Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi
The historical Gorakhpanthi tradition presents a striking contrast to the political ideology now associated with its most prominent institutional representative, Yogi Adityanath. The contrast does not lie simply between religion and politics, for the Nath Yogis were never entirely removed from worldly power. They advised kings, received land grants, intervened in disputes and sometimes conferred legitimacy upon ruling dynasties. What separates the older tradition from its contemporary political appropriation is the manner in which power was conceived and exercised. Historically, Nath authority rested upon renunciation, inward discipline, freedom from social distinctions and an ability to communicate across religious boundaries. The political world represented by Adityanath, by contrast, has been shaped by the language of Hindu consolidation, suspicion of Muslims and the conversion of a flexible ascetic inheritance into a more rigid majoritarian identity.
Simon Digby’s Wonder-Tales of South Asia, especially “The Tale of Gorakh Nath” and the accompanying section on medieval Sufi tales of Jogis, offers an unusually rich entry into this earlier world.¹ The narratives collected and translated by Digby are neither doctrinal manuals nor dependable biographies. They belong to the domain of hagiography and popular memory. Yet precisely for that reason they reveal what successive generations believed Gorakhnath to represent. He appears not as the guardian of a territorialised Hindu community but as a wandering master of yoga, austerity, compassion and spiritual power. His authority comes from siddhi, discipleship and control over the self, not from the mobilisation of one religious community against another.
The first word through which the reader encounters this world is Alakh. Digby explains it as meaning, approximately, “beyond all perception”, the name of the divine used by Yogis as a greeting. Gorakhnath’s world therefore begins with a God who cannot be confined within image, institution or sectarian definition. The cry of Alakh accompanies the Yogi who moves from door to door seeking alms, without asking whether the householder belongs to a preferred community. It directs attention away from external identity towards the invisible and ungraspable divine.²
This orientation towards the formless was one of the reasons why Nath teachings could converse so readily with Sufi and later nirguna devotional traditions. The religious language of the Yogis did not depend upon a fixed opposition between Hindu and Muslim. It could employ Saiva, yogic, Islamic and vernacular vocabularies without treating their coexistence as a theological embarrassment. Religious identity was real, but it was not necessarily exclusive.
Digby’s narratives repeatedly define the true Yogi through renunciation. Gorakhnath rebukes his own guru, Matsyendra Nath, when the latter succumbs to luxury and sexual pleasure in the Land of Women. He reminds him that as a “semen-retaining and perfected Yogi” he has compromised the honour of the Nath path by becoming inflamed with passion.³ The point of the story is not merely sexual restraint. It establishes a larger distinction between yogic sovereignty and worldly captivity. The true master is the person who rules himself. A king surrounded by wealth, armies and flatterers may remain enslaved to desire, while an ascetic without possessions may exercise genuine power.
The cycle of Gorakhnath, Bharthari and Gopi Chand repeatedly dramatises rulers abandoning royal splendour for the life of a Yogi. Political sovereignty is thereby relativised. The king is not the highest form of human authority. He must eventually recognise the superiority of the renouncer who has conquered hunger, pride, attachment and fear.⁴ The historical Nath tradition could certainly become involved in politics, but its legends preserved a warning against mistaking possession of a kingdom for mastery of the self.
Compassion is equally central. In one of Digby’s stories, Gorakhnath’s disciple is maliciously directed towards an impoverished household to request milk. The woman of the house is so poor that she and her husband lack sufficient clothing. When the disciple explains her distress, Gorakhnath’s “heart melted with compassion”. The miracle that follows is generated not by hostility towards an enemy but by sympathy for the humiliated poor.⁵ Elsewhere, when Matsyendra Nath threatens a woman who has made a mistake, Gorakhnath intercedes: “the lady of the house has done nothing wrong. Please pardon her!” Matsyendra responds that Gorakhnath’s magnanimity proves his spiritual worth.⁶
These episodes are important because they locate spiritual greatness in mercy, restraint and protection of the vulnerable. The Yogi’s miraculous power becomes legitimate only when governed by compassion. Anger may possess enormous force, but force without moral control is not siddhi. It is spiritual failure.
