The Final Word The Caitanya Caritamrta and the Grammar of Religious Tradition TONY K. STEWART OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 2010OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS ‘Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. ‘Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dares Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2010 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 wiw.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stewart, Tony K., 1954~ ‘The final word : the Caitanya caritimyta and the grammar of religious tradition / Tony K. Stewart. p.m. Includes index and bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-19-539272-2 1. Chaitanya, 1486-1534—Cult, 2, Krgnadasa Kaviraja Gosvamib. 1518, Sri Caitanya Caritamyta, 3, Chaitanya (Sect) —History. I. Title. BL1285.392.C53877 2009 294.5'512—de22_ 2009004337 Grammars of Creation by George Steiner. Copyright © 2001 by George Steiner. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author. The Last Life by Claire Messud. Copyright © 2000 by Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt. Reprinted by permission The Caitanya Caritamrta of Krsnadasa Kaviraja, rans. Edward C. Dimock Jr., ed. Tony K. Stewart. Harvard Oriental Series 56. Copyright © 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard University. Reprinted by permission 987654321 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paperfor Donald R. and Ann Lee Tuck strong and gentle soulsExperience isn’t interesting till it begins to repeat itself — in fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience. —Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart Stories are made up, after all, as much of what is left out. —Claire Messud, The Last Life ... I take grammar to mean the articulate organization of perception, reflection and experience, the nerve structure of consciousness when it communicates with itself and with others. —George Steiner, Grammars of CreationPreface Reconstructing the Life of a Text It was the concept of “religious biography” that defined my initial study of Krsna Caitanya (1486-1533) and his followers, a group which subsequently coalesced into the Gaudiya Vaisnava movement. A seminar at the University of Chicago in 1972 and 1973, organized by Frank Reynolds and Donald Capps, provided the impetus for a series of essays that were subsequently published under their editorship as The Biographical Process: Studies in the History and Psychology of Religion.’ | regretted that I arrived at Chicago a few years after that class, but I did make it just in time to receive one of the first copies of the book, a fortuitous event that drew me to work in the area and with several of the book’s contributors over the next decade. The introduction to those provocative essays provided an operational typology of religious biography that defined the parameters of the genre as a function of the way authors— religiously committed or critical (characterizations that were not always exclusive)—would depict their biographical subjects in relation to the accompanying religious ideal. The typologically predictable processes of this twin-poled interaction provided the intellectual structure for my first study of the biographies of Caitanya that reconstructed the chronology of the changing images of Caitanya’s divinity during the sixteenth century. The result of that study, which appeared as my dissertation in 1985, was eye-opening, for it demonstrated that the early tradition was—now, I see, not 1. Frank Reynolds and Donald Capps, eds., The Biographical Process: Studies in the History and Psychology of Religion (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1976).vil PREFACE surprisingly—quite in disagreement about who Caitanya was and what that represented; and it took the biographers about a century to reach some kind of consensus. There were a number of obvious implications from this “discov- ery,” but two haunted me in ways that I could not at first articulate, much less resolve. The first mystery was the simple fact that even though I could document with precision the theological and ritual positions articulated by the biogra- phers and the places those positions changed during that formative century, I was at a loss regarding the decision-making processes within the group. How did one decide what was theologically and ritually “correct,” or put another way, who adjudicated such issues? How did the community come to define an orthodoxy and orthopraxy? The second enigma, which was closely related to the first, was how textual canons were fixed. How did one decide what a proper Gaudiya Vaisnava should read? How were canons delimited? My problem in both instances, and what bound the two together, was my inability to locate a defining or legislating authority for either type of sanction. There seemed to be no overt, certainly no centralized, institution that had been given, or arrogated to itself, the authority to perform these delimiting and defining functions; yet I found an uncanny uniformity in the texts that were cited in the scholastic and communal literature, uniformity in the books that were published for public consumption, and widespread agreement on which biographies “everyone read” and which ones “no one read.” I could find no clear model among the religious traditions I had studied that allowed for a religious group to be de- fined as a tradition, replete with sophisticated transcribed theologies and con- comitant practices, without some kind of institutionalized authority to legislate such matters. So I began to search for the mechanisms by which authority was established, to locate this seemingly invisible institution. The answer lay in an extraordinary text: the Caitanya caritamrta. As | was told by several scholars and mahants when I first undertook to study the Gaudiya tradition, it was the only text I needed to read. And while their intention in guiding me to that text was different than my own reasons for studying it, their advice turned out to be prescient; it was the story of this text I soon felt compelled to reconstruct. In searching through the corpus of Bengali and Sanskrit literature pro- duced by this group, it became increasingly clear that the theological, ritual, and aesthetic works tended to be assertions of truth with little or no attempt to defend those positions, that is, while conforming to various logical presupposi- tions regarding the nature of argument and what constituted proper inference, and so forth, they were presented as self-validating static “systems” of practice and thought. There was decidedly little evidence of conflict or contest within these works to show how they arrived at these theological assertions—save the inevitable contrast with the central principles of a monistic or non-dualistic Vedanta, which was always represented as the quintessential Other, its adher- ents the mayavadins, the opposition. Yet the biographical and historical writings,PREFACE 1X most of which were in Bengali, proved to be quite different. This is not to say that arguments were not made in the theological and philosophical literatures, because they were, for example, it would have been impossible for Ripa Gosvami to adapt the tenets of rasa sastra to the devotional world without depending on, but ultimately disagreeing with his illustrious predecessors in the hopes of clarifying the propositions of the prior texts, a very subtle kind of conflict. But it was also in the nature of most of these arguments to base them- selves on foregone conclusions in their rules of discourse—and quite frankly my interests have hardly been philosophical and reconstructions of such issues fall outside the domain of my inclination, though I think it is clear now in ret- rospect that the community was engaged in a type of literary practice that in some ways mimicked the courts with their concern to cultivate a proper San- skrit (universal) ethos for regulating action and modulating power within the group, along the lines Sheldon Pollock has recently argued (interestingly, Jiva Gosvami and Kavikarnapira composed Sanskrit vyakaranas [grammars], the writing of which in courts Pollock has argued come to define a dharmic king- ship, and I suspect here do much the same for establishing an unassailable authority).” My interest was in the way that theology was represented in the images of Caitanya and the rituals of the group, how they changed historical- ly—and I became convinced that it was in that process of representation where devotees would, perhaps inadvertently but certainly predictably, show their orientations. The only place where serious disagreement or contest occurred, it seemed, was in the hagiographical literature, the way devotees narrated Caitanya’s life. The changing biographical images of Caitanya that I had previously docu- mented constituted the theological content of those texts—and that analysis on the whole remains valid, save a few minor corrections of a factual nature. In order to determine the way these images were established, how they were re- lated to each other, and eventually hierarchized into a complex system, required that I shift the focus of that inquiry to the rhetorical strategies of the authors, and to the salient formal properties of the texts that presented these images. To do this, I have relied heavily on the sustained analyses of narrative among liter- ary structuralists and their successors in the arena of narratology, such as Gérard Genette and, as applied to history, Hayden White. But in analyzing these strategies, it quickly became clear that the theological and historical con- tent of the biographies served as a vehicle for subtle attempts to appropriate the ideological lead through the manipulation of the narratives, fictions created to establish the centrality of each author’s guru and lineage. I say subtle be- cause one key element of Krsnadasa’s several unifying strategies was to down- play overt conflict to the point where it became a general aversion, a part of 2. Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006), see especially pp. 166-84.X PREFACE the Vaisnava ethos inculcated by later devotees and a feature that figures prominently in the rhetorical strategies to follow. As soon as the social context was identified, the hagiographies could be clearly seen to function as symbolic emblems of social ascendency, much as Pierre Bourdieu’s notions of symbolic cultural capital would lead us to expect: to be an important guru with a defina- ble religious following required that one commission a biography of Caitanya, and that biography would, ipso facto, become indexical of the lineage’s posi- tion. It was Krsnadasa who sought to consolidate them. Such was his eventual success that subsequently a guru no longer established his bona fides by com- missioning a hagiography of Caitanya, but by authoring or commissioning a commentary on the Caitanya caritamrta. Where social issues are germane, I have pointed to them and suggested a path of analysis; but ultimately those concerns lie just outside the limits of this study, for none of that positioning is understandable without a close analysis of the textual strategies that made these documents effective and the literary practices to which the community subsequently subscribed. In that analysis, I locate the principles by which these potentially divisive social maneuvers were effected, that is, the ways independent groups within the larger Vaisnava pop- ulation were eventually brought together—and, perhaps more importantly, the extension of those principles to create a replicable, self-correcting strat- egy that could be applied to future communities without breaking from the past. The most material and urgent of these principles generate for the group what I have unoriginally dubbed a “grammar of tradition” that comes to sub- stitute in large part for the missing centralized authority. This grammar, how- ever, turned out to be far more pervasive than I had at first imagined. While there will undoubtedly be a certain amount of tedium involved in making the case, the reader will discover that the phenomenology of repetition and repli- cation that informs most of these strategies extends to embrace nearly all phases of the Gaudiya Vaisnava experience: the social history of the move- ment, its