Literary and religious history from the middle: Merchants and bhakti in early modern North India

This article examines the hagiographical writings of two religious communities, that is, the Dadu Panth and the Niranjani Sampraday, in what is now known as Rajasthan, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in order to illuminate how their monastic and lay members, particularly merchants and ‘scribal’ communities, imagined their religious, social and political worlds. The role of merchant and scribal groups in the origin and development of such so-called ‘nirguṇ sant’ bhakti movements has been largely overlooked, the assumption being that these movements drew their following primarily from members of subaltern communities. Yet a close reading of these hagiographical sources reveals that merchants and scribes played a central role in shaping the theological and literary character of these movements, and in turn these movements reorganised the social and financial relationships within these mercantile communities. By focusing on such ‘middle’ groups—that is, groups that mediated intellectual, literary and economic exchanges between different spaces and institutions such as the monastery, the court and the bazaar—historians, as well as scholars of literature and religion, can gain insight into how merchant and scribal groups helped to re-form notions of the individual, community and polity in early modern North India.