The same principle governs the relationship between asceticism and political authority. In Digby’s account of Gorakhnath’s intervention in Nepal, the Yogi opposes a ruler who persecutes the followers of Matsyendra Nath. When the king temporarily promises to stop the oppression, Gorakhnath forgives him. Only when persecution resumes does he conclude that “such an unjust man has no right to remain on the throne” and that a ruler inclined towards oppression is a sinner.⁷
This is not an endorsement of theocracy. Gorakhnath does not seek the throne for himself. His political action is justified as resistance to oppression, while kingship remains morally conditional. The Yogi stands outside the state and judges it by justice. This differs fundamentally from a modern situation in which the head of a religious establishment becomes the head of government and the moral distance between ascetic authority and state coercion virtually disappears.
The inclusive dimension of the older Nath tradition is even clearer in the materials examined by Christine Marrewa-Karwoski in her two important essays for The Wire. Her 2018 article, “The Erased ‘Muslim’ Texts of the Nath Sampraday”, draws attention to two early-modern texts, the Avali Siluk and the Kafir Bodh. These were known to P. D. Barthwal when he prepared his influential edition of the Gorakhbani, but they were not included in the published compilation. Marrewa-Karwoski shows that the two teachings appear in an early Hindavi manuscript dated 1614 and continued to circulate in later manuscript traditions. They were directed unmistakably towards Muslim audiences.⁸
Their importance is not that the Naths secretly became Muslims, or that they ceased to belong to a broad Saiva and yogic world. Rather, they demonstrate that Nath teachers could acknowledge Islamic belief and ritual while presenting yogic knowledge in a vocabulary intelligible to Muslims. The Avali Siluk employs Persianised religious terms and treats Islamic ethical categories with respect. One of its memorable formulations is rendered as: “Anger is haram, truth is halal.” It continues by equating uncontrolled desire with Satan and purity of heart with freedom from desire.⁹
The language is not decorative. It places yogic discipline inside an Islamic ethical idiom. The teaching does not demand that Muslim listeners first renounce their inherited religious identity. It tells them that self-control, humility, truth and purification are recognisable within their own vocabulary.
A further passage treats the mosque, prayer niche, ablution and profession of faith as meaningful symbols rather than objects of ridicule. Marrewa-Karwoski argues that such texts invited Muslim devotees into a sacred space where Islamic practices could coexist with yogic teaching without being stripped of their Islamic specificity. She quotes Barthwal’s conclusion that the Yogis made no distinction between Hindus and Muslims as servants of the same Lord.¹⁰
This was not modern secularism, nor should it be romanticised as complete equality. Medieval ascetic traditions competed for followers, patronage and prestige, and their inclusiveness could also serve strategic purposes. Yet the strategy itself remains revealing. The Naths sought authority by crossing boundaries, not by sharpening them. They increased their spiritual reach by incorporating, translating and accommodating. Their confidence did not require the vilification of another community.
Digby’s “Medieval Sufi Tales of Jogis” supplies parallel evidence from Muslim sources. The Chishti saint Gesudaraz could recount narratives concerning Matsyendra Nath and Gorakhnath by describing the elder Yogi as a pir and his disciple as a murid. Digby notes that Gesudaraz was aware of the special “Jogi language” employed by the Naths and could narrate their traditions within Sufi conceptual categories.¹¹ This was a world of debate, competition and occasional polemic, but also of translation. Yogis entered Sufi hagiography, while Sufi terms entered the narration of yogic lineages.
The historical Gorakhpanthi world also included Muslim Yogis as a social reality. Communities in eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar preserved ballads of Gopi Chand and Raja Bharthari while wearing the dress associated with Nath renouncers and performing with the sarangi. Many belonged to occupational groups such as weavers and cotton carders who stood outside the centres of Brahmanical authority. Their gurus were often drawn from their own communities rather than from Brahman priesthood.¹² The legacy of Gorakhnath therefore survived not only in monasteries and Sanskrit texts but in mixed communities, itinerant singers and occupational groups whose lives complicated any simple Hindu-Muslim division.
