Naraharitirtha: The Monk Who Ran a Kingdom

Naraharitirtha is sometimes credited with a role in the origins of Odissi, and this needs handling carefully because the claim is genuinely uncertain and the honest account is more interesting than the confident one.

What the evidence is

The Srikurmam inscriptions record temple activity associated with him, and the tradition and some scholars connect him with the patronage of dance and dance drama in the Kalinga temples of the period.

And there is a broader association in the Madhva tradition between Naraharitirtha and performed devotion, which fits with what he is credited with next: the beginning of the Haridasa song tradition.

What cannot be claimed

That he invented Odissi, and nobody serious does claim that.

What Odissi actually is, historically

And this is the part worth knowing, because it is a genuinely remarkable story and it is recent.

The dance called Odissi today was reconstructed in the twentieth century.

Its sources were:

• The Mahari tradition, the temple dancers of the Jagannath temple at Puri, a hereditary community of women
• The Gotipua tradition, in which boys dressed as girls performed outside the temple, and which survived when the Mahari tradition was suppressed
• The sculpture of the Odishan temples, particularly Konark and the Jagannath temple, which preserves postures
• Texts: the Natya Shastra, and the Abhinaya Chandrika of Maheshvara Mahapatra, an Odishan treatise

And the reconstruction was done by identifiable people in living memory: Kelucharan Mohapatra, Pankaj Charan Das, Deba Prasad Das, Mayadhar Raut and others, from the 1950s onward, working with scholars and performers to assemble a classical form from what had survived.

Which means Odissi is both very old and very new, and both halves are true: the materials are ancient and the form as danced is seventy years old.

The Mahari system, honestly

Because it cannot be left out.

The Maharis were the temple dancers of Puri, dedicated to Jagannath, and their position deteriorated over centuries from a respected temple office into something much worse, in the same way and for the same reasons as the devadasi systems elsewhere in India, which this app has covered in the Kshetrayya entry.

By the colonial and late precolonial period the women in these systems were in many cases in conditions of sexual exploitation with no exit, and the reform and abolition movements that ended the systems were led substantially by women from those communities.

And the abolition also destroyed a repertoire, which is why the reconstruction was necessary, and the people who preserved what survived were often the Gotipua performers and the last Maharis.

Both facts are true and neither cancels the other: the system was abusive and had to end, and an art form was nearly lost with it, and the recovery of the art is not a defence of the system.

What can fairly be said about Naraharitirtha

That a thirteenth and fourteenth century Madhva sannyasi held office in Kalinga, is attested in the temple inscriptions of the region, was involved in temple activity there, and that the tradition associates him with performed devotion.

And that a line runs from that association to the Haridasa movement, which is the subject of the next section and of most of the rest of this batch.

Which is a real and interesting claim, and it does not require crediting one man with an art form.

The claim that matters most for this batch.

Naraharitirtha is counted as the first of the Haridasas.

What the Haridasa movement is

A tradition of devotional song in Kannada, running from roughly the fourteenth century to the eighteenth and continuing after, produced by people in and around the Madhva tradition, and it is one of the great bodies of devotional literature in India.

Its figures include, and this series has entries on several:

• Naraharitirtha, the first
• Sripadaraja, who has the next entry but one in this batch
• Vyasatirtha, who follows
• Purandara Dasa, who is called the grandfather of Carnatic music and has an entry in this series
• Kanaka Dasa, of the shepherd community, who has an entry
• Vijaya Dasa, Gopala Dasa, Jagannatha Dasa, all of whom are in this batch or have entries

What makes it a movement rather than a set of poets

Three things.

One. The language.

Kannada, not Sanskrit.

Which is the whole point. The Madhva tradition's intellectual work, the Nyaya Sudha and the rest, is in Sanskrit and requires decades of training. The Haridasa songs require nothing.

And the two run in parallel inside the same tradition, which is unusual: the same institutions that examine a scholar in the Nyaya Sudha also sing devaranamas, and the same men wrote both.

Two. The ankita.

Every Haridasa composer has a signature word, the ankita or mudra, which appears in the last line of every song they compose.

Purandara Dasa's is Purandara Vittala. Kanaka Dasa's is Kaginele Adikeshava. Vijaya Dasa's is Vijaya Vittala.

And the ankita is not vanity. It is how a song is attributed in an oral tradition with no manuscripts and no copyright: the authorship is built into the text and cannot be separated from it.

Naraharitirtha's is Raghupati or Narahari, depending on the song.

Three. The form.

Devaranama, the name of god, is the standard form: short, set to a raga and a tala, singable by anybody, and designed to be carried.

