Islam meets yoga: Sufis and Nātha yogis in medieval and early modern Bengal

The search for South Asia’s composite religio-cultural traditions transcending the binaries of “Hinduism” and “Islam” is traceable at least in part to academic oeuvres from the early twentieth century and have, in more recent times, informed the idea of the “Indic”. Emerging from the vantage points of different disciplines, scholars have also focused in particular on the complexities of South Asia’s mystical traditions. Against this larger backdrop, this paper revisits some aspects of medieval mysticism and takes a cue in particular from the recent scholarship on the quest for “equivalence” in cultural encounters in medieval and early modern South Asia. Drawing upon underused vernacular literature emanating from Nātha yogī-Sufi encounters from medieval Bengal, the paper explores some aspects of translational techniques— understood in more capacious cultural terms— resorted to in the Nātha yogi- Sufi exchange(s).

Shekh Phāyjullā’s Gorakṣha-bijay (GB) documents a complex translational process: one in which a Sufi master takes recourse to Nātha yogi narrative and participates actively in the polemics of one form of yoga vis-à-vis another. Its preference for haṭha yoga over tāntric techniques, for instance, reflects key aspects of a choice made by our protagonist in his quest to not merely cater to a burgeoning clientele through search for cultural homologies in the world of vernacularized Islam, but also an endeavour to broker knowledge about authority and mastery over one’s own self, indeed a very grammar of ethics of the self. It can be argued that Shekh Phāyjullā’s GB did not juxtapose ideas of asceticism and mastery over oneself as oppositional categories, unlike Foucaldian theorisation of pre-Christian and Christian traditions, which are often contrasted with the Stoic techniques of askēsis in. In other words, our case study of this medieval Bengali text illustrates how ideas and praxis of asceticism and mastery over one’s own self were mutually potentiating exercise.

Etching out the normative parameters of asceticism, in general, and conceptualization of the yoga body, in particular, were important sites for their translational endeavours. Such translations then mean much more than mere turning, in literal terms, from one language to another. Indeed, they evoke history of a dynamic cultural process with significant multi-layered ramifications, at times pointing towards critical internal negotiations within categories otherwise thought in modern lexicons to be homogeneous or monolithic. While on the one hand, our medieval/ early modern case study unravels the dynamic history of a wide spectrum of yoga practices, we also see on the other hand the internal polemics of different Nātha strands which, by way of a pertinent corrective, destabilises any narrative of a monolithic or homogeneous Nātha sampradāya.

While hailing from a Nātha background, Shekh Phāyjullā’s GB has important Sufi-Islamic markers and has to be seen as part of a rich corpus of Bengali Sufi-yoga texts, other key examples being: Shekh Chand’s Hara-Gauri Saṃvad and Tālib-nama; Yoga Kalandar by an anonymous author; Hāji Mohammad’s Surat-nama or Nur-Jāmal; Mir Mohammad Shafi’s Nur-nama; Kaji Shekh Mansur’s Sirnama; Āli Raja’s Jñānasāgara, et cetera. Yet, there are also significant signature marks that make them distinctive in their own ways, in terms of their approach to yoga, the agenda they promote, and not least the (multiple) lives and afterlives they underwent thanks to their subsequent redactions and resultant variations.

Understandably, Shekh Phāyjullā represents a period of Sufi tradition in Bengal when technologies of self by way of control over one’s own self and senses from non-Islamic traditions bore significant homologous meanings for such Sufi thinkers and practitioners. This was no random choice, but an exercise that reflects both participation in and contribution to the internal dynamics of the Nātha sampradāya even as Sufi masters were in their own journey to discover homologies in ideas, structures, and practices. Thus an emphatic asceticism (contra tāntric excesses) was weighed and measured against practices from within their own Islamic(ate) doctrinal and orthopractic repertoire. In the end, what they sought was spiritual affinities that lay at the roots of their quest for equivalence. This was not a quest in any linear teleological trajectory. This was a process conditioned not merely by outwardly show of miracles and efforts at attracting clientele but also the very fundamental question of disciplining the self.

Soumen Mukherjee
Department of History
Presidency University, Kolkata