Pilgrimage and Remembrance: Biography and Geography in the Mahānubhāv Tradition

Abstract

In this chapter, we turn to the history of a particular religious movement that began in the thirteenth century C.E. and is still alive today. The movement is that of the Mahānubhāvs. The Mahānubhāvs and the Vārkarīs are Maharashtra’s two principal surviving medieval bhakti movements. Although today the Vārkarīs are much more numerous, more popular, and better known than the Mahānubhāvs, the Mahānubhāvs are nevertheless extremely important for understanding the beginnings of regional consciousness in Maharashtra. For the Mahānubhāvs were among the first to choose Marathi as a language of literary expression, and their literature was the first to ascribe religious meaning to a whole region that they called “Maharashtra.” As we will see, some Mahānubhāv authors, using the kind of rhetoric that we have examined in chapter 5, praise their holy places by connecting them with more widely known ones in northern India. However, Mahānubhāv literature also preserves a tradition that goes beyond finding correspondences with places elsewhere in India and explicitly values Maharashtra as a whole in its own right, as a place that is better in significant respects than other places. Ironically, the value of Maharashtra to the man who started this tradition seems to have been a rather negative one: the fact that Maharashtra is inconvenient, uncomfortable, and therefore, all in all, a good place to practice asceticism.