The foursampradāys: ordering the religious past in Mughal North India

Abstract

Monika Horstmann has written eloquently about appeals to the notion of the ‘four sampradāys’ as a way to discipline religion at the court of the Kachvāhā king Jaisingh II in the early decades of the eighteenth century. Here was orthodoxy in Vaishnava garb. We have normally thought of Nābhādās the Rāmānandī as being the first major figure to put forward this idea, sometime around the turn of the seventeenth century. Indeed, Nābhādās wrote from within the Kachvāhā orbit, and his Bhaktamāl (‘Garland of Bhaktas’) quite literally made history – if not under Jaisingh, then later. Yet Nābhādās's text deserves to be juxtaposed with another that is far less well known – the Sampradāyapradīpa (‘Lamp of Sects’), purportedly written by Dvivedī Gadākhya in Brindavan in VS 1610 (1553 CE). This text provides insight into how someone closely associated with the followers of Vallabhācārya might massage the four-sampradāy idea with quite different aims than Nābhādās had in mind. The Sampradāyapradīpa also raises a host of questions about relations between Vallabhites and other religious communities, and their common relation to political authority. Lurking beneath these questions is another: When was the text actually composed?

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