textual history, the theological development documented by that textual history, the discovery of Caitanya’s divinity, and the development of individual practice. In each case the structures are parallel and the principles of organization and validation are consistent to such a high degree that I am convinced that these strategies constitute the forgotten rules for the Gaudiya Vaisnava doxa, to utilize another Bourdieu term, the elements the tradition forgot about its own origins, their unique genesis amnesia, elements that have become so ingrained as to be unquestioned as the right way to act. Precisely because these rules function in this unspoken realm, their articulation has been elusive at best. To understand how disparate and decentralized communities in Bengal eventually established a common core of practice and belief requires us, then, to analyze how the textual tradition became a tool for social organization without seeming to do so. The key is the reflexive property of these religiousPREFACE XI biographies, for their subject matter is as much the community as it is Caitanya, and their stories are agreed-upon fictions, much as Hayden White and others have suggested. This study is about the text as the de facto sanctioning insti- tution for a religious group that had (and still has) no center, save a commit- ment to truths revealed in the life of Caitanya. Yet the obviousness of what is important today disguises a long process of exploration and discovery that ultimately hinged on the ability of Vaisnavas in the sixteenth and subsequent centuries to find their place through complex repetitions of things past. This “phenomenology of repetition” and working through its correlative “indirect assertion by analogy” becomes the principle of validation for the Gaudiya Vaisnava community. There is a certain delicious irony to discover that one’s intellectual pursuit parallels the object of it, and such has been the case with this book. What be- gan many years ago as the rewrite of a ponderous dissertation (is there any other type?) that rather mechanistically examined the biographies one by one to determine the change in the perception of Caitanya’s divinity has through several iterations now become a nearly unrecognizable essay in the mechanics of the creation of tradition. For those many encouraging scholars who have pressed me to publish the dissertation, they will undoubtedly be surprised, though I hope not disappointed. While that earlier work focused on the sys- tematic (and therefore static) images of Caitanya, this current work focuses on the process of synthesizing those images—and a whole lot more—into a tradi- tion. It focuses on literary practices as the key to understanding how Gaudiya Vaisnavas came to define themselves. Given the enormity of this textual tradition—literally millions of lines of print—undoubtedly I will have missed certain potentially important historical evidence, and in other instances simply made mistakes—and those I hope will be corrected by others more knowledgeable. But because of the fragility of resources and the nature of these textual traditions—traditions which depend on what I call “living texts” that are routinely modified to suit the immediate needs, rather than privileging some kind of original or Ur-text—the argu- ments I have made never rest on any single textual statement, nor on any hair- splitting hermeneutic that once discounted allows the whole to fall like a house of cards. Rather, the arguments are based on larger trends within texts and sets of texts that should withstand the damage imposed by an isolated misreading or faulty attribution. But this will become clear only when these positions are tested for their applicability to the subsequent generations of the Gaudiya Vaisnava literatures, a task which I have started here in the final chapter with four rather telling examples, but which will ultimately be left to others to complete. Scholastically this essay falls somewhere between several important books on the Vaisnava traditions of the Bengali-speaking community: the historical reconstructions of $. K. De in his monumental Early History of the VaisnavaXI PREFACE Faith and Movement in Bengal,’ Edward C. Dimock, Jr.’s Place of the Hidden Moon; which examines the divergent tantric traditions that emerged from this group, and Ramakantha Chakravarty’s Vaisnavism in Bengal, which recon- structs the history of the second and third generations of followers. More than any other, it was B. B. Majumdar’s Sri caitanya caritera upadana that inspired me.’ Perhaps the musing in this book will help to explain not what transpired (the subject of those investigations), but how those events are all linked. Cen- tral to the endeavor, however, was the opportunity to work with Edward Di- mock for more than twenty-five years, much of that on the translation of the Caitanya caritamrta, which finally appeared in the Harvard Oriental Series in 1999. The luxury of such sustained study of a single text cannot be described. While any number of fellow scholars have criticized me, cajoled me, and even dismissed me for waiting so long to release the current work, I have known for years that it simply had to wait until the translation of the Caitanya caritamrta was completed and published. That book is the “final word” for the tradition, and it has been for years the final word for my own scholarship as well. With that publication, this essay will now have a proper context and will, I hope, be better understood by those who have the time and energy to peruse the monu- ment of scholarship that is the Caitanya caritamrta. The greatest hazard of this undertaking, I fear, is that of losing the reader in the mass of detail. But as Foucault is somewhere reputed to have said, no doubt paraphrasing a popular adage, the significance lies only in the details; and the details here tend to be people and their books, for this is largely a study of genealogies of religious commitment and the strategies by those lineages to accommodate their ideals to the lived world. To aid the reader, then, I have tried to introduce individuals at their relevant moments, and to remind read- ers just who they are when they reappear; but failing those guides, a list of personae is appended. Hopefully the effort will be rewarded with a greater insight into the workings of this remarkable community, which has managed to cohere and define itself over the last five centuries largely through the inspira- tion of Krsnadasa Kaviraja. London 10 March 2007 3. S.K. De, Early History of the Vaisnava and Movement in Bengal, 2nd ed. (Calcutta: Firma K, L. Mukopadhyay, 1961), 4. Edward C. Dimock, Jr., The Place of the Hidden Moon: Erotic Mysticism in the Vaisnava-Sahajiya Cult of Bengal (1966; repr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 5. Ramakanta Chakravarti, Vaisnavism in Bengal 1486-1900 (Caleutta: Sanskrit Pustak Bhandar, 1985). 6. Bimanabihari Majumdara, Sr7 caitanya caritera upadéna (Calcutta: Calcutta University Press, 1959). 7. The ‘Caitanya caritamrta’ of Krsnadasa Kavirdja, trans. Edward C. Dimock, Jr., ed. Tony K. Stewart, with an introduction by the translator and the editor, Harvard Oriental Series 56 (Cambridge: Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, Harvard University, 1999).Acknowledgments When you have been puzzling over a problem for a long time—it is hard to believe it has been more than three decades since I first read about Caitanya—it becomes impossible to identify the many individuals and their ideas that helped you along the way. In some ways this book reflects the input of every teacher, colleague, and friend I have had over the years; nor could institutions be exempt from this credit. Iwas drawn to The University of Chicago in mid-1970s to study with Edward C. Dimock, Jr., Distinguished Service Professor of Bengali Language and Culture; I could easily stop my acknowledgements right there and everyone who knows me will understand the debt, for all my scholarship on the Bengali-speaking world rests on his tempered guidance, wit, and inspiration. I am saddened that Cam never saw the final product of a project which was hatched and incubated over more than twenty-five years of conversation with him. While I was at The University of Chicago, Ronald Inden and Bernard Cohen taught me how to read texts with hermeneutic rigor while never forgetting their historical sensibilities, for what the texts said, rather than what tradition wanted us to hear. Clinton B. Seely’s legendary knowledge of Bengali was instrumental to my comfort in the language of these old texts. A. K. Ramanujan and Norman Cutler, now both prematurely deceased, and C. M. Naim tutored me in issues of translation, while Frank Reynolds, Ralph Nicholas, and Wendy Doniger suffered through various forays into these materials, offering encouragement and judicious advice about the theoreticalXIV. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS dimensions of this work, including comparative issues. James Fitzgerald, my first Sanskrit teacher at Chicago and now the Das Professor of Sanskrit at Brown Uni- versity, Donald Nelson, and Allen W. Thrasher, now of the Library of Congress, each helped me to understand the Sanskrit texts with which I was dealing. South Asian bibliographer Maureen Patterson initiated me into the mysteries of the Re- genstein collection, and James Nye actively picked up where she left off. Long, often late-night conversations with fellow graduate students in the stacks of the Regenstein or tramping through the snow along the quad contributed significantly to the work’s inception: David Haberman of Indiana University, Glen A. Hayes of Bloomfield College, Robert “Bibliography Bob” Evans now working in Network Services and Information Technology at Chicago, Paula Richman of Oberlin Col- lege, and Neal Delmonico. Since then, two others who emerged from that same milieu to become intellectual partners were David White, University of California- Santa Barbara, and Jeffrey Kripal, Rice University. The work of two former students—Rebecca Manring now of Indiana University and Jason Fuller now of Depauw University—sharpened my un- derstanding of subgroups and later traditions of the Gaudiya community; and another former student, Pika Ghosh now a local colleague at the Univer- sity of North Carolina-Chapel Hill likewise contributed through her analysis of the Bishnupur temple complex. Ashley Lyons, now a graduate student at the University of Chicago, helped materially in the preparation of the index and personae list when she was an undergraduate at North Carolina State University. A host of personal friends have aided and abetted this project, including my ever-ready hosts in Kolkata, the late Jaweed Moiz and his wife Rukhsana, and Ajoy and Anna Ray, as well as now-Mumbai residents Jayanta and Ran- jana Sengupta. Hena Basu, who first helped me as a research assistant in Kolk- ata in 1981, has continued through the intervening years to give me remote access to the library collections and book stalls of Kolkata and elsewhere. In London during the late nineties Rupert Snell and Renuka Madan graciously opened their flat to me in numerous trips to the British Library, and Rupert’s sensitivity to the textures of these early modern texts is a model I have strug- gled to emulate. Charles D. Orzech and Mary Ellis Gibson, down the road in Greensboro, read chapters or parts of chapters to help me through some of the literary critical issues, especially the formation of literary canons, in which I had been previously untutored. A personal and intellectual debt is owed to the great literary historian, the late Sukumar Sen, whose private advice still resonates when I read printed texts and manuscripts. Three other Kolkata-based scholars—Asit Kumar Bandyo- padhyay, Ramakanta Cakravarti, and Nirad Prasad Nath—patiently discussed with me various historical issues regarding the texts and community of Gaudiya Vaisnavas; their published works of course have been constant companions. In Dhaka, the late Ahmad Sharif, the late M. R. Tarafdar, and my dear friend andACKNOWLEDGMENTS = XV mentor Anisuzzaman each accommodated me in much the same way. My many conversations with Joseph T. O’Connell of Toronto likewise proved especially fruitful. Sheldon Pollock while at the University of Chicago and now Columbia University