And they were carried, by the dasas themselves, who walked, and by everybody who learned them, into fields, kitchens and streets.

What survives of his own songs

Not much, and this should be said.

A small number of compositions are attributed to Naraharitirtha, and the attribution of early Haridasa material is a genuinely difficult scholarly question, because an oral tradition with an ankita system is easy to add to.

What is not in doubt is that the tradition itself places him first, deliberately, and that the placement is a claim about where the movement's authority comes from: not from the poets, but from the acharyas.

Which is worth noticing as a difference

Most of the devotional movements in this series began outside institutions and were absorbed later, sometimes reluctantly: Kabir, Ravidas, Namdev, Chokhamela, Mirabai.

The Haridasa movement began inside one.

Its first figures were sannyasis holding office in a formal monastic order, writing technical Sanskrit philosophy on one side of the desk and Kannada songs on the other.

And when it did produce its outsiders, and it produced two of the greatest, Purandara Dasa who gave away a fortune and Kanaka Dasa who was refused entry at Udupi, the tradition had already established that songs in Kannada were something its own acharyas did.

Which did not prevent Kanaka Dasa being kept outside the temple, and this app has said so in his entry.

But it is the reason his songs were kept.

Where Naraharitirtha is

His brindavana is at Hampi, on the Tungabhadra, at Chakratirtha.

Which is a short distance from Navavrindavana, where nine Madhva pontiffs including Vyasatirtha are enshrined on an island in the river, and which has an entry later in this batch.

Who: Naraharitirtha, died 1333, a direct disciple of Madhvacharya, known before his sannyasa as Shyama Shastri, of a brahmana family of the Telugu and Kalinga country. He was a minister at the court of the Eastern Ganga kings, whose territory covered what is now coastal Odisha and northern Andhra Pradesh, met Madhva, became his disciple, took sannyasa, and then went back.

The regency: the Eastern Ganga ruler died leaving a minor heir, and a thirteenth century state with a child on the throne is a state about to be taken apart by its own nobility, its neighbours, or both. Naraharitirtha administered it for about twelve years, until the heir came of age, and then handed it over and left.

The evidence: he is named in inscriptions at Srikurmam, the Kurmanatha temple in Srikakulam district, Andhra Pradesh, with dates, in connection with grants and temple activity. That is hard evidence of a kind most figures in this series do not have, since for the majority the sources are hagiography written by their own communities.

On monks holding power: the tradition presents it as duty and that may well be what happened, but religious figures holding political power is a pattern with a bad general record, as this series has already noted with the Dadu Panth's regiments, the armed Naga orders and the Gosains operating as bankers. An institution with both spiritual authority and coercive power has no check on it. What distinguishes this case on the available evidence is the ending: he handed it back, which is the rarest thing in the record of anybody who has held power.

The icons: the tradition says he obtained ancient icons of Rama and Sita from the Kalinga treasury and brought them into the Madhva line. The Moola Rama is the central icon of the Madhva succession, passing with the office, worshipped by the pontiff, and the subject of serious disputes between mathas over the centuries. Whatever its actual antiquity, its function is clear: it is the continuity.

The dance question: he is sometimes credited with a role in the origins of Odissi, and the honest account is more interesting than the confident one. Nobody serious claims he invented it. What Odissi is today was reconstructed in the twentieth century from the Mahari tradition of the Puri Jagannath temple, the Gotipua tradition of boys performing outside it, the sculpture of Konark and the Jagannath temple, and texts including the Natya Shastra and the Abhinaya Chandrika, by identifiable people in living memory including Kelucharan Mohapatra, Pankaj Charan Das, Deba Prasad Das and Mayadhar Raut, from the 1950s onward. So Odissi is both very old and very new. The Mahari system deteriorated over centuries into conditions of sexual exploitation, as the devadasi systems elsewhere did; the abolition was necessary and it also nearly destroyed a repertoire, and recovering the art is not a defence of the system.

The Haridasas: Naraharitirtha is counted as the first. The movement is devotional song in Kannada rather than Sanskrit, so it requires no training where the Nyaya Sudha requires decades, and the two run in parallel inside the same institutions. Every composer has an ankita, a signature word appearing in the last line of every song, which is how authorship survives in an oral tradition with no manuscripts. Unlike almost every other devotional movement in this series, which began outside institutions and was absorbed later, the Haridasa movement began inside one, with sannyasis writing Sanskrit philosophy and Kannada songs at the same desk. His brindavana is at Chakratirtha, Hampi, on the Tungabhadra.