Ramravanl and Jada

In the great garland that Nabhadas began stringing together in the closing years of the sixteenth century, most beads hang singly: one name, one life, one bright specific hour when grace broke through a human being. But every so often two names are strung so close that they have never since been pulled apart, held together by nothing more than a small conjunction. Sri Ramrawalji and Sri Jadaji are threaded that way, inseparable in the text as they must once have been inseparable in the sadhana that bound them, two companions on the Vaishnav path of Braj whose personal lives have almost entirely vanished from the written record, leaving behind only their names, and the names of everyone who came after them.

That alone is worth pausing over. Of the great founders remembered in the same stretch of this Bhaktamal, in the very breath before and after these two, Vallabhacharya, Rupa and Sanatana, Hita Harivansh, Jiva Gosvami, each is recalled through some scene: a debate won, a text composed, a vision granted, a household of devotion raised up out of nothing. Ramrawalji and Jadaji receive none of that. Even Priyadas, who in his 1712 tika rarely lets a bhakta pass without at least one vivid kissa, a curse lifted, a king humbled, a doubter converted, offers nothing here. What survives instead, in the later Hindi tilak of Sitaramsharan Bhagwanprasad Rupkala, is a bare, numbered roll: two founders, and then, one after another, the names of seventeen men who are said to have held their seat after them, generation folded quietly into generation.

Read that roll slowly, because it is the only inheritance we have from these two men, and it is not a small one. After Ramrawalji and Jadaji comes Shyamji, carrying a name of Krishna himself, Shyam, the dark one, as his own. Then Khojiji, whose very name seems to hold inside it the word khoj, the search. Then Sihaji, the lion, Dalhaji, Padamji, the lotus, and Manorathji, a name that means literally the chariot of the heart's longing, the very word Vaishnav poets reach for when they speak of the secret desire carried inside a devotee's bhajan. Then Rokaji, then a name set down as Yogji, then a single link the old scribes did not trouble to fill in, and after that gap, Chachaguruji, the uncle-guru, a title that suggests a teacher so familiar and so dearly held that his own disciples could not bring themselves to call him anything grander than kin. Then Savaiji, Chandaji, the moon, a name recorded as Napaji but badly worn by the copyist's hand and hard now to restore with full confidence, Purushottamji, who took for himself the very name of the Supreme Person, Chaturji, the skilled or the clever one, and finally Kitaji, seventeenth and last in the line as it stood when Rupkala set it down on paper.

Two of those seventeen do not remain names alone. The third in the list, Khojiji, and the eighth, Rokaji, are given full chhappays of their own elsewhere in this very Bhaktamal, entries standing in their own right immediately after this one, sung by Nabhadas and his commentators as bhaktas substantial enough to deserve verses of their own. That detail matters more than it first appears. It means the channel that ran from Ramrawalji and Jadaji was not a dry one; at least twice that we can still verify, disciples who drank from it went on to become saints whose own devotion was judged worth setting into the sacred record. A guru is tested less by what is said of him than by what grows up around him afterward, and by that measure, whatever else has been lost to time, Ramrawalji and Jadaji passed.

It is worth naming honestly, as a possibility rather than a settled fact, that the word Rawal in Ramrawalji's own name may not be a personal name at all but a title, the kind still carried today by the presiding priest of Sri Badrinath high in the Himalaya, and by the Rawal of Kedarnath nearby, an office-name for whoever sits at the head of a particular seat of worship rather than a name given at birth. If that reading holds even in part here, Ramrawalji would mean something closer to he who holds Ram's seat, and the numbered roll that follows would not be a family tree so much as the record of an office passed hand to hand, lamp to lamp, for as long as seventeen men could carry it forward. Nothing in the surviving text proves this beyond doubt, and it should be held loosely, but it fits everything else we are told about him, which is to say almost nothing except a succession.

Whether Jadaji stood beside Ramrawalji from the very first day of their sadhana as a brother in devotion, or came to him later and was raised up as his chief successor, the text does not say, and both patterns are common enough in the history of Vaishnav gurudom that either is plausible. What the record does insist on, by refusing to separate the two names even once across centuries of copying, is that neither man is complete in this Garland without the other. Bhakti in the Braj of that century was rarely a solitary discipline. It was built, hut by hut and akhara by akhara, on companionship: two or three sadhus sharing a single fire and a single bowl, a hundred repetitions of Ram-nama carried through a winter night, each one watching the other's nishtha the way a mother watches a lamp in the wind so it does not gutter out. Whatever else is uncertain, that much of the world Ramrawalji and Jadaji walked through is not in doubt, and it is almost certainly the ground their friendship grew in.

There is a teaching folded into a record this bare, and it would be a mistake to read past it looking for a more dramatic one. The Bhaktamal exists to answer a single question: what does it look like when Bhagwan enters a human life? Usually Nabhadas answers with an episode, a poet composing under divine dictation, a widow found unharmed in a burning pyre, a beggar fed by the Lord's own hand. Here he answers differently. He answers with a parampara, an unbroken line of teachers, seventeen names deep and very likely deeper, ordinary men who kept one small seat of devotion burning long after the two who first lit it were gone. In a sampraday's own understanding, no acharya matters only for his own sake; he matters for whether the fire he was given is still alight when he passes it on. Judged by that standard, a life remembered only as the first link in a chain that held for generations may be a rarer achievement than a life remembered for a single miracle. A miracle happens to a person. A parampara has to be built, disciple by disciple, out of a hundred small acts of faithfulness that nobody thought worth writing down at the time.

It is worth resisting, too, any temptation to feel shortchanged by how little of Ramrawalji and Jadaji survives in words. Rupkala, by his own evident practice everywhere else in this text, had every reason to record a memorable kissa about the two of them if one memorable enough had reached him by the time he compiled his tilak in the early twentieth century. That he instead simply set down, carefully and number by number, the roll of their spiritual descendants suggests he believed that roll was itself the truest memorial available: plain, unornamented proof that a channel of grace opened by two largely unrecorded men had not run dry across three, four, perhaps five centuries. There is something quietly consoling in that for a reader tonight. Most of us will not compose a scripture or convert a king. What Ramrawalji and Jadaji are actually remembered for, stripped of every ornament, is something far more within an ordinary seeker's reach: they loved Ram together, faithfully, and kept on loving him long enough and steadily enough that the love did not die when they did.

Say their names, then, the way the old roll itself does, without embellishment and without apology: Sri Ramrawalji, Sri Jadaji, and after them Shyamji, Khojiji, Sihaji, Dalhaji, Padamji, Manorathji, Rokaji, Yogji, Chachaguruji, Savaiji, Chandaji, Napaji, Purushottamji, Chaturji, Kitaji, sixteen names surviving out of a line at least seventeen deep, each one a lamp lit from the one before it, none of them famous, all of them faithful. That, finally, is the prayer this entry leaves behind. Not a question of what miracle would prove that a life had been touched by Bhagwan, but a question turned back on the one who is reading: whether the flame received in this life will still be burning in someone else's hands long after this name too has been folded into a list that only Ram remembers in full.