provided much-needed feedback on some of the rhetorical issues, and support of more general nature as far back as the early work on the transla- tion of the Caitanya caritamrta, whose interventions helped bring that volume to light. Many of the members of the Triangle South Asia Consortium—now the North Carolina Center for South Asia Studies, composed of faculty from North Carolina State University, Duke University, and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill—listened ad nauseum to these various tales, and their comments have in many instances been directly incorporated. The late John F. Richards (Duke), David Gilmartin (NCSU), Carl Ernst (UNC-CH), Bruce B. Lawrence (Duke), and Katherine Ewing (Duke) had the most to say; but to all I am deeply grateful for their ongoing support. Ann Rives, administrative assistant in Philosophy and Religion at NCSU, originally typed the entire man- uscript of the Caitanya caritamyta and subsequently cast her keen eye on the early stages of this production. While the Triangle South Asia Colloquium provided a regular venue for airing parts of this project, other institutions played major réles. In Kolkata the library and manuscript collections of the Bafgiya Sahitya Parigat, the Asi- atic Society, the Bengali Department at Calcutta University, Sanskrit College, Rabindra Bharati University, the National Library in Kolkata, and the Gauraiga Grantha Mandir at Pathabadi Aérama were all crucial. Similarly, the manuscript collections of Dhaka University, the Asiatic Society, and the Bangla Academy in Dhaka yielded important treasures. As can be seen in the citations, the manuscript collection at the Vrindaban Research Institute, founded by the late Tarapada Mukherjee of the School of Oriental and Afri- can Studies, proved critical, while the hospitality of Shrivatsa Gosvami of Vrindaban proved salutary by giving me a nearly complete set of edited schol- arly texts in Sanskrit produced by Puridasa Mahasaya of his personal lineage. The regular collections of The University of Chicago Regenstein Library, whose librarians have already been singled out, and the combined Triangle Research Libraries Network in North Carolina, with Avinash Maheshwary as the South Asian Bibliographer, were variously successfully mined. In the Brit- ish Library, Dipali Ghosh, former Bengali bibliographer, and Graham Shaw, then Deputy Director of the Oriental and India Office Collection, made the print and manuscript riches of their holdings easily accessible. The Lyman-Coleman Lectures at Lafayette College in 1996 helped me to bring parts of the last chapter into focus. Somewhat belatedly in the process, presentations made in Dhaka to the Institute for the Advanced Study of the Humanities at Dhaka University, and contributions to the Banglapedia project at the Asiatic Society, allowed me to float some ideas that had previously beenXVI ACKNOWLEDGMENTS less clearly articulated. In the last decade, parts were made public in presenta- tions to the American Academy of Religion, the Association for Asian Studies, and the American Oriental Society, and to very receptive and enthusiastic au- diences at the University of Texas-Austin, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Virginia, Emory University, The University of Chicago, the Uni- versity of Tennessee-Knowville, lowa State University, and Indiana University. In London parts were shared with gatherings at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and at The Institute of Ismaili Studies, and at the European Conference on Modern Asian Studies at Manchester. More recently, several ideas were further elaborated in workshop conversations at Ecole pra- tique des hautes études at the Sorbonne in Paris and St. Antony’s, Oxford. All of this was, of course, made possible by very generous funding. Begin- nings can be traced to The University of Chicago (1976-85), where I was a Special Humanities Fellow for many years and a FLAS recipient for one; and the American Institute of Indian Studies where I was sponsored to study Bengali language (Kolkata 1978-79). My dissertation research, which laid the foun- dation for this work, was funded by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad fellowship in Kolkata (1981-82), followed by a Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship (1983-84). Several small travel grants from my home institution and department (1987, 1988, 1993, 1994, 1996, 2000, 2002) afforded winter break and summer travel to London, India, and Bangladesh, supplemented by a National Endowment for the Humanities travel to collection grant to London (1991). A yearlong NEH Senior Research Fellowship (1997) enabled much of the initial writing. The latter was enjoyed while in residence as the Jubilee Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania; a special thanks to Guy Welbon who made that possible. A very special retreat was made available for some of the most inspired writing when I was the Owl’s Nest Writing Fellow of the I.D. Blumenthal Foundation at their Wildacres Retreat in the mountains near Little Switzerland, NC (1999, 2001, 2002). Personal support has always been at hand. My former wife, Julie H. Stewart patiently used my dissertation and the first drafts of this book to coax me through the vagaries of writing the English language; the inspiration of her writ- ing and reading skills remain among my most valued assets. Robin Rinehart, Lafayette College, read and commented extensively on drafts of the early chap- ters, and Mary Beth Heston, College of Charleston, provided much-needed feedback as I wrestled with problems of the middle chapters. Samira Sheikh has, in the text’s final throes, made me come to realize something of the value of this contribution and offered all manner of support, not least of which is the demanding rigor of a medieval historian—and for that I am deeply grateful. Production of a book of this sort is challenging and I have been especially fortunate in the team at Oxford University Press: Cynthia Read and Theo Cal- derera who talked with me for several years about the book before its submis- sion; ever-patient production editor Gwen Colvin, editorial assistant JustinACKNOWLEDGMENTS — XVII Tackett, copyeditor Katherine Ulrich, and director of production Nancy Hoagland, each of whom kept me on track and tightened the presentation; and Eve Siegel, whose cover design was inspired. To them all I am deeply grateful. I began these long acknowledgements with my mentor, Cam Dimock, and Lend with the man who inspired me to the study, to study South Asia, to study with Dimock at The University of Chicago: Donald R. Tuck. Don was my un- dergraduate advisor at Western Kentucky University in the early 1970s, and it was for him in 1975 that I wrote my first paper on the Vaisnavas of Bengal. Little did I know where it would lead. For three years, he and his wife Ann Lee accepted me into their home as one of their own, and I became big brother to daughters Karen and Carolyn. Don and Ann Lee were then and remain mod- els of compassion and graciousness, matched only by their dedication to an ethical life of the mind. In those three short years, Don taught me to be honest about what I know, and more importantly, what I do not. It is then to Don and his wife Ann Lee that I dedicate this book, for without their lead, I would never have embarked on this journey.Contents Abbreviations, xxi Transliteration, xxiii Dating Systems, xxv Figures, xxvii Tables, xxix 1. Facing the Peril of Disintegration, 3 » . Coping with the Enigma of Divinity, 45 . Early Formal Theories of Manifest Divinity, 99 . The Ascendency of the Erotic, 139 . Hierarchizing Theologies, Sanctioning New Practices, 189 (Oy Oi too) . The Rhetoric of Primer, Commentary, Canon, 233 7. A Phenomenology of Repetition The Self-Replicating Community, 273 8. The Legacy of the Caitanya Caritamrta Four Examples in the Grammar of Mimicry, 317 Personae, 367 Bibliography, 381 Index, 409Abbreviations AR BhP BhR BhRS CBh cc CCA CCN DMC GDK GGUD GLA HBhV JCM KBhA KCC KCCM LCM LM Anuragavalli of Manohara Dasa [Bengali] Bhagavata purdna of Veda Vyasa [Sanskrit] Bhaktiratnakara of Narahari Cakravarti [Bengali and Sanskrit] Bhaktirasamrtasindhu of Rapa Gosvami [Sanskrit] Caitanya bhagavata of Vrndavana Dasa [Bengali] Caitanya caritamrta of Krsnadasa Kaviraja [Bengali and Sanskrit] Caitanyacandramrta of Prabodhananda Sarasvati [Sanskrit] Caitanyacandrodaya nataka of Kavikarnapiira [Sanskrit] Caitanya tattva pradipa of Vrajamohana Dasa [Bengali and Sanskrit] Dinamanicandrodaya of Manohara Dasa [Bengali] Kadaca of Govinda Dasa [Bengali] GauraganoddeSadipika of Kavikarnapiira [Sanskrit] Govindalilamrta nataka of Krsnadasa Kaviraja [Sanskrit] Haribhaktivilasa of Goplala Bhatta [Sanskrit] Caitanya mangala of Jayananda [Bengali] Karnananda of Yadunandana Dasa [Bengali and Sanskrit] Krgnabhajanamgta of Narahari Sarakara [Sanskrit] snacaitanyacaritamyta of Murari Gupta [Sanskrit] Krsnacaitanyacaritamrta mahakavya of Kavikarnapira [Sanskrit] Caitanya marigala of Locana Dasa [Bengali] Lalitamadhava nataka of Ripa Gosvami [Sanskrit]oxi NV PV RM RTS SDK UNM VM ABBREVIATIONS Narottama vildsa of Narahari Cakravarti [Bengali] Prema vilasa of Nityananda Dasa [Bengali] Rasika maigala of Gopijanavallabha Dasa [Bengali] Rasatattvasara of Rasikacandra Dasa [Bengali] Kadacé of Svariipa Damodara [Sanskrit] Ujivalanilamani of Ripa Gosvami [Sanskrit] Vivarta vildsa of Akificana Dasa [Bengali] Vidagdhamadhava of Rapa Gosvami [Sanskrit]Transliteration Standard English transliteration for Sanskritic alphabets has been adopted for use with both Sanskrit and Bengali words. In all cases, the vernacular apocope has been avoided in favor of transliterating the final inherent vowel, though this choice to follow orthography will not accurately represent the sounds of spoken Bengali. Because, compared to most other vernaculars, Bengali orthography follows more closely that of Sanskrit, the advantage is to make otherwise unintelligible words comprehensible to a broader audience, for example, yoga instead of jog, or the goddess Sarasvati instead of Shorshoti. This choice will, however, produce occasional awkward looking words and phrases, for instance the common name Sarkar will appear as Sarakara; there was no way to selectively apply the principles. I have chosen to transliterate Bengali and Sanskrit words which have otherwise already found their way comfortably into English because the semantic field of the English term is often truncated from the source language, so expect words such as guru and dharma to be transliterated and italicized throughout. Following the convention adopted for the translation of the Caitanya caritamrta (pp. xxxi-xxxii), the sole exception to this decision is the Anglicized “ghat,” which carries precisely the same meaning in Bengali and Sanskrit, and which becomes difficult to recognize in full transliteration, e.g., ghafa. Diacritics have been left on anglicized words if needed, e.g., Vaisnavism. Place names will generally follow the fully transliterated form, e.g., Varanasi instead of Benares, Ganga in place of Ganges, and so forth. Only the first word of the title ofXXIV TRANSLITERATION Sanskrit and Bengali texts has been capitalized (since no capital exists in those scripts), but the entire title will be italicized. Some names of Arabic or Persian origin will retain more familiar forms that strict orthography would dictate be- cause of the inherent difficulties and consistent techniques of transliterating these languages into Bengali. When hyphenating transliterated terms, we have made every effort to avoid breaking sandhi and to maintain the syllabic structure of the original Sanskrit or Bengali, rather than follow English hyphenation rules.Dating Systems Four separate dating systems are used by the texts to which there will be reference; the fifth, the commonly used western system, is sometimes also used by modern Bengali critical studies. + AD and CE, the traditional western system; + barigala Saka (BS), derived by subtracting 593 from the western date; + gaurabda or gaurangabda (GA), a system that begins its dating with Caitanya’s birth in 1486 AD; + Saka, the dates of which can be approximately derived by subtracting 78 from the western date; + samvat, add 57 to the western date.Figures Figure 1. Figure 3. Figure 5.1. Figure 5.2. Figure 5.3. Figure 5.4. Figure 6.1. Figure 6.2. Figure 6.3. Figure 6.4. Relationship of Religious Ideal to Religious Biography, 11 The Poles of Vaisnava Divinity and Their Features, 103 The Avatara System, 206 Radha Tattva of Krsna’s Svartipa Sakti, 207 Progressive Hierarchy of Bhavas, 212 Type of Love Generated by Emotional Attitude, 213 Homologous Forms of Divinity, 236 The Intellectual and Theological Genealogy of the Caitanya Caritamyta, 256 Complementary Organization of Caitanya Bhagavata and Caitanya Caritamyta, 260 Formation of Hagiographical Canon, 264Tables Table 5.1. Vilasa Division of Krsna’s Tadekatma Ripa, 203 Table 5.2. Manvantara Incarnations, 204 Table 5.3. Maiijari Identities in the Siksatattvadipika, 227 Table 5.4. Maiijari Identities in the Manast Seva, 229 Table 6. Sources for the Construction of the Caitanya Caritamrta, 249The Final WordI Facing the Peril of Disintegration Srirapera grantha gaude haibe pracare / ke karibe hena keho na dekhi sarpsare / grantha anusare dharma saba pracaribe | Apanara nija dharma palana karibe |/ purwe kahiachi yara yeripa karana / seiriipe sarwajane karabe Siksana // ei mora nija karyya sabadhane yabe/ ye mata gosahira ajfid te mata karibe // —Prema vilasa, 12 Take the books of Ripa [Gosvami] and make them known throughout Bengal. I can think of no one in this world better suited to the task. Promulgate the righteous life of dharma according to the writ of those books—but take care to mind your personal obligations and conduct. Instruct everyone according to the strategies I have taught you before. This task was entrusted to me, and now it falls to you. Just as [Ripa] Gosvami ordered, so you must do. .. . 