a comic book. Meanwhile, Bankim's anthem sung by the ascetic-patriots, ‘Bande Mataram', had been put to music by none other than Rabindranath Tagore, and became a rallying cry during the Swadeshi movement in early twentieth-century Bengal. It is still sung today, mainly by Hindu nationalists, though not without controversy. In short, Anandamath formed the core of a political imaginary that would influence generations of Indian nationalists, not least because it imprinted the figure of the Hindu ascetic as an authentic response to foreign rule. Indeed, Gandhi's cultivation of political asceticism may be seen thus as a continuation of Bankim's literary-nationalist project, which was itself an inventive reimagining of early modern warrior asceticism.

Bankim's warrior ascetics were sprung-from-the-soil patriots, more a product of a desperate late nineteenth-century need for manly national pride than a reflection of eighteenth-century late Mughal realities. While the actual roving bands of warrior ascetics no doubt felt some claim over the villages through which they moved, and from which they levied contributions, to call this a form of patriotism is probably a stretch. Similarly, while Anupgiri and Umraogiri may have felt some emotional tie to their native Bundelkhand, and even to their adopted Hindustan and Awadh (and Bhojpur), any regional patriotism they might have felt paled in comparison to the exigencies of military entrepreneurship that governed their lives and careers. And while it is just possible to glean a sense of what being a Saiva warrior ascetic meant for men like Anupgiri and Umraogiri, it is harder still to know what they thought about violence. Whereas their Rajput opponents conceived of battle as a kind of cosmic wedding ceremony to be approached with unbridled passion, yogi warriors entered the fray with ‘calm indifference'. For Rajputs, violence was an end in itself; for yogis, violence was a means to an end. Consequently Man Kavi com­pared Anupgiri to Canakya (aka Kautilya), the brahman minister who advised Chandragupta Maurya and authored the Arthasastra, the ancient treatise on statecraft. Violence was a given, a fact of life. The ancient axiom that asceticism enhanced one's martial prowess implies that violence was not a problem, as such. It only became a problem for Gandhi in the early twentieth century, as he confronted the immense power of the British Raj and the inability (in his opinion) of Indians to combat it in a conventional way. It was the ready acceptance of violence in the Hindu tradition, especially in the Bhagavadgita, that inspired Gandhi to articulate a doctrine of non-violence - and to rethink the Gita in the process. Violence needed no doctrine in India before the twentieth century.

Bibliographic Essay

Because it is something of a categorical mistake for Western observers, warrior asceticism has received uneven attention in English-language scholarship. The earliest (non-fiction) work on the topic is J. N. Farquhar, ‘The Fighting Ascetics of India', Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 9 (1925), 431-52, which introduced the oral tradition concerning Akbar's arming of Hindu ascetics to fend off attacks by Muslims in the sixteenth century. This essay was followed by Jamini Mohan Ghosh's Sannyasi and Fakir Raiders in Bengal (Calcutta, 1930), which examined the ascetic resistance to English East India Company suppression in late eighteenth-century Bengal. The next major work, building especially on Farquhar, was W. G. Orr, ‘Armed Religious Ascetics in Northern India', Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 25 (1940), 81-100; its main contribution was Orr's examination of late seventeenth-century Persian records from Jaipur. The leading Mughal historian Jadunath Sarkar included frequent reference to Rajendragiri and Anupgiri (‘Himmat Bahadur') in his four-volume Fall of the Mughal Empire (Calcutta, 1932-50), as well as his more detailed co-authored study with Nirod Bhusan Roy of Shantiniketan, A History of the Dasnami Naga Sanyasis (Allahabad, n.d. [1952?]).

Detailed social histories of warrior asceticism began to appear in the 1960s, reflecting an increasing awareness of the importance of the akharas in the economic and political history of the eighteenth century. The pioneer in the field was B. S. Cohn, ‘The Role of the Gosains in the Economy of Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Upper India', Indian Economic and Social History Review 1.4 (1964), 175-83. D. H. A. Kolff followed with ‘Sanyasi Trader-Soldiers', Indian Economic and Social History Review 8.2 (1971), 213-20, which extended Cohn's argument to suggest that the monastic-business networks were also effective in supporting naga soldiering. C. A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), built on these arguments but emphasised the importance of military-trader ascetic orders in facilitating commercial and financial links between the increasingly regional political economies of the eighteenth century.

A new phase of analysis that combined social history with literary analysis was inaugurated by David Lorenzen with his foundational article, ‘Warrior Ascetics in Indian History', Journal of the American Oriental Society 98 (1978), 61-75, which argues that it is likely that the inspiration for the decision to take up weapons had more to do with the need to protect monastic endowments from treasure-hungry kings in the deep past, long before Muslims arrived in India. Another important study is Monika Thiel-Horstmann's ‘Warrior-Ascetics in 18th Century Rajasthan and the Religious Policy ofJai Singh II', in M. K. Gautam and G. H. Schokker (eds.), Bhakti in Current Research, 1982-85: Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Early Devotional Literature in New Indo-Aryan Languages (Lucknow: Indo-European Publishers, 1985), pp. 43-55. Finally, I should mention my Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), a major goal of which was to argue for the importance of warrior asceticism not simply to reframe the political and military history of early modern and modern India, but also for what it reveals about the categories with which religion and asceticism are perceived in history generally.