Anantananda

Somewhere in the salt country around Sambhar, in the flat scrubland of Rajasthan where a well was prized and a fruiting orchard rarer still, an old story remembers a small band of wandering sadhus arriving hungry and dust-covered at the wall of a royal garden heavy with ripe bihi, the pale quince-like fruit still gathered in that country every autumn. They asked only for what any traveling mendicant expected as a matter of course, a few fallen fruits, enough to break a day's fast. Whoever was minding the king's orchard that day refused them outright and turned them from the gate. The sadhus went back to their teacher wounded, less by hunger than by the closed door, and told him what had happened. Their teacher was Swami Anantananda, and by every account he said nothing at all in reply. But by the next morning, so the story goes, not a single bihi remained on a single tree in that whole garden, as though the orchard itself had chosen to answer an insult its keeper would not undo. When word reached the ruler of Sambhar of what had happened and why, he did not go looking for the gardener to punish him further. He went instead to find the ochre-robed teacher whose sadhus had been turned away, and knelt at his feet. The chronicles say the whole region turned toward bhakti after that, not because a king had ordered it, but because he had seen, in an emptied orchard, an argument for surrender that no sermon could have given him.

This is nearly the only story that survives about Anantananda in any real detail, and it says something about the shape of his greatness: quiet, indirect, felt more in what it left behind than in anything he himself is recorded to have said. He belonged to the inner circle gathered, sometime in the fifteenth century, in Varanasi, around the Vedanta teacher and reformer Ramananda, whose fellowship became famous for holding together, at one table, a range of disciples no orthodox teacher before him had dared assemble under a single initiation. Kabir sat there, and Pipa, a king who had renounced his own throne, and Ravidas, and Sena, and Dhanna, and Sadhna, and two women remembered as teachers in their own right, Surasari and Padmavati, each of them destined to found an entirely different stream of devotion. Among this company, tradition places Anantananda as one of Ramananda's serious Vedanta-trained disciples rather than a poet of the marketplace, and it was Anantananda himself, later texts remember, who first recited the sampradaya's whole lineage aloud to his own foremost disciple: a chain reaching back through teacher after teacher to Hanuman, to Sita, to Rama, so that whoever received it from his mouth received not merely a teaching but its entire remembered ancestry.

When Nabhadas came to write of him in the Bhaktamal, he did not describe Anantananda's face, his birthplace, or a single word he had spoken. He measured him instead by what had grown up around him. In one dense chhappay, Nabhadas names six of Anantananda's own disciples, Yoganand, Gayesh, Karamchand, Alha, Krishnadas Payahari, Sariramdas and Shrirang, and says that by touching his feet, by taking sharanagati there, each of them became like a Lokapala, a guardian of one of the directions of the world, carrying a share of its protection outward the way the old gods Indra and Varuna and Yama each hold a quarter of the sky. It is a striking way to measure a guru: not by how brilliantly he taught, but by how each person who knelt at his feet walked away enlarged, entrusted with some portion of the world to guard in Ram's name. And then, almost as an aside, Nabhadas adds the detail that carries the most weight of all: that Padmaja, the lotus-born, an epithet that identifies Sita with Lakshmi, appeared before Anantananda in his devotions and laid her own hand, gracious and unbidden, on his head.

Nabhadas doesn't stop with that first circle. From one of the six, he says, arose a further disciple named Narharidas: not the elder Narahariyanand, who was Ramananda's own direct disciple and who would later give the boy poet Tulsidas his sacred name at Ayodhya, but a separate figure within Anantananda's own spiritual family, remembered as a cloud of gathering joy who sang the praises of both Raghubar and Yadubar, Ram and Krishna together, and who through that singing, in Nabhadas's phrase, gathered the wealth of pure kirti, fame with nothing false inside it. Even in the fine print of the lineage, Anantananda's line kept producing devotees who refused to be closed inside a single form of God.