1.1. A Promise to Proselytize in the Name of Caitanya These words of Jiva Gosvami quietly dissolved the tranquility of his two best students, Srinivasa and Narottama Dasa, who sat attentively in the hut of one of their teachers in the village of Vrndavana. That day they had suspended their routine study and meditation to celebrate kirtana, devotional singing in praise of their lord Krsna, and to worship his different images in temples that, like the strings of flowers they offered, garlanded this small town on the banks of the Yamuna River. This village, defined by its special forest groves, had become one of the most important pilgrimage centers for all Vaisnavas, as the devotees of Krsna or Visnu were called, and4 ‘THE FINAL WORD these two young devotees had dedicated themselves to a life of service there. Vrndavana was unlike other places on this earth, for it was here the tradition declares that Krsna descended to experience the love of the local cowherd girls, the gopis; and that love, so glowingly recorded in the ancient revelation of the Bhagavata purdana, has subsequently served as the model for human devotion to god. But for all the pleasures had by Krsna, he had not been sated, so his follow- ers believed that he had reappeared in their own historical time in the form of a Bengal brahmana-turned-ascetic, whose religious name was Krsna Caitanya (1486-1533). Caitanya taught that all devotion begins with a simple chanting of the name of God, a mantra, for that name will begin a process of transformation that will change the very nature of the devotee. These two young men had been changed, becoming devotees or bhaktas of Caitanya, and so great was their transformation that they had walked more than eight hundred miles from Bengal to Vrndavana to study with men who had known the Master and who had been sent by him earlier in the century to recover the badly overgrown and lost sites where they believed he had played in the previous age as Krsna. Those earliest devotees were more than religious archaeologists, they were scholars who had been deputed to gather and compose texts so they might better explain the religious devotion, bhakti, that Caitanya had revealed. They had, by all accounts, been successful in finding a way to transport themselves into the mythic world opened to them by Caitanya, and for that they bore the honorary title of Gosvami, literally the lords of cows, most beloved among cowherds, sig- nifying their réle as eternal servants of their pastoral God. It was to learn the bases of this developing theology and the ritual application of it that these young devotees had made their way to Vrndavana several years earlier. The eldest of these two students was Srinivasa, a brahmana who had aban- doned considerable fortune in Bengal to study with the surviving Gosvami adepts; he had just been awarded the academic title of “acarya” or “accom- plished instructor” for his knowledge of the Bhagavata purana and his mastery of the devotional system developed to explain it. Narottama, a kayastha by birth and a prince by position and wealth, had followed a path similar to that of his senior companion and was declared to be “thakura” or “master” for an equiva- lent accomplishment, the slightly lower but often interchangeable title perhaps reflecting his non-brahmana status. With but a single utterance, the idyllic life we might have expected for them was reoriented to an active life of public serv- ice in their homelands. They were to be sent away, effectively banished from the holy forests where their Lord Krsna and his beloved Radha had passed so many nights anxious in the passion of their love, banished from the service of their teachers, gurus who by tradition were themselves gods to their disciples. It is hard to imagine what went through the minds of these men as they were ordered half a continent away from the very source of all they deemed good in this world, for they had spent long years of their devotional lives reaching the place. According to the famous account in the seventeenth century Prema vildsa,FACING THE PERIL OF DISINTEGRATION 5 they wept for three hours, inconsolable, before settling into the determined execution of their task.! They really had no choice, for the command of the guru cannot but be obeyed, and not only obeyed, but without protest. Still, they could not fathom what personal fault they might blame, what egregious failing in conduct could have been sufficient to elicit such a harsh karmic reprisal as this seemed to be; but they were disciplined and committed, so they began that evening to take their leave, dedicated to a new life they could scarcely conceive. No one knows exactly when this fateful order was given. Historians have proposed dates as early as 1576 and as late as 1615, and that question we will consider briefly later; but for now, the precise time is of considerably less con- sequence than what seems to have transpired and, even more importantly, how the tradition chooses to remember it, for these two men, joined by a third named Syamananda, a caste sadgopa from Orissa, would over the following decades change the face of the Vaisnava religion in eastern India. The emo- tional bhakti that had inspired thousands of devotees for close to a century through the example of Caitanya, they would now begin to organize into a formal tradition that would ultimately lay claim to the title of anew sampradaya or established Vaisnava order that would go by the name of Gaudiya, after its origin in the Gauda region of Bengal.? Where many prominent devotees of Caitanya in Bengal had developed considerable followings of their own, many of which had grown to be quite independent if not disparate in form and prac- tice, this trio would work to consolidate them into a common community, while standardizing their different rituals according to graded principles of efficacy, finding for each a place in this new world order whose details their teachers had conceived as a hierarchy of inclusion for all Vaisnava devotees, no matter their persuasion. And where the leaders of these devotional branches in Ben- gal had commissioned hagiographies of Caitanya, each portraying the line- age’s perspective on his “descent” (or “incarnation,” as avatara is routinely, but slightly misleadingly translated), this trio would help to rectify those some- times conflicting biographical images by integrating them into a comprehen- sive theology that included all and eliminated none, but gave decisive priority to the vision of his divinity that had guided the Gosvamis from the start of their mission in far-away Vrndavana. It is worth remembering that the communities could not have been subsequently integrated unless they perceived some need 1. Nityénanda Dasa, Prema vilésa, ed. Ramandrayana Vidyaratna (Murshidabad: Haribhakti Pradayini Sabha at Radharamana Press of Baharamapura, 406 Ga [1298 Bs]), p. 159; hereafter cited as PV. 2. There were originally four other sampradayas recognized by the Gaudiya Vaignavas, founded by the historical figures of Ramanuja (11th c.), Madhva or Anandatirtha (1 th c.), Nimbarka (13th c.), and Vellabha (15-16th c.); the Gaudiya sampradaya constitutes the fifth and the only one named after a geographic region, Gauda. Some would have the Gaudiyas be a subgroup of the Madhva, but this is not the most commonly held view within the community itself. There is a vocal subset of followers today, primarily based in Vraja, now re- ferring to their sampradaya as the Caitanya Vaisnavas, although that term is almost never heard in West Bengal or Bangladesh where the overwhelming majority of followers reside.6 THE FINAL WORD or advantage in doing so, and unless the bases for integration were consistent with what they already accepted to be true; they had to share a common interest, so this makes Srinivasa, Narottama Dasa, and Syamananda “mission- aries” of a different sort, their goal of revival being one of reorientation rather than a radical reversal or displacement of belief and practice. By the time Srinivasa and his companions made their way to Bengal, the minute differ- ences in the ways the early devotional communities interpreted the divinity of Caitanya had developed into potentially disintegrating centrifugal trajectories of theology and ritual, and any solution that could reverse or slow this segregat- ing process would have to explain them all. It would be the job of these emis- saries to provide that explanation, but they would have to establish their own authority for doing so and that would revolve around a novel strategy that took advantage of a new Bengali medium of theological discourse: hagiography. In retrospect, we can see now that Gaudiya Vaisnavas were unusual among religious groups of their time, for when they at first expressed their differences over theology and the nature of devotion, they staked their claims largely through the medium of religious biography, in their portrayals of Caitanya, the man they knew to be God.’ Religious biography already had a long history in other parts of India, but in Bengal it emerged in this period as the favored theological, and ultimately political, tool. In this northeastern region, language too had an impact on the genres that proved to be viable vehicles of theological discourse, and in Bengali, poetry and narrative were more comfortable forms than the analytic expository style of a philosophy written in Sanskrit. That is not to say that their philosophical literature is deficient, in fact far from it; it is just that that realm of abstraction was and remains the preserve of a select few and, as will become apparent, those few do it with an insight and intelligence that matches the best anywhere. But bhaktiis a religion of the heart, no matter how much it is analyzed, and the heart of this group was Caitanya himself. Common devotees who simply knew him as Krsna loved him as one of their own, for he showed them the way to an eternal love that crossed all distinctions of social rank, age, and gender. The acts of Caitanya inspired their devotion by example, and the subsequent portrayal of those acts in the hagiographies reflected the ways he had affected those devotees: Caitanya gave shape to their religious life and they shaped and reshaped what Reynolds and Capps coined the “biographical image.” It is clear from the outset that Caitanya’s biographical image was never simply the reported facts of his life, though on that there is 3. The theoretical distinctions proposed by Frank Reynolds and Donald Capps in the introduction to The Biographical Process: Essays in the History and Psychology of Religion (The Hague: Mouton, 1976) that defines “hagiography “as the life ofa saint or exemplar of the religious ideal, in opposition to “sacred biogra- phy” as the life of a founder of a new religious ideal, unfortunately does not hold in the biographies of Cai- tanya, for each biography views him both ways due to the unusual theology that developed around him. He exemplifies Krsna’s religious devotion and promotes a new path for the Kali Age at the same time, The terms biography, religious biography, sacred biography, and hagiography will be considered equivalents, with con- text making clear when more technical connotations are intended.FACING THE PERIL OF DISINTEGRATION 7. agreement enough to satisfy all but the most cynical of historians; rather these biographies are concerned with the meaning of that life, and each time they presented that life they interpreted it through the prism of their particular the- ology and expectation, the religious ideal as each author had come to know it.