The modern monastic Santmat movement of Bihar: building bridges between Sanātana Dharma and Sant-Mat

International Journal of Dharma Studies, Jul 2017

This article analyzes how the modern movement of Santmat, literally “the views of sants,” primarily popular in the rural areas of northern India, uniquely situates itself within the context of “Vedic Dharma.” Through the monastic leadership’s redefinition of the categories of Vedic Dharma and Sanātana Dharma, the Santmat tradition creates a space where vernacular Hindu practices and mystical Vedic paths can co-exist. Thus, it stands apart from other contemporary Sant Mat traditions that reject Vedic Dharma. In this article, I pair an examination and analysis of the Santmat movement’s historical development and methods, in which Vedic wisdom coheres with the sants’ spiritual insights, with an ethnographic analysis of how this movement enacts a creative integration of vernacular traditions. I suggest that this particular Santmat’s “bricolage,” to borrow a term from Claude Levi-Strauss, illustrates a distinctive example of experimental dharmas in the context of vernacular sant traditions in contemporary North India. Santmat’s skillful integration of local religious vernaculars gives expression to its engagement with lived devotional traditions. Such mixing of practices, which illustrate the processes of hybridity and syncretism, has helped to make the esoteric practices more meaningful and relevant to the everyday lives of the masses, including the tribal and rural people of Bihar and Nepal, populations often marginalized in orthodox Hindu practices. I examine the experimentation occurring within the Santmat tradition and argue that Bihar’s Santmat movement may be termed “Vernacular Vedic Dharma.” Furthermore, I address how within the 21st-century rise of extremism, Santmat shows that Vedic Dharma, within its manifold strands of practices and philosophies, encourages an adherence to the harmonizing esoteric spiritual path as well as a universal ethical framework.

A PDF file should load here. If you do not see its contents the file may be temporarily unavailable at the journal website or you do not have a PDF plug-in installed and enabled in your browser.

Alternatively, you can download the file locally and open with any standalone PDF reader:

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1186%2Fs40613-017-0058-8.pdf

The modern monastic Santmat movement of Bihar: building bridges between Sanātana Dharma and Sant-Mat

Howard International Journal of Dharma Studies The modern monastic Santmat movement of Bihar: building bridges between Sanātana Dharma and Sant-Mat Veena R. Howard This article analyzes how the modern movement of Santmat, literally “the views of sants,” primarily popular in the rural areas of northern India, uniquely situates itself within the context of “Vedic Dharma.” Through the monastic leadership's redefinition of the categories of Vedic Dharma and Sanātana Dharma, the Santmat tradition creates a space where vernacular Hindu practices and mystical Vedic paths can co-exist. Thus, it stands apart from other contemporary Sant Mat traditions that reject Vedic Dharma. In this article, I pair an examination and analysis of the Santmat movement's historical development and methods, in which Vedic wisdom coheres with the sants' spiritual insights, with an ethnographic analysis of how this movement enacts a creative integration of vernacular traditions. I suggest that this particular Santmat's “bricolage,” to borrow a term from Claude Levi-Strauss, illustrates a distinctive example of experimental dharmas in the context of vernacular sant traditions in contemporary North India. Santmat's skillful integration of local religious vernaculars gives expression to its engagement with lived devotional traditions. Such mixing of practices, which illustrate the processes of hybridity and syncretism, has helped to make the esoteric practices more meaningful and relevant to the everyday lives of the masses, including the tribal and rural people of Bihar and Nepal, populations often marginalized in orthodox Hindu practices. I examine the experimentation occurring within the Santmat tradition and argue that Bihar's Santmat movement may be termed “Vernacular Vedic Dharma.” Furthermore, I address how within the 21st-century rise of extremism, Santmat shows that Vedic Dharma, within its manifold strands of practices and philosophies, encourages an adherence to the harmonizing esoteric spiritual path as well as a universal ethical framework. - this way, Santmat embraces the wisdom of the tradition while simultaneously rejecting the concepts, such as discrimination based on caste and gender, as well as Hindu practices. Importantly, the Santmat tradition does not represent Vedic Dharma or Sanātana Dharma simply as Hinduism, but rather as systems of divine knowledge. In this article, I pair an historical examination of the Santmat movement’s development and methods which suggest coherence between Vedic wisdom and sants’ spiritual insights with an ethnographic analysis of the creative integration of vernacular traditions enacted by this movement. I contend that this particular Santmat’s “bricolage,” to borrow a term from the anthropologist Levi-Strauss (1966) , illustrates a distinctive example of experimental dharmas in the context of sant traditions in contemporary North India.4 I draw on the Sanskrit term prayoga for the current use of “experimental.” Prayoga literally means “application,” and is generally translated as “experiment.” It implies an integral connection with “investigation into truth” and “living the truth,” as was used by Mahatma Gandhi (see: Howard 2013, 39) . Santmat tradition emphasizes the path of inner journey to the realization of truth as well the practice of ethical codes of abstaining from lying, stealing, intoxicating substances, etc. The Santmat tradition’s skillful incorporation of local religious vernacular languages and practices gives expression to its engaging lived devotional traditions with which to reimagine its conceptual boundaries in a transnational age of plurality, heightened selfcritique, and rapid social change. Blending regional religiosity in connection with rituals—such as offering flowers to the Guru, touching the Guru’s feet, worshiping the image of the Guru, singing songs in vernacular languages (i.e., Bihari and other regional dialects of rural communities), and big carnival and cavalcade-like ceremonies—with a focus on esoteric meditation that I further suggest has no parallel in any other SantMat traditions that emerged in northern India since the early 19th century. I contend that such mixing of practices, which illustrate the processes of hybridity and syncretism, which the other contributors to this volume spotlight as defining characteristics of experimental religion as lived in the current global milieu of the 21st century, has helped to make the esoteric practices more meaningful and relevant to the everyday lives of the masses, including tribal and rural people of Bihar and Nepal, who are normally marginalized in orthodox (Brahmanical) Hindu practices (cf. McGuire 2008) . Experimenting with the religious boundaries of Santmat to include typically underprivileged caste and ethnic groups, and by implication their local religiosities, makes it possible for this Santmat movement to widen its appeal and meet the challenges of modernity. On the basis of the experime (...truncated)


This is a preview of a remote PDF: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1186%2Fs40613-017-0058-8.pdf

Veena R. Howard. The modern monastic Santmat movement of Bihar: building bridges between Sanātana Dharma and Sant-Mat, International Journal of Dharma Studies, 2017, pp. 21, Volume 5, Issue 1, DOI: 10.1186/s40613-017-0058-8