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RELIGIOUS PROCESS The PuralJas and the Making of a Regional Tradition KUNAL CHAKRABARTI ··- OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS OX.FORD UNIVERSITY l'RUS YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi 110001 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. 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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means. without the prior pennission in writing of Oxford University Press. or as expressly penuitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department. Oxford University Press, at the address above You musl not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer ISBN 019 564989 3 Typeset by Urvashi Press, Meemt 250001 Printed in India at Saurabh Print-o-Pack. Noida, U.P. and published by Manzllr Khan. Oxford University Press YMCA Library Building, jai Singh Road, New Delhi 110001 For my teacher Ashin Das Gupta now a cherished memory Acknowledgements This book took shape over a long period of time, with the help of many teachers, friends, and colleagues. Professor Asbin Das Gupta initiated me into the study of history, and sustained me with his unfailing intell.ectual and emotional support. This book is dedicated to bis memory in the words in which be dedicated bis work to bis teacher, Professor N.K. Sinha. This is my tribute to a tradition to which I have the honour to belong. I am indebted to my teachers at the Presidency College, Calcutta, and the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, for their contribution to my academic d<:velopment. I especially thank Sbri Kamal Kumar Gbatak and Sbri Sunil Kumar Cbattopadbyaya for their interest, patience, and rigour. My advisor, Professor B.D. Cbattopadbyaya, had set a standard of scholarship both daunting and stimulating. He helped me to explore with his suggestions and reflect by his silence. His remarks on the first draft have been invaluable. Professor Romila Tbapar inspired, enriched, and provided support in ways too numerous to mention. I gratefully acknowledge the encouragement and assistance I received from Professor R. Champakalakshmi, Professor Satish Saberwal, Professor Majid Siddiqi, Professor Rajan Gurukkal, Professor Sabyasacbi Bhattacharya, Professor Dilbagh Singh, Dr K. Meenakshi, Dr K.irti Trivedi and Dr Yogesh Sharma. Professor Muzatfar Alam and Professor Neeladri Bhattacharya have been incredibly generous with their time, spurring me on with their friendly criticism and advice. They helped me to sustain my faith in my work. I am indebted to Professor Sbereen Ratnagar for her precise critical comments and editorial suggestions. I have also greatly benefited from the comments of Professor Ludo Rocher, Professor N.N. Bbattacbaryya, and Professor K.M. Shrimali. This book would have been inconceivable without the contribution of scholars who wrote on various aspects of the subject before me. They are acknowledged in the notes, but I would particularly like to mention the seminal works of Professor R.C. Hazra, Professor Niharranjan Ray, viii I Religious Process Professor Shashibbushan Dasgupta, and Dr Hitesranjan Sanyal. I have bad the privilege of knowing Professor Hazra, and I remember with gratitude how tolerantly he entertained and helped to clarify the many queries of a young researcher. Dr Sanyal was an extraordinary man, who had everything to give and little to gain from our many hours of conversation. I am indebted to the staff of the National Library, Asiatic Society, and Bangiya Sahitya Parishat libraries at Calcutta, and the libraries of Jawabarlal Nehru University, Archaeological Survey of India, National Museum, and Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, for their co-operation. I especially thank Mr L.N. Malik of the Jawabarlal Nehru University; I have seldom come across a more quietly helpful person. A British Council visiting fellowship to the Cambridge University enabled me to make use of the libraries in the UK, and gave me the opportunity to interact with Professor F.R. Allchin. I am grateful to Studies in History and the editors of 'Iradition, Dissent and Ideology (Oxford University Press, 1996), who published early versions of parts of this work. Shri Om Prakash typed a difficult manuscript with exemplary competence. My father, Shri Bhabes Chandra Cbalcrabarti, and my uncle, Professor Satyes Chakrabarti, are two of the best teachers I have ever had. I thank my mother, Ms Manjusri Chakrabarti for her concern. My friends, Professor Sudip Chaudhuri, Professor Biswajit Dhar, Dr Pinaki Chakrabarti, Dr Roshen Dalal, and Shri Amit Banerji helped me tide over difficult circumstances and make them appear meaningful. Ms lndrani Guba and Professor Ashok Sanjay Guba have been always reassuring with their deep understanding. Ms Jayasri Sen and Shri Paritosh Sen have remained more than a source of support. Shri Sen willingly accedes to the frequent demands I make on his generosity. The cover of this book is an example. My student Shri Agni Kumar Hota helped me with the proofs and Ms Naina Dayal prepared the index. Baishakh has been a source of delight I take this opportunity of expressing my deep sense of gratitude to all of them. Contents Aclc:now/edgements vii Abbreviations x r. Introduction 1 II. Texts and Traditions: The Bengal Puro1.1as 44 Ill.. Cultural Interaction and Religious Process 81 IV. The Diffusion of Brahmanism and the Transformation of Buddhism 109 v. Appropriation as a Historical Process: The Cult of the Goddess 165 VI. Vratas: The Transmission of Brahrnanical Culture 234 VII. The Malting of the Regional Tradition of Bengal 288 Bibliography 338 Index 362 Abbreviations BP Brhaddharma Puriit;ra BnP Brhannaradiya Puriit;ra BvP Brahmavaivarta Purat;ra DP Devi Purat;ra DbP Devibhiigavata Puriit;ra KP Kiilikii Puriit;ra Ks Kriyiiyogasiira MbP Mahiibhiigavata Puriit;ra I .... _...,..,...,. Introduction When Bhabani, the protagonist of the novel Jchiimati, returns to Bengal after his religious apprenticeship in the 'West' studying the Vedas and Upani~ads, he finds to his dismay that the Vedic tradition fonns no part of Bengali religious culture. There are only the songs of Mailgalacai;i4i, the bhiisiin of Manasi and the marriage of Siva. At best, the Bengalis are familiar with the epics. 