A later hagiography written within the Rasik current of the sampradaya, the Rasik Bhaktamal, tries to fill in what Nabhadas left unsaid. It remembers Anantananda as cool as sandalwood paste to everyone who came near him, a source of gladness to the sadhus around him, a man so entirely given to bliss that his surrender looked complete rather than partial, gliding across the lake of the mind the way a swan glides across water, uniquely favored by Janak-suta, Sita, for the beauty of his inward form, often lost in samadhi, his eyes welling without warning as though a hidden lake of nectar inside him kept rising past its own banks. Nabhadas's own Hindi, describing the same six disciples, calls them the very bela, the tideline, of the ocean of Hari-bhakti, and generations of commentators have argued over what exactly that line means: whether it is simply a metaphor for how far devotion's tide could be seen to reach because of these men, or a hidden reference to an actual book, a Bhaktisindhu, an Ocean of Devotion, that some believe Anantananda composed and that has since been lost. No one can say with confidence which reading is correct, and it seems more honest to leave the question open than to pretend it has been settled.

Of the six named disciples, one carried Anantananda's teaching further into the world than any other. Krishnadas came to be called Payahari, one who lives on milk, because from earliest childhood he was said to take no other food, holding to a discipline so severe that it became his name before he had done anything else to earn a reputation. Under Anantananda's guidance this milk-fed boy ascetic grew into a teacher capable of walking into unfamiliar country and turning it toward Ram.

In the early years of the sixteenth century, Krishnadas travelled into the hill country near Amber, the small kingdom that would later grow into Jaipur, and took up residence on a ridge in the Aravallis called Galta, a place of natural springs and monkey-haunted ravines that had belonged to ascetics of another order before him. Tradition remembers a public contest of doctrine there, in which Krishnadas bested a rival ascetic and won the ground for his own line, though the precise details of who his opponent was and exactly when it happened are told differently in different tellings and are worth holding loosely. What is not disputed is the outcome: Prithviraj, the ruler of Amber, and his queen Bala Bai became Krishnadas's initiated disciples soon after, and Galta itself became the seat, still standing today, from which the Ramanandi order spread across Rajasthan. Krishnadas is remembered to have gathered some twenty-three principal disciples of his own before the end of his life. One of them, Kilhadev, succeeded him at Galta; another, Bhagwan, carried the family's teaching as far north as Pandori in Punjab. A single guru's blessing, passed hand to hand from Ramananda through Anantananda to this one milk-fed disciple, had reached far enough within two generations to reorder the religious life of a kingdom.

It did not stop even there. Krishnadas's own disciple Agradas opened, within a generation, an entirely new register of devotion inside the sampradaya, the Rasik current, which dwelt not on Ram the warrior-king but on the tenderness between Ram and Sita, on glance and gesture and the intimate weather of divine love, much as other traditions had already done for Krishna and Radha. And it was Agradas's own disciple, a poet named Nabhadas, who sat down around 1585 to compose the Bhaktamal itself, the very garland of verses in which Anantananda is remembered. The six lines about Anantananda that survive, then, are not the record of an outsider looking back at a stranger's biography. They are a great-grandson in the spirit, writing of his own family's founder, four links up an unbroken chain of hands laid on heads.

Later chroniclers of the sampradaya, tallying up its branches, count as many as three out of every four of the Ramanandi order's dozens of monastic lineages as descending in some way from Anantananda and the disciples gathered around him, a claim too sweeping to weigh with full certainty at this distance, but not an idle one either, given how much of what still stands, at Galta and far beyond it, does trace its founding hand back through Krishnadas to him. If it is even roughly true, then most of the wandering, saffron-clad Ramanandi world that would go on helping to keep the memory of Ram bhakti alive across Rajasthan and the Gangetic plain owes its existence to a man about whom almost nothing personal survives: no birthplace anyone will vouch for, no date of death, not even a description of his face beyond a later poet's guess that his eyes were like lotuses.

What does survive is smaller, and, oddly, more convincing: an orchard that would not yield its fruit to a gatekeeper's refusal, and a queen among goddesses remembered to have rested her hand, once, on the head of a man who seems to have done nothing at all to draw attention to himself except surrender completely. That may be the whole teaching folded into Nabhadas's six terse lines of Braj: that a life given wholly enough to bhakti stops needing its own biography, because it keeps living on in whoever it touches next, in Yoganand and Gayesh and Karamchand and Alha, in Krishnadas and Sariramdas and Shrirang, in Krishnadas's own twenty-three disciples, in Agradas, in Nabhadas, and in whoever today still touches the feet of anyone standing anywhere along that long unbroken line. To ask what Anantananda taught may matter less, in the end, than to ask what he became: a threshold so many others managed to pass through toward Ram that his own name has almost disappeared into the passing, and a quiet invitation to anyone reading his story now to ask for that same kind of disappearing.