‘ Some of the authors were gifted in articulating complex images of Caitanya, while others struggled simply to portray their joy at his appearance. It should come as no surprise that Caitanya inspired his followers differ- ently, so while they were unanimous in seeing in him the living image of Krsna and were equally committed to the religious rituals he taught, especially the chanting of the names of God in kirtana, they did disagree about the precise way he could be identified with Krsna, about how that identity affected the injunction to perform ritual in daily life. In this they are no different from other religious communities as they tried to establish precisely what was devotionally acceptable, and it would be easy to draw parallels, especially with religions that see their founders as God. Where they do differ is the way they relied on biog- raphies of their founder to justify each devotional lineage in the group, so much so that without a biography to call their own, we can hardly identify other contemporary communities who might have believed in Caitanya’s divinity. Put another way, for a group to be considered a legitimate member of what would become the Gaudiya community, it must have a leader who was recog- nized as one of Caitanya’s intimate followers; but among the several hundred candidates, only a few prominent devotees commissioned hagiographies and their groups are, some four and one-half centuries later, generally deemed central to the organization of the community as a whole. Theirs became the primary guru lineages, paramparas.° Because the memory of Caitanya was fresh when the hagiographers wrote—the first biography was finished the year he died—one cannot but come away with a sense of joy and sadness in the nar- ratives of these documents, and in that their erudition is mixed with an 4. For our purposes the term “biographical image” will follow the technical definition provided by Reynolds and Capps in the introduction to The Biographical Process. The biographical image is composed of the life story of the individual in question (bios) as it is shaped by the controlling religious ideal the individual taught or embodied in action. This construct provides a model through which we can articulate the distortions of history in the service of other concerns and at the same time demonstrate how the historical acts and con- text help to shape the ways religious ideals are both conceived and applied. ‘5. While commissioning a hagiography might be considered a necessary condition for establishing authority during the first generation, it was not sufficient, as some hagiographies are mentioned but no longer extant. In later generations, especially prominent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, writing a commentary on Kssnadasa Kaviraja’s Caitanya caritémrta becomes a necessary condition, and after the advent of printing, prepar- ing an edition, often with commentary, seems to have supplanted that necessary step. For the text, see Krsnadasa Kaviraja, Caitanya caritamyta, ed. with the commentary Gaurakrpataraniginitika by Radhagovinda Natha, 4th ed., 6 vols. (Kalikata: Sadhana Prakaani, 1369 8s); hereafter cited as CC. All textual references wll be to section Il), chapter (pariccheda), and verse(s).It should be noted that few of the editions differ, though enumeration of ver- sification makes it appear so; Radhagovinda Natha numbers slokas separately from the Bengali payéra, where the Gaudiya Matha edition numbers them sequentially with the Bengali payara, which will be indicated in parentheses as GM, see Krsnadasa Kaviraja, Caitanya caritamrta, ed.,intro., and notes by Bhaktikevala Audulomi Maharaja, with the commentary Amrtaprabaha bhdgya of Saccidananda Bhaktivinoda Thakura and the Anubhasya of Barsobhinavidayita Dasa, sth ed. (Kalikaté: Gaugiya Matha, 1364 8s (c. 1957).8 THE FINAL WORD intensely human presence in a way that seems to belie any thought of a remote divinity; Caitanya was continually present and alive to them. To hear these tales, even with the wooden ear of a foreigner centuries removed, is to come away with a profound impression of the personality of the man Caitanya and those around him, situated squarely in a historical India of the sixteenth century. The exuberance with which Caitanya was celebrated in writing marks a departure from other religious traditions of the time in both the number and the volume of these foundation documents, and that rich cache of early devo- tional writing gives us a chance to see the way that a community came to create itself in the reflection of its founder. Even though Caitanya himself apparently never deliberately set out to create a movement, his followers made it so; and because he left only the most general and sparse directions—occasional instruction in kirtana and his injunction to Ripa and Sanatana to write the theology following the lead of a Sridhara, a commentator on the Bhagavata purana—it is no wonder that the different groups of his followers struggled for the better part of a century to reach a working consensus about the nature of their organization. The struggle does not, however, appear to have been overly contentious, with one or two minor exceptions, but simply reflected the myriad of spiritual struggles as each major figure around Caitanya endeavored to make some sense of Caitanya’s divinity and his relation to it. The different groups already cohered in their common interest in following Caitanya, so the hagiographies provided one of two genres of common ground, the other being the devotional lyric literature or padavali (singular pada).° Most padavali, however, were a celebration of Krsna (those devoted to Caitanya constitute between 10 and 15 percent of the total, depending on the anthology),’ which meant that it was the hagiographies that played the larger réle in institutional- izing beliefs and practices. It would be the last of these hagiographies that would prove to be the key to the organization of the entire community and would become the tool by which that deferred promise finally could be real- ized by the trio of devotees. We might even go so far as to argue that precisely because it did these things there was no more need for new hagiographies, that is, by its virtuosity it closed out other options. The story we are about to tell is the record of that struggle to resolve the differences among the many theories of Caitanya’s divinity in the service of creating a coherent religious community. But to do that we must examine how theological and ritual claims were made in connection to Caitanya, and how his followers could use those successfully in the subsequent generations to 6. The largest collection of padavaliis the Padakalpataru compiled by Vaisnava Dasa, ed. and intro. by Satigacandra Raya, 5 vols., Sahitya Parisat Granthavali 50 (Kolkata: Ramakamala Simha for the Bafigiya ‘Sahitya Parisat, 1322~38 Bs). 7. For the most complete collection of lyrics devoted to Caitanya, see Gaurapadataraigipi, comp. Jagadbandhu Bhadra and ed. Mrnalakanti Ghosa, 2nd ed., Sahitya Parisad Granthavali 10 (Kolkata: Baigiya Sahitya Parisat, 1341 BS).FACING THE PERIL OF DISINTEGRATION 9, create a de facto normative standard in the absence of any institutionalized sanctioning authority. It is not an “orthodoxy” because that suggests a uniform ideational and doctrinal standard to which everyone is pressured to adhere. It is more of a doxa, in Bourdieu’s use of the term,® a way to circumscribe a lim- ited number of possible acceptable ways of acting (and the act is the emphasis, not the thought); but it never prescribes a monolithic orthopraxy, preferring a continuum of alternatives, which are in the final analysis graded according to their efficacy, not their theoretical brilliance. Tracing the creation of that nar- rative standard is the story of how a religious community created and defined itself without a clear line of leadership or centralized institutional base for sanctioning what is proper, without an anointed successor to Caitanya’s central position, but more than that, how it established a set of working theo- logical propositions that gave credence to the de facto flexible structure the communities had created. Each generation was charged with the responsibility of revalorizing its tradition without destroying it, to make it relevant to a con- temporary world without having to diverge from the general consensus of its broad normative ideals, to make its history relevant, much as Dilthey argued we must. We might think of this process as the fixing of a “grammar” of Vaisnava ritual and theology as the basis for continuing community, a self- correcting strategy by which a tradition was made to live, and by which they constructed what passes for reality. This grammar would include not only propositions about the world, but working presuppositions and the learned rhetorical strategies to convey them and the practical acts to instantiate the perceived reality. This grammar, as we shall see, eventually permeates all phases of the Gaudiya Vaisnava world, structuring individual and group expe- rience, structuring community, structuring the tradition’s own history. Apart from individualized instruction, which was by necessity unique and tailored to the individual, the most common delivery mechanism for standardizing these principles for a larger audience in the first generations would prove to be sacred biography. And it was the last biographer, Krsnadasa, who most clearly demonstrated the strategies, rhetorical and otherwise, by which this could be accomplished. His word would prove to be final in these matters. Biographical Fictions, Historiography, and Theological Claims At least a dozen biographies were composed in Sanskrit and Bengali in the century following his death, and seven have survived complete, giving contem- porary readers well over one hundred thousand verses of primary hagiographic 8. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice, Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology 16 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), esp. pp. 164-7110 THE FINAL WORD narrative. It should never be forgotten that in spite of the plethora of narrative material, these documents seldom provide the empirical evidence through which one can reconstitute a factual history, although that is certainly the way they have most frequently been used by scholars. Undoubtedly there are many facts to be found, and there can be little reason to doubt the basic historical outline, for occasional independent corroboration has borne out their conten- tions. The presentation of facts however is nearly always colored, if not domi- nated, by devotional concerns that prove to be of far greater import to the authors and their communities. These are sacred histories. They must be un- derstood, then, as historical “fictions” in the original sense of that term, not something that is untrue, but something that is constructed or fabricated im- aginatively to explain an event or experience; they are not impersonal cata- logues of people, places, and dates.’ They follow, for the most part, traditional narrative chronologies that are in their general form realistic in presentation, for they take historical events as the basis for their writing; but they present and interpret these events through the lens of their religious commitment in a very personal way—and that personal perspective invariably reflects the theo- logical and ritual training of each author and his attempt to present the life of Caitanya as his guru saw him. It is useful to remember Reynolds’s and Capps’s construct of the “biographical image” as a starting point for conceptualizing the problem, shifting as much of the attention to the author as to the ostensible subject. In this case the gaze is extended not only to the author, but to the author as an appointed representative of a guru lineage or community. Through this connection of subject-author-community we have the most pre- cise linking of specific historical social units to a manifest agenda; no other documents make this link in quite the same way for this period, mainly be- cause these biographies describe Caitanya only in the context of his commu- nity or communities. Most of these iriterpretations, however, are as much overt as simply assumed, and in that sense they appear to be naively unself-conscious, for they speak with the conviction of the unmitigated truth; yet for all their sim- plicity of form, these documents can be deceptively sophisticated, presenting theology, ritual preference, and history blended into narrative form; to make Caitanya’s life and message accessible, they tell stories. But if they are to be treated as fictions in Hayden White’s sense of the term, they are of a special sort because they are writing a narrative in the service of religious commitment. When analyzing the strategy of the author of a religious biography to the biographical subject, Reynolds and Capps have suggested that there has been a tendency to emphasize either the “individual life” per se or the “biographical image”; and in the history of religions, the academic analysis has tended to split 9. The use of “fiction” and “imagination” by Hayden White is certainly germane to this discussion. See his Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), and his Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), esp. the first five chapters.FACING THE PERIL OF DISINTEGRATION 11 MYTH History Sacred Biography Critical Biography creates exemplifies explicates _ demythologizes FIGURE I. Relationship of Religious Ideal to Religious Biography. along the same lines, which reflects the fundamental division between “history” and “myth” respectively. The former addresses the structure and dynamics of individual lives, which make up the individual circumstances of important his- torical religious figures. In contrast, the study of the biographical image is as much or more concerned with the religious ideal taught or embodied by the biographical subject than with that subject’s life itself. The biographical image represents the life of the individual in the light of a religious ideal; it concen- trates on the mythic content of the life.° What is central to this enterprise then and to the interpretation of sacred biography generally is the preoccupation with the “religious ideal,” for that is the truth that the author perceives in the life of the subject, which in its most general presentation is the myth that imparts meaning; the religious ideal is the concern of Caitanya’s biographers— and Caitanya was understood to have created as well as embodied that ideal. These religiously motivated fictions, what we generally call “sacred biography,” are opposed to the academic and generally nonsectarian “critical biography,” which do not seek to persuade along religious lines (although they are certainly capable of committing to intellectual, if not ideological, biases), explicating, if not effectively demythologizing, the same subject (see figure 1). As the name implies, “critical biography” attempts to represent and understand the indi- vidual’s life, especially the religious life, from the perspective of an ostensibly disinterested observer. Although this style of biography does not presuppose that the author is a nonpractitioner or that he is not involved in the religious life of his subject, critical biography must generally suppress the author’s per- sonal belief. This is so because biographies in this mode tend to emphasize the historical pole of the myth-history continuum and avoid making truth claims based on religious commitment. Critical biography aims for the ever-elusive ideal of historical appraisal devoid of sectarian bias, what has often been 10, In the Reynolds and Capps scheme, these two foci, ie., the individual life vs. the biographical im- age, emerge respectively as the study of “men of genius” as opposed to “hero myths” in psychology, as the study of the “life history” versus the “cultural model” in anthropology, and as “critical biography” in opposi- tion to “sacred biography” in the history of religions; The Biographical Process, pp. 27-28.12 THE FINAL WORD erroneously referred to as objectivity, a goal in which there is little scope to introduce personal religious commitment if the study is to maintain a disinter- ested air. The reason is clear enough. As soon as the author’s own religious belief is interjected to any discernible degree into the narrative, the biography begins to shift its focus toward the subject’s religious ideal, and the history that is discernible shifts from the ostensible subject (the individual about whom the biography purports to be) to the documentation of the belief, systematic and doctrinal, or a more general history of ideas surrounding the individual and his biographical authors.'' Modern apologetic biography attempts to present a theologically committed but rational presentation that mimics critical biography, attempting to co-opt the critical, so-called scientific mode of discourse in a sophisticated effort to persuade the skeptical reader, an act that blurs the distinction between sacred and critical biography and sits between the polar ori- entations of myth and history. Not insignificantly and as will become apparent, among the texts under scrutiny, those that share this propensity, that is blending an elevated erudition with the passion of devotion, tend to dominate the rest. The orientation of the author to the subject is, however, but the first step in utilizing these documents for reconstructing any kind of history. Classifying the text in and of itself requires us to make value judgments regarding the author’s religious orientation, if not commitment. But when we shift the focus from the ostensible subject to the author, that is when we examine the religious commit- ment of these men (and all of the authors in this study are) as a factor of compo- sition, we must take into account two methodological issues that are immediately germane to the analytical categories of fiction and history in this context. First, where many scholars in the last two centuries have erred in their historical reconstructions is in forgetting that biographies such as Caitanya’s are highly motivated, which is to say, they as scholars have often naively accepted sacred biography as a form of critical biography by the simple removal of events and stories that have an obvious mythic basis, a kind of mechanical demythologization based on positivist principles, the most controversial of which exercises is attributed to Amilyacandra Sena for his iconoclastic Itihasera Sricaitanya or “The Caitanya of History,” a book so decried by the public that the publisher withdrew it from circulation.” Plausibility, however, is not a reliable standard for determining what Caitanya’s texts meant and what their authors were trying to accomplish; plausibility can only produce a simulacrum of (often arbitrarily) determined possible events, which constitutes 11, For the issue of the “ostensible subject” see: Tony K. Stewart, “The Subject and the Ostensible Sub- ject: Mapping the Genre of Hagiography among South Asian Chishts,” in Contemporary Islam Between The- ‘ory and Practice, ed, Carl W. Ernst and Richard Martin (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010, 227-44). 12, Amilyacandra Sena, Itihdsera Sricaitanya (Kalikata: Kirapa Kumara Raya through Sarasvata Laibrerl, 1965). So complete was this effacement that when I visited the publisher in 1981 with a copy of the title page in hand, the manager of the press simply told me that I was mistaken, that it was not their press. Fortunately several copies survived the recall, including one in my possession.FACING THE PERIL OF DISINTEGRATION 13, an acceptable reading for a given interpreter according to the standards of a particular period. Plausibility in no way accounts for the texts as whole nor does it explain any of the rejected material, much of which constitutes the most important religious statements regarding Caitanya’s divinity—what has been designated in general terms as its myth. Plausibility, coupled generally with the concept of consistency, tends to be the bias of scholars accepting a “scientific” (or at least pseudoscientific) ideology. What constitutes the plausible must be adjusted to account for the prevailing pragmatic and logical presuppositions of the text’s discursive arena; for instance, what are the rules by which inference can be deemed valid, what are the acceptable genres for expressing such no- tions as divinity, and so forth.’* Any reading that attempts to understand these texts as the religious biographies they are must account for the theological as- sertions, the rhetorical strategies, and the traditional narrative conventions of the genre, if these stories are to make any historical sense, for they not only tell ofa history, but constitute one themselves. They refer to Caitanya and his fol- lowing, giving a version of his life as their primary concern; at the same time, they document their own biases and prejudices, providing a secondary history of their authors and their times. For those texts that have commentaries, we can add a third dimension, a glimpse into the communities that consumed them. Most scholars of this tradition have focused primarily on the former of these three types of histories (subject, author/theology/community, commentator/ community) through a kind of triangulation procedure that has operated on the assumption that, with sufficient cross-referencing, valid historical data about the primary referents (Caitanya and his following) will emerge. The work of check- ing and collating these thousands of internal references has produced a wide scholarship that has already probably come about as close as anyone could ever hope to mapping the possible contours of Caitanya’s life and that of his primary followers, as evidenced through the encyclopedic compilations of Haridasa Dasa’s Gaudiya vaisnava abhidhana, Rabindrandtha Maiti’s Caitanya parikara, and Walther Eidlitz’s Krsna-Caitanya: Sein Leben and Seine Lehre." That pri- mary history, we will argue, is simply a more refined fiction of the events, how- ever probable or otherwise (by what really amounts to positivist standards); it has little relation to what the devotional community has come to accept over the last several centuries. To view it as anything more is to give it a validity that the methods for its reconstruction do not warrant, that is, its historical value is as much for its own formulations as for its ostensible subject. But it does reveal a 13, Jonathan Culler, “Presuppositions and Intertextualit Pp. 1380-96. 14, Among the myriad of sources, see Haridasa Dasa, Gaudiya vaisnava abhidhana, 4 pts. in 2 vols. (Navadvipa: by the editor at Haribol Kutira, 471 Ga); and Rabindranatha Maiti, Caitanya parikara, with a fore- word by Sukumara Sena (Kalikata: Bookland Pvt. Ltd, nd, [1962]). Perhaps the most thorough reconstruction of the life of Caitanya as a composite ofall ofthe tales from the biographies is by Walther Eidlitz, Krsna-Caitanya: Sein Leben und Seine Lehre, Stockholm Studies in Comparative Religion 7 (Stockholm: Almgyist and Wiksell, 1968), a critical biography that blends parts ofthe primary sources into a synthetic and consistent portrayal. .” Modem Language Notes 91 (1976):14 THE FINAL WORD unique tendency among Gaudiya Vaisnava authors, that is, a reluctance to con- tradict other hagiographers, a tendency that has had enormous implications for understanding the rhetorical strategies used to argue difference. The secondary history—that of the authors—has been largely ignored, with one monumental exception: the Sri caitanya caritera upadana of B. B. Majumdara.!