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STIMW 2021 Rebecca Manring Hanumāna’s Leaps of Faith: Intertextuality in the Dharma-maṅgala Rebecca J. Manring Indiana University-Bloomington, USA Dharma Ṭhākura is a god celebrated in the maṅgala-kāvya literature of the western part of Bengal dating from the mid-17th century. We can think of maṅgala-kāvya as “creative, vernacular mediations of the Puranic tradition,” as Kumkum Chatterjee1 puts so succinctly. These works “are superficially similar to the Puranas, but differ in paying more attention to social reality.”2 While other exemplars of the genre celebrate goddesses like Caṇḍī and Manasā, the Dharma-maṅgalas constitute one of only two corpora dedicated to male deities. Literary scholars were reluctant to take these works seriously, until Sukumar Sen began to insist that at least Bengali postclassical non-Sanskritic literature was very much worthy of academic attention. We know Caṇḍī and Manasā, but who is this god Dharma? How can he be at all significant if only some segments of society have ever been interested in him? In this paper I will consider that question and explore how intertextuality helps to cement his hold in the region. Who is Dharma Ṭhākura? As it turns out, his identity may be something of a red herring. Outsiders have been trying to make sense of Dharma and his cult for over a century. Most often Dharma is described as formless nirguṇa Brahman, with some Purāṇic Viṣṇu attributes and stories amalgamated.3 Equally important is who worships Dharma. H.H. Risley, in his Tribes and Castes of Bengal (1891) mentions that the Ḍoms of West Bengal at one time worshipped Dharma Ṭhākura as a man with a fish tail, but that that may be an old practice no longer in use. Some ādivāsīs of Choṭanāgpur and Odissa referred to the sun god as Dharma Ṭhākura or Dharma Deotā. In some 1 Kumkum Chatterjee p. 91 2 Kaiser Haq p. 31 3 Shashibhusan Dasgupta p. 294 1 areas Dharma is worshipped in the form of particular stones, much like the śālagrāma, which are considered identical with Viṣṇu. And Dharma goes by many names: Kālu Rāya, Budā Rāya, Kautuka Rāya, Yātrāsidhi Rāya, Bānkura Rāya, and more, nearly all with the title “Rāya.” Amalendu Mitra4 recorded ninety different names for the god! Most of the Dharma pūjā-paddhatis, the instruction manuals for worship, according to Sukumar Sen, are from the Odissa-Bengal border area, and some of the items used in the worship have Odiya names. Sen and Pañcānana Maṇḍala, in the introduction to their own edition of (the first several pālās of) Rūparāma Cakravartī’s Dharma-maṅgala, note that Rūparāma’s creation story is similar to (ādivāsī) Gond creation stories, and that it is not unreasonable to guess that the basic form of Dharma pūjā is an import into Bengal from the “Austrik” people, that is, autochthonous groups. Sen, however, notoriously attributed lexical items and other linguistic anomalies he couldn’t quite trace, to various indigenous peoples. It was how he indicated “I don’t know where this came from.” Amalendu Mitra even claims that Sen once asserted that the name comes from Egyptian “Ḍo-āhoma-rā” and transmogrified to “Dharma-rāya” in Bengal. He even tries to support the claim by saying that the Bengali script looks an awful lot like hieroglyphics. I can substantiate neither assertion. But given Dharma’s provenance outside the brahmanical fold and among those at the bottom of the social hierarchy, it does seem not unlikely that Dharma was an ādivāsī/indigenous/aboriginal deity whose name sounded to Brahmin ears like “Dharma.” Other scholars had a hard time taking a non-brahmanical deity seriously and seemed to want to make him fit into high-caste paradigms, but none succeeded. Harapraśāda Śāstrī, writing in the late 19th century, thought Dharma is the Buddha, but his reasoning for that conclusion is not convincing and no one takes him seriously any more, though 4 Amalendu Mitra pp. 248-251 2 his attempt is interesting. First, he claimed the name alone connected the deity with the Buddha. Second, he pointed to Dharma’s worship by non-brahmins, especially members of the lowest castes. The formal officiants for Dharma’s worship are usually Ḍomas. Śāstrī’s point of reference is brahmanical Hinduism, and since what he observed of Dharma worship did not fit that model, he could not admit it as “Hindu” and said that it must therefore be Buddhist: still perfectly respectable, if not Brahmanical. He tried to prove his point by finding similarities between accounts of the Buddha’s life as set out in the Lalita-vistāra, and the Dharma tales, but the “parallels” are not parallel: _____________________________________________________________________________ Lalita-vistāra Dharma-maṅgala The Buddha thinks of taking his last birth Dharma wants to preach his own worship The Buddha was born as his mother hangs Rañjāvatī performs śāle-bhara to get a son from a tree A storm follows the birth of the Buddha a storm precedes the birth of Lāusena Temptation episodes temptation episodes The Buddha attains nirvāna and ascends Lāusena and his family ascend to heaven to heaven ____________________________________________________________________________ It is as if Śāstrī wanted to take the Dharma-maṅgalas as a legitimate component of the literary canon, but could not bring himself to admit anything subaltern to that canon. Śāstrī noted the references in the Dharma texts to the Sanskrit epics as well. Some scholars have tried to connect Dharma with a Vedic antecedent. Kṣitīśaprasāda Caṭṭopādhyāya thinks that Dharma is the modern version of the Vedic god Varuṇa. But if Dharma 3 is indeed Vedic Varuṇa, asks Aśutoṣa Bhaṭṭācārya5 in his Maṅgalakāvyera Itihāsa, why is his worship so geographically limited? Moreover, Varuṇa has no connection with the Ḍom caste Dharma priests. Bhaṭṭācārya further notes that even the pūjārīs disagree on just who Dharma is! P.K. Maity placed the Dharma cult largely in RaṚh, and says it may go back as far as the ninth or tenth century. He echoes Sukumar Sen that “the worship of Dharma was originally a human fertility ritual,”6 and that it remains one since perhaps the 13th or 14th century. Maity places the origins of the Dharma cult “outside the pale of Brahmanical Hinduism among the primitive men who used to practice many magico-religious rites.”7 Bholanath Bhattacharya, too, claims that Dharma Ṭhākura was original a local/ādivāsī god with magical powers, and that “he has from the outset been essentially a tutelary god of the lowest classes,” who “gradually served to form a bond of unity amongst the underprivileged who virtually remained outside the pale of the varnashrama system.”8 Anthropologist Ralph Nicholas, working in the mid-20th century, observes in his Rites of Spring that “while important local deities such as Manasā and Sītalā were absorbed into Brahmanical practice, the Brahmans most often avoided Dharma Ṭhākur and substituted Śiva (combining his Puranic and Bengali rural forms) in place of Dharma.”9 Their avoidance is intriguing; if they could subsume the formidable Manasā, why not Dharma, whose very name suggests righteousness? One wonders what exactly marked him as so undeniably beyond their pale. Adding to the intrigue is the brahmanical authorship of nearly all the Dharma-maṅgalas. 5 Aśutoṣa Bhaṭṭācārya p. 621 6 P.K. Maity p. 83 7 P.K. Maity p. 92 8 Bholanath Bhattacharya pp. 245-46 9 Ralph Nicholas pp. 3-4 4 Kumkum Chatterjee, in her very useful work The Cultures of History in Early Modern India: Persianization and Mughal Culture in Bengal, notes that “most deities about whom mangalakabyas were composed had Vedic/Puranic antecedents,”10 but that’s not true of Dharma. But what does hold in the Dharma material, as with other maṅgala-kāvyas, is that “the classical order based on a Brahmanical view of the world – both social and narrative – is left behind.”11 Caste “boundaries are breached by a more radical imagination of possibilities,” and “…the life of lower-caste society is brought into the sacred sphere of literature.”12 Nonetheless, Sukumar Sen wanted to connect the Dharma tales with Ṛg Vedic 10.129 account of Creation, and with the Hariścandra story in the Aitareya Brāhmana – but it’s a reach to do so. Rūparāma’s Hariścandra, or Haricandra, Pālā, is a grisly tale about the sacrality of a promise and the strength of faith in Dharma. Although the two tales have some similarities, the maṅgala- kāvya piece is quite different from the older story.13 In his Obscure Religious Cults, Shashibhusan Dasgupta provides some details about the ways devotees worship Dharma Ṭhākura. He notes that the “Dharma cult is the result of a popular commingling of a host of heterogeneous beliefs and practices; it will therefore be incorrect to style it purely Buddhistic or Hindu or indigenous either in origin or in nature – it is as much a hotch- potch in its origin as it is in its developed form and nature.”14 He understood Dharma as something unique, who “represents the formless Brahman of the Upaniṣads, the Lord Śiva of the Śaivites and the Tantrics, Viṣṇu of the general Vaiṣṇavites, Kṛṣṇa of the Kṛṣṇite Vaiṣṇavas and Rāma of the Rāmite Vaiṣṇavas, and again sometimes the Sun-god of the Sun-worshippers.”15 That is to say, 10 Kumkum Chatterjee p. 519 11 Sheldon Pollock p. 517 12 Sheldon Pollock p. 518 13 See Rebecca Manring, Child Sacrifice in Rūparāma’s Dharmamaṅgala, The Journal of Hindu Studies, hiy003, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhs/hiy003 14 Shashibhusan Dasgupta p. 260 15 Shashibhusan Dasgupta p. 263 5 “Dharma-Ṭhākura does not represent the conception of any particular deity, - he rather represents the general idea of Godhead or of the sovereign deity over the universe, and as such he has been associated consciously with all the conceptions of Godhead or of the sovereign deity popularly current in Bengal and Orissa from the tenth century AD.”16 Nicholas takes a different perspective to make essentially the same point: “Indian myths constitute a staggeringly elaborate multidimensional web in which acts and personalities that figure prominently in the narratives about one god appear multiple times – sometimes slightly transformed, sometimes inverted – in narratives about other gods.”17 Perhaps his origin, intriguing as the speculation may be, is immaterial.
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