Rohini Shukla

In 1782–83, a Peśvā mandate declared that the Mahānubhāvs—pioneering Marathi scholars and ascetics of the Deccan—were to be expelled from all religions, excluded from the six Hindu philosophical traditions, and relegated outside the caste system. This article is an investigation of the historical processes and actors that consolidated the official ban and socio-religious expulsion of Mahānubhāv ascetics and the shifting limits of Hinduism that they illuminate. In doing so, the article explores the functional, conceptual, and devotional worlds recorded in bilingual (Marathi and Persian) mandates and land grants from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, a period that is referred to as a “long period of silence” in modern historiography on the Mahānubhāvs. This archive suggests that the simultaneous visibility of Mahānubhāv public comportment (ācārdharma) and the culture of secrecy that imbued the theological and textual basis of Mahānubhāv ācārdharma posed a great challenge to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century orthodoxies. While the term mahānubhāv (and its variants) emerges as a caste-adjacent category that operates alongside a social order that is not all-encompassing, by the late eighteenth century, we see the culmination of a slow-brewing, broad-scaled, and violent shift. Hierarchies within the Mahānubhāv community, as well as frequent disputes with landlords, revenue collectors, Brāhmaṇs, and other ascetic communities, undergird Mahānubhāvs’ assimilation/ousting from caste Hindu and Muslim communities of the Deccan, ultimately altering their standing vis-a-vis Hinduism.