° Today we do not have access to the primary object of the biography, the biographical subject Caitanya, nor do we have access to the first-hand accounts of his immediate fol- lowers, for the simple fact that we are too removed historically; but what we do have are physical texts, nearly all of which have physical pedigrees that stretch back nearly to the time of their composition, and in some cases, including the original documents. Those texts provide the basis for a secondary history that focuses on the authors as purveyors, if not conceivers, of Caitanya’s tradition. This secondary history provides a firmer picture of the intellectual and religious life of the community by making the biographies themselves the object of the inquiry—and that leads us to the second general methodological consideration. Since the emergence of deconstruction as a mode of literary and now more general cultural analysis, and which now the various poststructuralist camps have modified, centuries-old assumptions about the relationship of the author to his or her work have been questioned to the point of a nearly analytical ‘orce between the two. Starting with Barthes and Derrida, the long-held belief that the personal biography of the author would yield insights into the literary work, according to the terms of their discourse, has been effectively eliminated by demonstrating the epistemological impossibility of determining authorial intention (even though privately many literary critics, especially literary historians, still turn to those biographies in search of insight).'* This camp proposes that we simply cannot know what an author intends, no matter what we are told in the work itself because the work is ultimately a fiction, a world that is constituted entirely of itself, by its own language. Any additional information we may have about the author is extraneous to the text itself and should not bear on a text’s interpretation, for there is no necessary link be- tween the author’s personal history and what is written; while it may be prob- able, it is in no way necessary or causal. In their terms, texts speak only to a world of other texts. No matter how counterintuitive this appears at first sight, the literary work as conceived by Machery and, to a lesser extent, Bakhtin and others, becomes a world unto itself with no other referent than other literary 15. Bimanabihari Majumdara, Sri caitanya caritera upadana, 2nd ed. (Calcutta: Calcutta University ress, 1959). This thorough study examines each major biography of Caitanya and evaluates its manuscript and printing traditions, dating issues, and most importantly, its theological perspective, which forms the basis of this secondary history. The current work is heavily indebted to Majumdara’s lead. 16. Printed many times over, see Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” in The Rustle of Lan- ‘guage, trans, by Richard Howard (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 49-555 and Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), a8 good starting places for this now vast literature,FACING THE PERIL OF DISINTEGRATION 15 works, that is, its confreres in its own discursive realm (though Bakhtin does argue for the inherently political nature of the text).'” The focus of interpreta- tion turns then to the way the text is received by its reader (or auditor), and what that individual construes the text to mean, the response of the reader.’ This would seem to suggest that any attempt on our part to construct what we have termed above a “secondary history” will go for naught because it assumes that the text will reflect, well or poorly depending on the skill of the author, something of the author’s intent. But what that poststructuralist position does not account for is the difference in the source materials of our present study— and any study that involves writers committed to religious practice. Were these texts purely literary—and we have and will continue to deal with them as narrative fictions, which is different from being literary—we might have to concede their divorce from the world of the writer; but these works are religious and devotional and that makes them not only of a different genre, but constitutes them differently as a social reality, the genre dictating an implicit contract between author and reader or auditor. These texts do more than interact with other texts, but also depend on and interact with the cultural texts that constitute the rules of social conduct, logical argument, systematic theology, ritual practice. Writing a sacred biography or hagiography is a reli- gious act, so that when the author tells us that he has written about Caitanya at the behest of his guru, and that he is telling his version of the life to explain what his own religious lineage understands, we can, within certain limits, accept that statement as reflective of the author’s experience, or at least something of what he hopes to convey of his experience (or perhaps even what he hopes his experience was or what he would like people to believe of it). His is most definitely a motivated discourse, but it is not just fictional; it is devotional and theological, and must because of that commitment be accepted as somehow reflective of a personal world. This writing is a public religious act connected to 17. See Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Slavic Series r (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981); and for his relation to members of his school, see Pam Morris, ed., The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, Voloshinov (London: Edwin Arnold, 1994). See also Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey ‘Wall (London and New York: Routledge, 1978). 18, Among the forms of reception aesthetics, starting with that initiated by Hans Robert Jauss at the University of Konstanz, reader-response criticism, which diverges specifically from the initial inquiries of the phenomenology of reading (e.g., Georges Poulet), while refining certain propositions of deconstruction, has greatly enhanced our understanding of the rdle the reader plays in creating the text. The text of course be- comes a variable entity based on what the reader brings to it and how he or she understands it. There is an ‘obvious debt here to basic hermeneutic theory, such as Gadamer’s and of course Ricceur’s; see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroads, 1985) and among his many works, especially note Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984-88) and Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), Of special interest is the approach adopted by Wolgang Iser, The Implied Reader (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974); Wolgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); Peter J. Rabinowitz, Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987); see also the very useful anthology, Jane P. Tompkins, ed., Reader-Response Criticism: From Formal- ‘ism to Post-Structuralism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980).16 THE FINAL WORD a definable social community. The authors, without exception, write at the behest of their gurus, and in so doing inevitably convey something of what the guru deemed important; otherwise the text is not likely to have survived (as several episodes suggest when texts disappointed the author’s teacher and were destroyed). These texts are then sanctioned as representative of a par- ticular lineage, a community of like-minded practitioners. So, as public reli- gious acts, the biographies of Caitanya do not completely sacrifice that link between what is written and what the author heard or understood or was made to understand for the sake of the group; rather, they document the instantia- tion and reification of the import of Caitanya’s life and their connection to it, for the authors routinely insert themselves quite literally into the narrative, not as fictitious voices, but as struggling purveyors of the truth. As truth docu- ments, they set a theological standard for the community and do not behave as purely literary works, no matter the co-opting of several literary genres (and here is part of the novelty of this tradition). The history these texts proclaim is not so much that of Caitanya, but of the religious imagination of the commu- nity that gathered around him—that is how the texts will be used in this study. We will, however, be forced to pay strict attention to the differences in theological and fictional voices in the texts themselves, working on the assump- tion that the former will control the latter, which is to say, the narrative will nearly always sacrifice the niceties of its history to the demands of its theology. Put in Reynolds’s and Capps’s way, the myth that controls the biographical image will dominate the history of the individual life, but the myth (the factors that constitute the religious ideal, most especially theology) will constitute its own history. Those many theological positions found in the biographies are not simply theoretical, but have concrete social ramifications. Furthermore, we will discover that on occasion the facts, by the admission of the author, simply will not yield to the theological impulse, no matter how brave an at- tempt is made to bend them, and these moments often carry great significance for the author as he attempts to reconcile his ideal world with the somewhat uncooperative life of his subject. The uneasiness stems from the réle of the subject, who generally serves as a model for the author’s own devotions. Taken together, these texts dramatically affect the way their readers live their lives because they contain instruction through the example of the subject as ideal devotee, and even more direct descriptions of theological and ritual injune- tions which devotees use as personal guides. At the same time, they not only participate in, but for efficacy depend on, intertextual connections within the tradition that shape and reshape how the texts are read and received.” 19. Although Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973) for a while dominated the discussions of intertextuality, its Freudian insights are provocative, but of somewhat du- bious value here; I have relied much more heavily on the basic formulations of intertextuality of Jonathan Culler’s “Presuppositions and Intertextuality” noted above.FACING THE PERIL OF DISINTEGRATION 7. Reader-response criticism alerts us to the mechanisms by which the succeeding generations in the period of our study—the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (although we could extend this to the present)—tell us precisely how they read these early documents as they formulated and defended their own positions, some of which will have diverged from their predecessors. This constitutes the tertiary history. These intertextual connec- tions nimbly direct the reader to the desired set of related texts, and in so doing, help to shape the contours of the tradition. So while we will see the authors of these biographies of Caitanya articulating their own particular per- spectives, we will also see those authors and their theologies elevated into abstractions that are used to legitimate other books and their proposed the- ologies and rituals as a part of the struggle to persuade the growth of tradi- tion, just as Foucault and others might predict.” Because the community writes largely for itself, the arena of its hagiographic (historical and theologi- cal) discourse—its discursive realm—is tightly circumscribed, and that pro- vides a unique opportunity to document its historical change. The history that is accessible, then, can be approached much more as an intellectual history, the history of the group’s acceptance of the divinity of Caitanya, a history of their search for and portrayal of a solution to the enigma of his descent, and how they might respond both as individuals and collectively as community. In their concerns to consolidate the communities the hagiographers provide an indirect social history. That in turn will provide the basis for establishing how the communities came to organize themselves into a single community, the elements that constitute the grammar of the tradition. This endeavor will ultimately, however, always refer back to the centrality of Caitanya as Lord, the basis for all else within the Gaudiya domain. To try to understand the paradox of Caitanya’s human divinity