A Vernacular Intellectual of Early Modern India
Although he is little known today, Jan Gopal was an important vernacular intellectual of early modern India. He was from a merchant family, well-educated, and an accomplished storyteller and poet. Most notably, he was the author of a seminal biography of his famous guru, Dadu Dayal (d. 1603). Yet today, Jan Gopal's name is hardly known outside of devotees and scholars associated with the Dadu Panth. This is not surprising since the focus of studies in nirguni literature has generally been on the reputed founders of long-lasting religious communities, persons like Kabir, Raidas, Nanak, and Dadu. Many nirguni poets have not received the attention they deserve, despite their poetic excellence and historical significance. Jan Gopal is one such figure
Why have we chosen to write a book about Jan Gopal? His best-known work, his biography of Dadu Dayal, has already been edited and published with an English translation. What else of significance can one find through a study of his work?
David Lorenzen first got interested in Jan Gopal when he published a translation of Jan Gopal's Prahlad charitra back in 1996. Purushottam Agrawal has worked particularly on the thought and poetry of Kabir. After many conversations between us, we decided that an expanded project on Jan Gopal would be worthwhile. With these questions in mind, we tentatively started working on Jan Gopal together several years ago. This book contains the result of our efforts. While both of us have contributed to each chapter, David Lorenzen has mainly written the first and third chapters, and Purushottam Agrawal has mainly written the second.
Jan Gopal does not conform to the stereotype created in modern historical and literary studies of a typical follower of the nirgun panth. He did not come from the 'margins of society'; he was not born into a so-called 'lower caste' household. He came from a well-to-do merchant (vaishya) background. He had excellent knowledge of prosody, poetic conventions and even of classical Hindustani music. He was not merely a biographer of his guru and a writer of stories about legendary religious heroes. He was also an accomplished poet, as can be seen from the selection of twenty of his songs we have translated for the first time in this book.
Jan Gopal did not choose to join a nirguni panth because of family tradition, social location, or cultural identity.
He chose it through a deliberate, self-conscious personal decision. Like his better-known fellow disciple of Dadu, the poet Sundar Das (about whom Dalpat Rajpurohit has recently published an excellent study in Hindi), Jan Gopal can be seen as a noteworthy example of a vernacular intellectual in early-modern India, an intellectual possessing an urbane and cultivated sensibility.
The awareness of their own economic importance and intellectual abilities, coupled with the disjuncture between these abilities and the marginal social roles assigned to them, drew many artisans and merchants to the religious and social vision of the bhakti poets, particularly the nirguni poets.
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