Yasovanta and Ananta Das: The Other Two

Ananta Das, sixteenth century, fifth of the Panchasakha, and the least written about of the five.

Where he came from

Balipatna, in Khurda district, near Bhubaneswar, and the biographical material on him is thin, which is itself part of this entry's subject.

What he wrote

• Sisu Deva Gita, his best known work
• Hetu Udaya Bhagavata
• Artha Tareni
• Bhakti Mukti Daya Gita
• Udebhakara
• And Malika material, with the same caution as above

Sisu Deva Gita

Sisu means child, and Sisu Deva, the child god, and the work belongs to the same theological world as the rest of the group: Shunya Purusha, the formless that is also a person, pinda brahmanda, the cosmos present in the body, and the internal correspondence to the outer temple at Puri.

Bhakti Mukti Daya Gita is on the relation between devotion and liberation, which is the standing question of the whole bhakti period: whether bhakti is a road to moksha or is itself the destination, and the bhakti answer, given in a dozen languages across five centuries, is generally the second one.

What the five held in common

Which is worth setting out once, since this is the last of the five entries.

One. Odia. All five wrote in the language people spoke, and between them they produced the Ramayana, the Bhagavata, and a philosophical literature, in a vernacular that had not had those things.

Two. Shunya Purusha. The void and the person as one, held together rather than resolved, with Jagannath at Puri as the point where the pairing is visible.

Three. Pinda brahmanda. The body contains what the cosmos contains, so the practice is internal, and the outer temple is a diagram of the inner one.

Four. A mixed group. Brahmana and non brahmana, including a man from a community placed low, all described as friends.

Five. Distance from the temple establishment. The Panchasakha material is consistently more interested in the internal temple than in the ritual one, and this is not an accident, and one of them was thrown off the chariot and another was punished for reading to women.

Six. A relationship with Chaitanya that is contested. He arrived at Puri in 1510 and stayed, the two streams overlapped, the Gaudiya tradition reads the Panchasakha one way and Odia scholarship reads them another, and this entry does not adjudicate it.

And here is why these two got their own entry rather than a paragraph.

The pattern

Every named group has members nobody can name.

Ask somebody in Odisha to name the Panchasakha and you will reliably get Jagannath Das, Balarama Das and Achyutananda, and then a pause, and then either an approximation or a change of subject.

And this is not because Yasovanta and Ananta wrote less well. The Prema Bhakti Brahma Gita is a serious book. It is simply that a group of five produces three names and two slots.

Why it happens

Not merit, in most cases. The mechanisms are ordinary:

• One work becomes ubiquitous, and the man who wrote it becomes the group. Jagannath Das got the Bhagabata and therefore the Tungi and therefore every village
• One life has a story in it. Balarama Das has the sand chariot, which is tellable in ninety seconds
• One name attaches to something people want. Achyutananda has the Malikas, and prophecy travels
• And two of them have neither a ubiquitous book nor a repeatable story nor a hook, and so they are a name on a list

Which is a mechanism worth recognising, because it is running in every workplace, every family, every band, every research group and every founding team, and the people it selects out are not the ones who contributed least.

What follows from that

Two things, and both are practical.

One. If you are the fourth or the fifth in some group of yours, it is worth knowing that the position is structural and not a verdict on you, and that the person who gets named usually got named for a reason that has nothing to do with relative worth.

Two. If you are the one being named, the correction is available and it is small: name the others when you are asked. It takes four extra words and it is the entire remedy.

And the group itself is the point

Because this is the thing the Panchasakha actually demonstrate, more than any individual doctrine in the five books.

Five men, of different castes, in the same town, at the same time, decided together that the material should be in Odia, and they wrote across each other and referenced each other and are remembered as a unit four and a half centuries later.

None of them could have done it alone. A single Odia Bhagavata is a book. Five men producing a Ramayana, a Mahabharata adjacent tradition, a Bhagavata and a philosophical corpus in one generation is a literature, and a literature is what saved the language in 1870.

Where to go

• Adhanga, Cuttack district, associated with Yasovanta Das
• Balipatna, Khurda district, associated with Ananta Das
• Nemal and Kakatpur, associated with Achyutananda
• Puri, where all five converge

A daily practice from this entry

• Jai Jagannath
• A few lines of the Prema Bhakti Brahma Gita or of any of the five, in Odia or in translation
• And the naming habit: when you are asked who did something, name everybody who did it

Yasovanta Das, also written Jasobanta, sixteenth century, fourth of the Panchasakha, from Adhanga in Cuttack district. He was a Bathuari, a community placed low in the Odisha social order of the period, which matters because of who he was standing next to: Jagannath Das was a brahmana and the son of a temple purana panda, Achyutananda and Balarama Das came from writing and service communities, and Yasovanta came from a community that in the ordinary arrangement of that society would not have been sitting with them. The five are described everywhere as sakhas, friends, equals, and the quiet fact about the Panchasakha is that the group was mixed, deliberately, and it held.

His works: the Prema Bhakti Brahma Gita, his major book, whose title is the argument, putting prema bhakti and brahman in one phrase and arguing that they are not two subjects. The Panchasakha problem is how to get a formless absolute and a lovable person into one system without either becoming a concession to the other, Shunya Purusha is the group's answer, and Yasovanta's book is that answer written from the side of love rather than metaphysics. Also the Atma Pariche Gita, Govinda Chandra and the Sivasarodaya.

The Sivasarodaya caution: it is an Odia treatment of swara material, the tradition that reads which nostril is running. Part is ordinary observation and costs nothing. Part of the classical swara literature is predictive and includes determining the sex of an unborn child and forecasting a time of death. The sex of a foetus cannot be told from anybody's breathing, and acting on prenatal sex determination is a criminal offence in India under the PCPNDT Act 1994, a law that exists because the practice was being used to end pregnancies with female foetuses at scale. A prediction of somebody's death does damage whether or not it comes true and should not be given or paid for.

Ananta Das, sixteenth century, fifth of the Panchasakha, from Balipatna in Khurda district, the least written about of the five. His works include the Sisu Deva Gita, the Hetu Udaya Bhagavata, the Artha Tareni, the Bhakti Mukti Daya Gita and the Udebhakara, in the same theological world as the rest of the group.

What the five held in common: Odia rather than Sanskrit; Shunya Purusha, the void and the person held together rather than resolved; pinda brahmanda, the cosmos present in the body so the practice is internal; a mixed group of brahmana and non brahmana described as friends; consistent distance from the temple establishment, one of them thrown off the chariot and another punished for reading to women; and a contested relationship with Chaitanya that this entry does not adjudicate.

Being fourth and fifth: every named group has members nobody can name, and the mechanisms are ordinary rather than meritocratic. One work becomes ubiquitous and its author becomes the group; one life has a story tellable in ninety seconds; one name attaches to something people want, and prophecy travels. Two members have none of those and become a name on a list. If you are fourth or fifth somewhere, the position is structural and not a verdict. If you are the one being named, the remedy is four extra words: name the others when you are asked.