1 How accurate is this depiction of the state of religion in Bengal? Is it correct to say that the Vedic tradition never sufficiently penell'ated there, so that a Bengali seeking 'the wisdom of Hinduism' had to travel to the proverbial 'West' (the Gangetic valley mainland) even in the nineteenth century? In other words, did Bengal create and preserve a distinct socio-religious tradition, one distinguish able from the dominant high cultw'e of Vedic Hinduism? In this study of the Bengal Puriir.ras, I propose to investigate this problem. In parti cular, I intend to examine the process by which the religious tradition of Bengal came into being. While Indologists have tended to focus on the overarching Sanskritic tradition, social anthropologists have remained concerned with the study of Indian village societies. Thus both disciplines have tended to ignore the regional traditions of South Asia which, in my opinion, embody the cultural continuum of Indian civilization. It has been suggested that this neglect is primarily due to an uneasy feeling that the regional traditions represent neither the unspoilt Sanskritic tradition nor popular culture in its pure form, but a distorted provincial variant of both.2 But it is the making of regional traditions and the fonnation of regional identities which reveal the pattern of socio-cultural interaction between the pan Indian and the local levels, so crucial for an understanding of the long tenn historical processes in India. To date the only significant work on a regional tradition in India, 2 I Religious Process which is based on the crystallization of a religious complex, has been a volume on Jagannitha.3 However, while Orissa developed a central cult focus and the factors that contributed to the construction of its regional tradition revolved a.round the temple of Jagannatha, Bengal singularly lacked a dominant symbol supported by the regional state, and its many local traditions, although they .converged on a nwnber of autonomous goddesses, were fragmented. It was only when brabmanism established its social order in Bengal by the early medieval period that a semblance of homogeneity appeared in this variegated cultural landscape. The account of this process of cultural interaction is contained in a set of texts called the Upapuriir.ras, many of which were composed in Bengal roughly between the eighth and the thirteenth centuries AD. Thus Bengal, like other regions, charted its distinct course. There is neverthe less an essential similarity in the process of formation of regional traditions in India and therefore my conclusions may also apply to areas beyond Bengal. I Despite the abu.odance of material, the Bengal Pura1)as have been per sistently ignored as evidence for the reconstruction of the early history of Bengal. The date, provenance and negotiations involved in the pro cess of codification of the Bengal Puriif,las are diiscussed in the next chapter. Here I deal with historiography in an attempt to explain why historians have remained so reluctant to accept the Puriir.ras in general and the Bengal Puriir.ras in particular as a valid and reliable source of historical information. In a recent article Gregory Schopeo has argued that the early Euro pean historians of Indian Buddhism had relied more or less exclusively on literary evidence, although archaeological and epigraphical materials, reflecting the actual beliefs and practices of the lay Buddhists, were available in plenty. He suggests that this curious preference may have been due to an assumption that 'real religion' is located in the 'Word of God' and not in the material objects of its practitioners. Schopen concludes that this assumption derives from the sixteenth-century Prot estant polemic on 'true· religion that was thoroughly absorbed by the Western intellectual tradition. 4 · Although the Western intellectual tradition exhibited the same attitude to Vedic religion, it was the reverse in the case of the Puriilµls. For one thing, in brahmanism 'direct' divine revelation ended with the Introduction I 3 Vedas. The later Vedic literature, through association, also acquired a high degree of sacredness. Yet, even as the gods continued to speak through the mouths of the bralim<Jl)as, the later texts were too numerous to constitute an authentic corpus of scripture of a status acceptable to all votaries of brahmanism. Thus while the brahmanical law codes ac quired the status of remembered truth, the Purdl,las came to occupy a curious position with neither the unquestioned sanctity of the Vedas nor the decisive normative significance of the Smrtis. European scholars who began to write about the Purdl,las from the mid-nineteenth century to some extent treated these texts as repositories of fantastic tales about gods and demons which contaminated the high seriousness and idealism of the Vedic religion. H.H. Wilson's translation of the ~f)U Purdl,las contains a long preface which may be considered the first systematic and scholarly statement in English on Puranic literature (although inCi dental observations on the Pura~ had already been published by Cole brook and Ellis in the Asiatic Researches). In his preface Wilson remarlced that the Purdl,las were sectarian in character, which indeed is lnle, but the conclusion he drew from this was that these texts were composed by 'pious frauds for temporary purposes', 'in subservience to .. . sectarian imposture',6 and therefore not authoritative about Hindu beliefs as a whole. This seems to be a little baffiing in view of the fact that two decades later Wilson, in his major study of Hindu beliefs and practices, 7 had classified practising Hindus into three major Puranic sects, the Saivas, the V~avas and the Siktas. Perhaps his suspicion about the authenticity of the Purdl,las is symptomatic of the approach of early scholars to the stages in the evolution of Hinduism. In 1855 E.W. Hopkins published his study on the religions of India' with detailed studies of the J!g Veda, brahmanic pantheism and the Upan~ads. The section on 'Hinduism' contains an account ofVi~u and Siva, primarily based on the epics. Significantly, Wilson considered the two epics as 'the safest sources for the ancient legends of the Hindiis',9 after the Vedas. Clearly, the unwieldy corpus of Purdl,las with conflicting claims about their names numbers and uncertainty about their dates, ~d bad made the Purtif)as less acceptable to these scholars than the epics. Hopkins had devoted a short, indifferent chapter to the Puraf)as. It dealt with the early sects, the religious festivals, and the formation of the Trinity. His preference for Vedism as the true religion of the Hindus, compared to the later debasement, is inescapable. A number of important monographs were published on the sub ject in the late 1870s and early 1880s. M. Monier-Williams' study of