Marrewa-Karwoski’s 2020 essay, “By Attacking the Mughals, Adityanath Is Erasing the History of His Own Nath Sampraday”, (The Wire) develops the argument further. It points out that Nath establishments received patronage from both Hindu rulers and Mughal emperors. The relationship was not uniformly peaceful, and individual Yogis sometimes opposed rulers. Yet the evidence does not support a timeless struggle between the Naths and Islam. Grants, gifts, requests for yogic or alchemical knowledge and relationships with individual ascetics continued under Mughal rule.¹³
Aurangzeb, so frequently converted into the archetypal Muslim enemy in contemporary political rhetoric, appears in Nath traditions in a far more ambiguous fashion. Scholarship on Nath lore shows him both as a threatening sovereign and as a ruler attracted to the powers of Yogis. A letter associated with the Jakhbar establishment reportedly requests treated mercury, valued in alchemical traditions for its connection with bodily perfection and longevity. Whether every detail of later monastic memory is accepted literally or not, the evidence reveals interaction where modern polemic prefers an unbroken history of persecution.¹⁴
The Gorakhpur monastery itself emerged through layered relationships that cannot be reduced to Hindu resistance against Muslim power. Historical accounts connect its expansion to Baba Roshan Ali, a Muslim faqir and devotee of Gorakhnath, and to support attributed to the Nawab of Awadh. The memory of Roshan Ali remains embedded in the sacred geography of Gorakhpur.¹⁵
The decisive transformation came much later. Marrewa-Karwoski locates the systematic Hinduisation and militant politicisation of the Gorakhpur establishment in the twentieth century, particularly under Mahant Digvijaynath.¹⁶ Nath Yogis had interacted with rulers for centuries, but Digvijaynath recast monastic power within the idiom of Hindu nationalism and mass electoral politics. A member of the Hindu Mahasabha, he was arrested for inflaming passions against Mahatma Gandhi and played a leading role in the Ram Janmabhoomi movement in 1949, which culminated in the appearance of Rama idols inside the Babri Masjid.¹⁷ His successors, including Mahant Avaidyanath, inherited an institution increasingly aligned with the Hindu Mahasabha, the Ram Janmabhoomi movement and eventually the BJP.¹⁸ This transformation marked a departure from the temple’s earlier syncretic character, turning it into a space associated with hard-line, right-wing politics.¹⁹
Yogi Adityanath’s politics therefore cannot simply be projected backwards and described as the timeless political expression of Gorakhnath’s teachings. It represents a selective modern reconstruction. The ochre robe, the title of Yogi and the authority of the math supply religious continuity. The ideological content, however, has been substantially reworked.
The historical Nath vocabulary sought to overcome duality. Contemporary Hindutva politics depends upon producing a durable duality between majority and minority, native and alien, patriot and suspect. The old tradition could speak of Allah, Muhammad, mosque and kalima in order to engage Muslim listeners. The contemporary political idiom often treats Muslim historical presence as a wound to be avenged or erased. The older Yogi sought freedom from pride and possession. The modern political ascetic commands the instruments of the state. Gorakhnath’s legendary authority rested upon disciplining anger. The current political culture repeatedly converts anger into electoral solidarity.
It would be too simple to say that the historical Naths were apolitical pacifists. They possessed land, cultivated royal patrons, claimed supernatural powers and occasionally intervened forcefully in dynastic affairs. Nor was the tradition entirely free of religious competition. But its historical plurality is undeniable. It included ascetics and householders, Hindus and Muslims, Sanskritic and vernacular strands, temples and itinerant performers, kings and marginal occupational communities. Its central religious imagination remained capacious enough to inhabit contradictions.
