Sankaradeva: The Man Who Gave Assam Its Village Hall

And here is the institution, which is what he is actually for.

What it is

A long open hall in an Assamese village where people gather to say the name.

Namghar, house of the name, and it is in essentially every village in the Assamese Brahmaputra valley, and it is the single most visible thing Sankaradeva left.

What is inside it

And this is the point.

At the far end stands the Guru Asana, a wooden throne, often tiered and carved, and on it sits a book.

Usually the Bhagavata, or the Kirtana Ghosha.

Not an image. There is no murti. The seat of honour in an Ekasarana Namghar holds a text, and the congregation faces it, and that is the arrangement.

Which is a striking convergence, because the previous entries in this batch describe the Bhagabata Tungi of the Odia villages: a small structure whose only contents are the Odia Bhagabata on a stand and a lamp, no image, with somebody reading it aloud in the evening.

Two regions, roughly the same century, arriving independently at a room built around a book.

What happens in a Namghar

Nama prasanga, the congregational saying of the name, with khol drums and taal cymbals, and it is loud and communal and physically demanding and goes on for a long time.

And everything else the village needs.

• The village meeting. Decisions are taken there
• Dispute settlement. Assamese villages have used the Namghar as the venue for resolving matters for centuries
• Announcements, relief coordination, flood response. In the Brahmaputra valley this is not theoretical
• Cultural performance, since the tradition supplies its own

Again the same shape as the Tungi, and again for the same reason: a room that belongs to nobody in particular and is open to everybody ends up doing everything.

The Sattra

The Namghar's larger relative, and the institution that organised the movement.

A sattra is a monastic and cultural establishment, with a satradhikar at its head, resident bhakats, a large Namghar at its centre, land, manuscripts, and the responsibility for keeping the performing traditions alive.

Hundreds exist, and the greatest concentration is on Majuli, the river island in the Brahmaputra, where Auniati, Dakhinpat, Garamur, Kamalabari, Uttar Kamalabari and Bengenaati are among the best known.

Four samhatis

After Sankaradeva and Madhavdeva the movement divided into four organisational streams, the Brahma, Purusha, Nika and Kala samhatis, differing on ritual detail, on the role of brahmanas, and on how far the founding austerity should be kept. The divisions are still live.

And this is the part that has no real parallel anywhere else in the bhakti record.

Most reformers write. Sankaradeva built an entire performing culture from nothing, on purpose, because he had worked out that a doctrine of hearing and saying needs material to hear and say.

Borgeet

Devotional songs, composed by him and by Madhavdeva, in fixed ragas, and they are the classical devotional song form of Assam and are still sung in exactly that repertoire.

Ankia Naat and Bhaona

One act plays, written by him, on Krishna material, and bhaona is their performance: masks, costume, a narrator called the sutradhar, drums, and a village audience that stays all night.

Which is a devotional technology. A person who cannot read learns the entire Bhagavata by watching it performed in their own village over years, and this was the design.

Sattriya

The dance, developed in the sattras as part of the performance tradition, and it is now recognised as one of India's classical dance forms, admitted to that list by the Sangeet Natak Akademi in 2000.

Brajavali

A literary language he made up.

A deliberate blend of Assamese with Maithili and Brajabuli forms, used for the borgeets and the plays, and the reason is that it was intelligible across a wide area and carried the flavour of the Braj devotional world without being any single spoken tongue.

Vrindavani Vastra

A woven textile, made under his direction by Assamese weavers, depicting the Krishna narrative across an enormous length of cloth.

It did not stay in Assam. Fragments of it are in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and in the Musée Guimet in Paris, having travelled out through Tibet, and they are among the most remarkable surviving Indian textiles of the period.

The books

• Kirtana Ghosha, his central Assamese work and the book on the Guru Asana in most Namghars
• Bhakti Ratnakara, in Sanskrit
• Gunamala, a compressed Bhagavata written, the tradition says, at the request of the Koch king
• Rukmini Harana, Patni Prasada, Kaliya Damana and the other plays
• Assamese renderings of books of the Bhagavata

Who he admitted

Everybody, and the names are specific and are not a later gloss.

Chandsai, a Muslim tailor, was among his close disciples and the tradition names him without embarrassment.

Govinda, a Garo. Jayanta and Madhai, from the hill and river communities. Narahari, an Ahom. Disciples from the Miri, Bhutia, Koch, Kachari and Naga communities are recorded.

In sixteenth century Assam, initiating across tribal lines and across a religious line was not a gesture. It was the structure of the movement, and it is why Ekasarana spread as fast as it did.

And it puts Sankaradeva in the same place as Salabega, two entries earlier: the devotional tradition of eastern India kept finding the boundary and stepping over it, and then the institutions that grew afterwards kept putting it back, which the next section is about.

Four, and they are all current rather than historical.

One. Caste came back

Sankaradeva initiated a Muslim tailor and men from half a dozen tribal communities and made no caste requirement.

And the sattra system that grew after him did not hold that line.

What happened is what usually happens. An institution acquires land, revenue, hereditary office and a place in the regional order, and the regional order is a caste order, and the institution accommodates it.

The result is that hierarchy operates inside parts of the sattra system that the founder explicitly excluded, that access differs by community in ways he did not sanction, and that this has been said out loud by Assamese reformers and by Ekasarana people themselves for a long time.

This is not an outside criticism. It is an internal one, and the internal version is sharper.

Two. Children in the sattras

Some sattras maintain celibate orders of resident bhakats, and boys enter them young, given by families, and they are raised inside the institution.

Say the ordinary thing about this, which is the same thing said about every residential institution anywhere: a child in residential care is at elevated risk and requires the same safeguards as any other child, including the ability to contact somebody outside.