is not only a theological challenge in its own right, but captures some of the tension that pervades the making of bhakti itself, and with these tensions the biographies are rife. Like all religions that give priority to emotional experience, the spon- taneity of its inspiration inevitably runs counter to the impulse to stabilize it in institutional forms as individuals try to preserve that experience, what Weber might call the routinization of the inspiring charisma. Preservation and per- petuation always require an acute analysis or at least agreement about the nature of that experience in order to be successful, and the emotional experience of bhakti makes for an elusive scholastic target; it resists any attempt to cap- ture it analytically, yet in the early decades of the sixteenth century that task is precisely what Caitanya had set for those adroit scholar-devotees who would make the Gosvami title so respected. While the biographers tried to convey 20. Amonga host of his writings, Foucault's treatment of the “author function” is germane; see Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?” in Critical Theory Since 1965, ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle (Tallahas- see: Florida State University Press, 1986), pp. 138-48.18 THE FINAL WORD the spirit of Caitanya’s devotion so that it was accessible and immediate, the Gosvamis were charged to analyze it, to subject it to the full range of exe- getical strategies available to the classically trained scholar: grammar, logic, metaphysics, poesy, dramaturgy, and aesthetics. Curiously, not every biogra- pher records that Caitanya sanctioned this mission, nor did everyone agree at the time that these chosen men did know better the nature of his devotion, al- though no one seems to have questioned that they were accomplished. The erudition of the Gosvamis seems to have been largely limited to rumor for most of Caitanya’s devotees in Bengal during the middle years of the sixteenth century, but the fact that several of them—Ripa, Sanatana, and Raghunatha Dasa—had been present in the heart of the ascetic community surrounding Caitanya in his later years made for them a special place in the constellation of Caitanya’s following. No matter how sincere their emotional attraction to Krsna or Caitanya was, what people knew of these men was their reputation through distant reports of their writings; there is no evidence that anyone in Bengal was familiar with these texts until about the time of Srinivasa and com- pany’s expedition. And those writings looked at devotion with a scholar’s re- move, a perspective undoubtedly reinforced by their physical remove from the immediate devotional life of Bengal. It would be wrong to over-emphasize this divide, for the Gosvami community kept in fairly close contact with important devotees in Bengal; but what the Gosvamis were trying to do was considerably different in its conception and execution than their counterparts to the east. 1.3. Sanskrit, Bengali, and the Hagiographies of Caitanya Importantly, the Gosvamis wrote in Sanskrit, the ancient language of revela- tion and brahmanical tradition, not the contemporary vernacular Bengali, Caitanya’s own tongue, even though Caitanya clearly knew Sanskrit as his training and other reports suggest. The scholasticism of Sanskrit with its array of sophisticated genres lends its ponderous authority to everything it touches; and even though the devotees had used Sanskrit from the group’s inception, it inevitably contrasted with the vibrancy and inspiration of a new literary Bengali that was still searching for polished forms of expression. In the extreme form of this opposition, we can envision tradition (Sanskrit) pulling against innovation (Bengali), the reifying tendency of a knowledge that suc- cumbs to the standardizing power of its brahmanical institutionalization in rather stark contrast to a devotional experience that is still exploring its own dimensions. Yet in the world they were creating, devotees did not see this as so much of a division, as two dimensions of a common experience of devotion— one rooted in the past with a retrospective slant on authority and revelation, the other in the present with a prospective view of a new dispensation— although the tension was recognized and it was one they struggled to ease. TheFACING THE PERIL OF DISINTEGRATION 19 Sanskrit writings of the Gosvamis and others were not, however, quite as far removed from the Bengali as they might have been, for they dealt with revela- tion as if it were a drama, quite literally, and analyzed it so; and that paralleled the Bengali interest in portraying the living drama of Caitanya’s life in their hagiographies. They applied the aesthetics of drama (as constructed in tradi- tional natya Sastra or drama, literature, and poetry) to devotion; Krsna’s ex- ploits were interpreted through an adapted form of aesthetics as the basis for devotion. At first implicitly, but by the end of the sixteenth century explicitly, Caitanya’s would be too. But as we will see, the expressions of these fictions were not simply portrayals, but were deemed to be the record of revelation it- self: Krsna’s from a transcendent reality visible only to the adept, Caitanya’s from a this-worldly reality visible to all the members of his entourage. This pairing of this-worldly and other-worldly revelation would provide a unique structure to the community, rooting its contemporary historical experience in a permanent world, its myth. This complementary strategy of approaching divinity—Krsna’s and Caitanya’s—would eventually ensure their perpetual consanguinity. By the end of the sixteenth century, this tension was still not wholly resolved into a comfortable rapprochement. At the risk of oversimplify- ing in order to set up the problem, the players in Vrndavana who focused on Krsna and those in Bengal who focused on Caitanya were moving farther apart, which is precisely why the mission of Srinivasa and his companions was needed. Thanks to the demonstrable parallel structure of the revelation of divinity, the effort would to a large degree be successful: they were meeting a very real and perceived practical need to integrate their emotional and intellectual worlds with the world of contemporary history. Asin the experience of bhaktielsewhere in India, the weight of brahmanical tradition, with its impulse to appropriate new ideas by remaking them in the im- age of the old, seemed to run counter to the devotee’s feeling of intimacy with God, which by virtue of its novelty and immediacy tended to bypass and super- sede legislated authority and seek expression in a vernacular more attuned to contemporary apprehensions. Yet recognition and prestige invariably accom- panied the trappings of that older authority, the language of Sanskrit providing the medium for a religious and cultural imperialism that endured precisely be- cause of its ability to be revalorized in generation after generation, the power of making something classical in traditional Indian terms.” Sheldon Pollock has 21. The creation of the literary classic as an object lesson in the extension of imperium is insightfully articulated by Frank Kermode in The Classic: Literary Images of Permanence and Change (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1983); the difference of course is that here the issue is not lit- ‘erature per se, but the narratives of mythic or religious history. Its important to note, however, that the proc- cesses by which writers of Sanskrit appropriate vernacular traditions is the complement to the Sanskritization process first described by M. N. Srinivasa, which looks only at the vernacular tradition attempting to lend greater authority to itself by using Sanskrit and the cultural forms that accompany that standard, which is only half of the process; see the relevant essays in Mysore Narasimhachar Srinivasa, Collected Essays, with a foreword by A. M. Shah (New Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002),20 THE FINAL WORD referred to this function of Sanskrit as the preferred mechanism for establishing something as “really real,” serving as a hyperglossia that transcends the ordinary and limitations of the mundane.” As if in anticipation of this age-old dynamic between Sanskrit and the vernacular Bengali, the first six complete extant bio- graphies of Caitanya were evenly split in their language of composition: three were in Bengali, three in Sanskrit.” The first, the Krsnacaitanyacaritamrta of Murari Gupta, was completed in the year of Caitanya’s death, in Sanskrit, albeit straightforward and unadorned; while easily the most popular biography of this period was written just a few years later in a vigorous Bengali, the Caitanya bhagavata of Vrndavana Dasa.” Two more Bengali texts were rendered in the manigala kavya epic style, which had been inspired by the Sanskrit purapas: the Caitanya marigalas of Locana Dasa’ and Jayananda.”” Kavikarnapira, né Paramananda Sena, a pandita living in Bengal and in Puri wrote early in his career the Sanskrit Krsnacaitanyacaritamyta mahakavya in an ornate poetic style,”* and ended his career in the late sixteenth century with a sophisticated allegorical Sanskrit drama, the Caitanyacandrodaya nataka, the only biographi- cal work in this genre.” All of these biographies were popular, but the Sanskrit texts were never circulated to the degree of the Bengali compositions, whose legacies of manuscripts are astounding even today. The seventh and last 22, Sheldon Pollock, “The Sanskrit Cosmopolis, 300-1300: Transculturation, Vernacularization, and the Question of Ideology” in Ideology and Status of Sanskrit: Contributions to the History of the Sanskrit Language, ed. Jan E. M. Houben (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996), pp. 197-2475 and Sheldon Pollock, “India in the Vernacular Millennium: Literary Culture and Polity, 1000-1500,” in Shmuel Eisenstadt and Wolfgang Schluchter, eds. “Early Modernities,” Daedalus 127, no. 3 (1998): pp. 41-74. Many of these ideas have been extended in Pollock’s The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006). 23. In this period there are references to at least four more hagiographical compositions, one of which ‘we have in part, the rest of which have been lost. ll of the lost compositions are in Bengali, perhaps another commentary on the staying power of Sanskrit composition. 24. Murdri Gupta, Krsnacaitanyacaritémytam, ed. Mrnalakanti Ghosa, Bengali trans. Haridasa Dasa (Kalikata: by the editor, 459 Ga); hereafter cited as KCC. Citation will be to book (prakrama), chap- ter (sarga), and verse(s). 25. Vmndavana Dasa, Caitanya bhagavata, ed. with the commentary Nitdikarunakallolini fika by Radhagovinda Natha, 6 vols. (Kalikata: Sadhana PrakaSani, 1373 BS); hereafter cited as CBh. The textual reference will be to section (khanda), chapter (adhyaya), and verse(s). Again the Gaudlya Matha edition num- bers Sanskrit Slokas sequentially with Bengali payara, and it divides up the chapters differently, especially in the final section, but the texts are otherwise virtually identical; see Caitanya bhdgavata of Vrndivana Dasa, edited with the commentary Gaudiya bhasya by Bhakti Siddhanta Sarasvatl Gosvimi, 3rd. ed. (Kolkata: Bhak- tikevala Audulomi of Gaudiya Mission at Bagabajara Gaudiya Matha, 475 GA). 26. Locana Dasa, Caitanya manigala, edited by Mrnalakanti Ghosa, with the padas of Locana Dasa (Kalikata: Amrtabajara Patrika Office, 1354 Bs), 2.27.2- (p. 78); hereafter cited as LCM. Citation will be to section (khanda), chapter, and page number of the printed text (due to lack of verse numbers). 27. Jayananda Misra, Caitanya masigala, ed. Bimenbehari Majumdar and Sukhamay Mukhopadhyay (Calcutta: The Asiatic Society, 1971); hereafter cited as JCM. Textual reference will be to section (khanda), chapter, and verse(s). 28. KavikarnapOra [Paramananda Sena], Krsnacaitanyacaritémrta mahakavya,ed., intro., and Bengali trans. by Prinakigora Gosvami (Kalikata: by the editor at Sri Gaurfiga Mandira, n.d. [1377 Bs]); hereafter cited as KCCM. Textual reference will be to chapter (sarga) and verse(s). 29. Kavikarnapara (Paramananda Sena), Caitanyacandrodaya nataka, ed., comm. and Bengali trans. Manindrandtha Guha (Panihati, 24 Paragands: Savitri Guha, 1378 Bs); hereafter cited as CCN, Textual refer- ences will be to act (anka) and verse(s).