A more complete picture of this tradition requires attention to its social dynamics, particularly its relationship with caste. The Nath movement attracted considerable support from lower caste and marginalised communities, and its critique of Brahmanical orthodoxy had social as well as theological implications. Scholarly accounts note that the Nath sampradaya never believed in untouchability or birth-based discrimination. In Bengal, the householder Naths were degraded by Brahmanical society during the twelfth century and placed outside the mainstream, yet they resisted this marginalisation by asserting their identity.²⁰ The ascetic branch, in contrast, remained beyond the varna system because its practices did not conform to Puranic Hinduism. This dual nature of the tradition – egalitarian in its spiritual ideals yet accommodating of caste in its householder manifestations – complicates any straightforward narrative of its relationship to social hierarchy.²¹ The Bengal case shows that while the Nath cult was philosophically anti-caste, over time and in certain regions it developed endogamous caste frameworks, with householders forming communities that became designated as Other Backward Classes.²²
The politics of Yogi Adityanath is deeply entangled with these caste dynamics. His government has at times been praised for rising above caste arithmetic and focusing on development that benefits all sections of society. His identity as a renunciate is presented as enabling a form of governance that transcends narrow caste loyalties. Yet critics point to persistent upper caste dominance in his administration and political appointments. The irony is familiar: a tradition that questioned caste distinctions is now deployed in a politics that must continually negotiate the very caste identities it claims to transcend.
The narrative of the Nath tradition also has a gendered dimension that deserves consideration. Ann Grodzins Gold’s ethnographic work, particularly Listen to the Heron’s Words, demonstrates how women in North India use expressive traditions – songs, stories, and oral narratives – to reimagine kinship, conjugality, and their own agency within patriarchal structures.²³ While her work is not primarily about Nath tradition per se, it illuminates how religious and folk traditions in the same region as Gorakhpur contain counter-hegemonic possibilities. The Nath tradition’s ambivalent treatment of female figures and sexuality, as seen in the story of Matsyendra Nath’s temptation, exists alongside a broader landscape where women’s expressive cultures have long offered subtle critiques of social hierarchy. A fuller engagement with this material might reveal unexpected continuities: both the Nath tradition and women’s songs share a capacity to subvert dominant social orders through spiritual or poetic means.
The material conditions that enabled the transformation of the Gorakhpur math into a political powerhouse also deserve closer attention. The math was not always the dominant political force it is today; its rise is a modern phenomenon, rooted in the early twentieth-century consolidation of Hindu majoritarian politics. Digvijaynath, who became Mahant in the 1930s, allied the institution with the Hindu Mahasabha and the Gita Press management, and he played a role in the early Ram Janmabhoomi movement.²⁴ His successor, Avaidyanath, expanded the math’s reach, and Yogi Adityanath inherited and enlarged this political machinery.²⁵ The math’s influence is primarily felt in Gorakhpur and adjoining districts, sustained by organisational efforts, claims to developmental leadership, and the projection of its abbots as vikaspurush (figures of development). Its trajectory shows how a monastic establishment could evolve into an alternative power centre capable of displacing gangster politics and offering protection to the local population, thereby creating the conditions for its eventual electoral dominance.²⁶
Finally, comparisons with similar transformations in other religious traditions help situate the Nath case within broader patterns of modern religious politics. Nadeem Farooq Paracha’s work on Sufism in Pakistan shows how the state and political actors have repeatedly attempted to model Sufism in their own image – as a pacifist, inward-looking tradition under Ayub Khan; as a Sharia-abiding orthodox force under Zia-ul-Haq; and as a symbol of “enlightened moderation” under Musharraf.²⁷ Each attempt failed to capture the complexity of Sufi traditions, reducing them to instruments of state policy. The Nath tradition’s contemporary appropriation by Yogi Adityanath follows a recognisably similar pattern: a complex, syncretic, and socially diverse tradition is simplified and redeployed for majoritarian politics. The parallel suggests that the selective use of ascetic traditions for political ends is not unique to India but reflects a recurring tension between the fluidity of mystical or ascetic religions and the rigidity of modern political ideologies.
The deepest irony of Adityanath’s position is therefore not that a Yogi has entered politics. Naths entered politics long before the modern age. The irony is that a custodian of Gorakhnath’s legacy now represents a politics that narrows the very tradition from which his authority derives. The older Gorakhpanth accumulated prestige by travelling across boundaries. Its modern political expression consolidates power by policing them.