In India those safeguards are law. The POCSO Act 2012 applies to every institution without exception, religious status is not a defence, and reporting is mandatory for anybody who knows. Childline 1098, police 112.

And a child in a sattra should be able to go to school, see their family, and leave. Where those three are true the arrangement is a boarding education. Where they are not, it is something else.

Three. Women and Sattriya

Sattriya was developed by and performed by male monks, inside the sattras, as a devotional practice rather than a public art.

And when it was recognised as a classical form in 2000 it moved onto the concert stage, where the performers are substantially women, and the question of women performing it, and of women's access to sattra spaces, has been contested for decades and remains so.

Positions inside the tradition differ, some sattras have opened and others have not, and this entry notes the dispute rather than settling it, while observing that a founder who initiated across every other line is an awkward authority for the restrictive position.

Four. Majuli is going

And this one is physical.

Majuli, the river island that holds the greatest concentration of sattras, is eroding. The Brahmaputra has taken a very large proportion of its area over the last century, the rate has been severe, sattras have relocated, and some have moved more than once.

This is documented, ongoing, and not a metaphor. Embankment and protection works have been undertaken and the erosion has continued.

Which means that if you intend to see Majuli, the sensible time is soon, and that supporting the sattras there is supporting a set of institutions holding manuscripts, mask traditions, borgeet repertoire and dance lineages on ground that is being removed.

Where to go

• Batadrava Than, Nagaon district, his birthplace
• Majuli, for Auniati, Dakhinpat, Garamur, Kamalabari, Uttar Kamalabari and Bengenaati, reached by ferry from Nimati Ghat near Jorhat
• Barpeta Satra, one of the great mainland sattras
• Bardowa, Patbausi and Sundaridiya
• Bheladonga, Cooch Behar, where he died
• The Vrindavani Vastra fragments, at the V and A in London and the Musée Guimet in Paris

When to go

• Bhaona performances run through the winter and around festivals
• Raas Mahotsav at Majuli, in November, is the largest occasion
• Bihu in April is Assam's festival and is not Ekasarana but is when the state is most itself

A daily practice from this entry

• Rama Krishna Govinda, or any form of the name, said aloud, which is the entire method
• A borgeet, played or sung
• And the Namghar question, applied wherever you live: is there a room near you that belongs to nobody and is open to everybody

Who: Srimanta Sankaradeva, 1449 to 1568, Assam, from Bordowa or Batadrava in what is now Nagaon district, into a Bhuyan landholding family. Both parents died when he was small and his grandmother Khersuti raised him; he began studying at twelve under Mahendra Kandali. He travelled across India twice, the first time for around twelve years, taking in Puri, Vrindavan, Mathura, Kashi, Gaya, Dwarka, Badrikashrama and the Deccan, at the moment the bhakti movement was running everywhere, and then went home and built something recognisably none of them.

Ekasarana Nama Dharma: shelter in one, through the name. One deity, Krishna alone and explicitly no others, which is stricter than most of what he had visited. One method, the name heard and said, shravana and kirtana, with no complicated ritual, no fire offerings, no priestly mediation and no image worship. Four things to rely on, the chari vastu: nama the name, deva the deity, guru the teacher, and bhakata the community of the devoted, that fourth being the unusual inclusion. And no caste requirement.

Persecution: the Ahom state was hostile and his son in law Hari was executed, so he left Ahom territory for the Koch kingdom, where Naranarayana and above all the general Chilarai, whose wife was his kinswoman, sheltered the movement. He died at Bheladonga in Cooch Behar in 1568, aged a hundred and nineteen by traditional reckoning.

The Namghar: a long open hall in an Assamese village, house of the name, in essentially every village of the Brahmaputra valley. At the far end stands the Guru Asana, a carved wooden throne, and on it sits a book, usually the Bhagavata or the Kirtana Ghosha. Not an image. The seat of honour holds a text and the congregation faces it, which converges strikingly with the Bhagabata Tungi of the Odia villages in the same century. Inside it happens nama prasanga with khol drums and taal cymbals, and also the village meeting, dispute settlement, relief coordination and performance, because a room that belongs to nobody in particular and is open to everybody ends up doing everything. Its larger relative is the sattra, a monastic and cultural establishment under a satradhikar, hundreds of which exist, concentrated on Majuli.

What he made: borgeet, the classical devotional song form of Assam; ankia naat, one act plays, and bhaona, their all night masked performance with a sutradhar, which is a devotional technology for teaching the Bhagavata to people who cannot read; Sattriya, developed in the sattras and recognised as a classical dance form in 2000; Brajavali, a literary language he made up by blending Assamese with Maithili and Brajabuli; the Vrindavani Vastra, a woven Krishna narrative whose fragments are now in the V and A in London and the Musée Guimet in Paris; and the books, chiefly the Kirtana Ghosha, the Sanskrit Bhakti Ratnakara and the Gunamala.

Who he admitted: everybody, with specific names. Chandsai, a Muslim tailor, was a close disciple. Govinda a Garo, Narahari an Ahom, Jayanta and Madhai from hill and river communities, and disciples from the Miri, Bhutia, Koch, Kachari and Naga communities. In sixteenth century Assam this was the structure of the movement rather than a gesture.

The hard parts, all current: caste came back into parts of the sattra system that the founder explicitly excluded, which Assamese reformers and Ekasarana people have said out loud for a long time. Boys enter celibate sattra orders young, and residential care anywhere carries elevated risk, so the POCSO Act 2012 applies without exception, religious status is not a defence, reporting is mandatory, Childline 1098 and police 112, and a child in a sattra should be able to go to school, see their family and leave. Women performing Sattriya and accessing sattra spaces remains contested. And Majuli is eroding, severely and continuously, sattras have relocated more than once, so the sensible time to go is soon.