Silsila-i-Jogiyan by Sital Singh Bikhwud

سلسلہ جوگیاں

سیتل سنگھ بےخود

Anglo-Persian Taxonomy of Indian Religions

The Annemarie Schimmel Memorial Lecture

by

Carl Ernst

This is not about the book. I have not read the book. I attended a lecture on the book and this is my take on the information I learned.

Sital Singh Bikhwud was a Munshi for the Raja of Banaras in early 19th century. Later he was asked by an East India Company officer to catalogue the various mystic religious  sects of Banaras.

These Munshis, the learned Hindu secretaries, were well versed in Persian and Arabic and were employed by the Kings and Rajas to document; mostly for tax and revenue purposes but at the same time wrote and experimented in philosophy, art and mysticism.

So he was asked to write a treatise of mystics.  What he did was much more than that. He identified many sects, wrote about their belief systems and practices and commented widely on their lives. 

As the language of his work and higher thoughts was Islamasized Persian, that is the language and terms he used to describe his subject. His nomenclature was Islamic and not Indian. For example, the sects are mentioned as mazahib and firqas. The relationship between master and the disciple is termed as Pir and Mureed and so forth.

It implied that the language of ones choice does influence once outlook. These munshis, many of them had written much about mysticism, where the line between a dervish or faqir (Muslim terms) and a jogi or sadhu (Hindu term) becomes blurred.

Perhaps the origin of the Indian mysticism was older than Islam's advent, but development and progression of various Indian orders were heavily influenced by Muslim mystics. These munshis  themselves became spiritually and intellectually involved in the viewing all this through an Islamic prism.

Of the various sects, firqa's he describes, the more notables are

vanisha, shiva, shakti, akashwasi's, sabwasi, nanakshahi and jain.
They include those mystics who would go out in the wilderness, or worship a certain deity, or exist as couples, or get involved in certain rituals like looking at the skies or having the hands up in the air for extended period of times  (months), or various other ascetic practices.

It was in fact the enormous emphasis of British to put people, their languages and belief systems into boxes, that Indians of today identify themselves as Hindus. In Satal Singh's book for example, there is no mention of the word Hindu at all. And this is as late as early 1800's.

According to Carl Ernst, the lecturer, Satal Singh is not the first one to write such a classification. There has been many attempts in the past to categorize the religions of India before this.

In Arabic, the earliest is by Ibn Khordadbih 820-912 in his kitabe masalik wa malamik in which he explains the different people of Abbasid Caliphate including Indian sub continent.

Later al-Idrisi who born in Muslim Spain under Almoravids and later was at the court of King Roger II in Sicily wrote in 1154. The Book of pleasant journeys in the faraway lands mentions 42 religions of India. He had never been to India but learned about East from Muslim merchants.  He was a famous geographer and , it is known that Columbus had used his maps. The modern integrated integrated geographic information system (GIS) and remote sensing software has its acronym IDRISI named after him.

Later in Persian, the first description of Indian religions is by Abu Fazal in Aine Akbari in 1602. He used the criterion of philosophy to separate Indian religious thoughts from one another.  He had a philosophical way of describing the religions, and for example he thought if Islam as a 'sect of Muhammad' and not more than that. He does not mention Sikhs at all, even as they existed at that time.

Then there was a Modeb Shah, who actually was a Zoroastrian but pretended to be a Shia. He wrote in 1656? Dabistan e mazahib and used the criterion of Belief to classify different religions.

And there was a Hindu Rai Chatar Man Kayath in Chahar Gulshan 1759. describing the ascetic practices of various religions. This is the first book of the above which mentions Sikhs. 

Sital Singh seems to be an interesting character. Apart from being a munshi, he had been a mystic philosopher and had written a book Khayal e Bekhudi in 1857, Bekhud being his takh'alus. 
 

 http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101076496478;view=1up;seq=4

He was quite close to an Greek Indophile  Dimitros Galanos who lived and died in Benaras in 1833 whose epitaph was penned by Sital Singh stating that :

 Woe, a hundred times! Dimitrios Galanos departed from this world to the eternal nomads. Woe me! Weeping and wailing have I said it. I am out of myself. Ah, he has gone away, the Plato of this century
Written in Persian and Greek. 

Carl Ernst is a professor of Religious Studies at University of North Carolina in Chapel Hills.  He has written much about eastern religions and edited a book on Islamophobia. One interesting book is How to read Quran.http://uncpress.unc.edu/browse/book_detail?title_id=2202
. http://www.unc.edu/~cernst/index.html

The lecture was a part of series of Metropolitan Museum of Arts lectures, carrying the name of Annemarie Schimmel Memorial Lecture. Hers was a household name during my days in Pakistan.