Simon Digby’s stories and Marrewa-Karwoski’s research return us to a Gorakhnath who cannot easily be recruited into a simple history of Hindu assertion. He belongs to a shared religious world in which a Yogi could be understood through the vocabulary of the Sufi pir, Muslim performers could sing his legends, Mughal rulers could patronise his followers, and teachings associated with his lineage could declare truth halal and anger haram. That inheritance does not fit comfortably within the politics of exclusion. It is precisely for this reason that recovering it is historically and politically important.
Notes
¹ Simon Digby, Wonder-Tales of South Asia, translated from Hindi and Urdu by Leonard Harrow (New Delhi: Oxford India Paperbacks, 2006), 3–24.
² Digby, Wonder-Tales, 5.
³ Digby, Wonder-Tales, 8.
⁴ Digby, Wonder-Tales, 17–20.
⁵ Digby, Wonder-Tales, 11.
⁶ Digby, Wonder-Tales, 13.
⁷ Digby, Wonder-Tales, 22.
⁸ Christine Marrewa-Karwoski, “The Erased ‘Muslim’ Texts of the Nath Sampraday,” The Wire, 21 December 2018.
⁹ Marrewa-Karwoski, “The Erased ‘Muslim’ Texts.”
¹⁰ Marrewa-Karwoski, “The Erased ‘Muslim’ Texts,” quoting P. D. Barthwal.
¹¹ Digby, Wonder-Tales, “Medieval Sufi Tales of Jogis,” 89–94.
¹² For the role of marginal communities in preserving Nath-related performance traditions, see Sukanta Chaudhuri, The Oxford Companion to Indian Theatre (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), 234–36.
¹³ Christine Marrewa-Karwoski, “By Attacking the Mughals, Adityanath Is Erasing the History of His Own Nath Sampraday,” The Wire, 13 December 2020.
¹⁴ Marrewa-Karwoski, “By Attacking the Mughals.”
¹⁵ William Pinch, Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 89–94; see also Marrewa-Karwoski, “By Attacking the Mughals,” for discussions of Nath-Muslim interactions and the Roshan Ali tradition.
¹⁶ Marrewa-Karwoski, “By Attacking the Mughals.”
¹⁷ For Digvijaynath’s role in the Hindu Mahasabha and the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, see Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics (London: Hurst, 1996), 89–92; also Marrewa-Karwoski, “By Attacking the Mughals.”
¹⁸ See Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement, 95–98, for the involvement of Nath maths in the Ram Janmabhoomi campaign; see also Marrewa-Karwoski, “By Attacking the Mughals.”
¹⁹ Marrewa-Karwoski, “By Attacking the Mughals.”
²⁰ For the Nath tradition’s relationship with caste in Bengal, see Hiteshranjan Sanyal, Social Mobility in Bengal (Calcutta: Papyrus, 1981), 123–35.
²¹ Sanyal, Social Mobility in Bengal, 128–32; see also “Nath” in the Banglapedia: National Encyclopedia of Bangladesh (Dhaka: Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, 2003), which documents the householder Nath community’s caste status.
²² Sanyal, Social Mobility in Bengal, 130–35; Government of India, Report of the Backward Classes Commission (New Delhi: Government of India, 1955), vol. 2, 147–49, for the classification of Nath communities as OBCs.
²³ Gloria Goodwin Raheja and Ann Grodzins Gold, Listen to the Heron’s Words: Reimagining Gender and Kinship in North India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 3–15.
²⁴ Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement, 89–92; Marrewa-Karwoski, “By Attacking the Mughals.”
²⁵ For the expansion of the Gorakhpur math under Avaidyanath, see Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement, 95–98; also Jaffrelot, “The Modi Model of Governance: Development as a Political Tool,” South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal 21 (2019).
²⁶ See Jaffrelot, “The Modi Model of Governance,” for the math’s role in providing protection and development in Gorakhpur; also R. S. Mishra, “The Politics of Yogi Adityanath,” Economic and Political Weekly 52, no. 43 (2017): 13–15.
²⁷ Nadeem Farooq Paracha, The Pakistan Anti-Hero: History, Politics and the Pop-Culture Icon (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2019), 145–78.
ASHA: Blast From The Past 