Life Stories in the Lives of Texts: Reconsidering Biography and Hagiography in South Asian Religions

The history of South Asian religious traditions is littered with the life stories of prophets, sadhus, swamis, yogis, fakirs, saints, godmen and godwomen that cross time periods, regions, linguistic groups, and media. The genre categories of biography and hagiography have generally, albeit not necessarily uncritically (e.g., Granhoff 1986), been adopted in South Asian religious studies circles, sometimes because they appear to map relatively easily onto explorations of such figures, other times for lack of better alternatives.

Given the propensity of religious traditions themselves to focus on the life stories of central individuals (e.g., Bhatta 2017, Lindquist 2023, Manring 2011, Martin 2023, Novetzke 2008) this panel argues that a new reconsideration of such terms is in order with a concern towards genre. While stereotypically biography is taken as a historical account of a life, hagiography is said to focus on pious recollection and miracle over historicity. Genre terms, though, are generally used as a description of an end product, a demarcation once a given genre has attained a relative fixity in a given community to allow for imitation, subversion, or expansion. Terms such as hagiography and biography are themselves historically situated, doubly so when they make historical claims, especially at linguistic, temporal, or cultural remove from the text producers themselves. Such terms, though, elide the process of genre: of establishing narrative norms, of the competing interests of participating parties, and of the vagaries of literary and social history that intersect. This panel then wants to bring indigenous processes into conversation with the boundaries that the English terms biography and hagiography evoke to problematize their use.

First and foremost, we view biography and hagiography as tentative genre classifications, where the historically situated conditions are investigated by each presenter to nuance the evaluation of their usefulness. In this sense, we acknowledge that genre is always unstable and an ongoing process. "Text" for our purposes is taken broadly, including oral or written text in a more traditional sense (presenter #1, #2, and #4) as well as the virtual realm of social media (presenter #3). The location of our texts varies from early ritual commentarial manuals (presenter #1) to the mixed genre of sīra (presenter #2) to a continually expanding life-story corpus (presenter #4), to a "dynamic archive" of the ongoing online construction of a religious leader (presenter #3). We span the ancient Brahminical religious world (presenter #1) to 19th c. Islamic and Hindu articulations (presenter #2 and #4) to 21st. century Jainism (presenter #3), drawing our examples from Sanskrit, Urdu, Gujarati, and English. All papers situate life stories in the production of authority within their respective communities, in the process of remembering past individuals, and in the construction of an individual to create "future memory" and authority.

Presenter #1 examines the "proto-biographical roots" of Late-Vedic life stories in the brāhmaṇas and he argues how these serve as a basis for narrative expansions into "life scenes" (i.e., stray references taking on greater and greater narrative context). The paper examines the references of several individuals named in these texts, where the references serve as kernels for expansion, both within these texts, but then into later literature where "life scene" may become "life story." Producers of such ritual manuals, of course, did not see their project as "biographical" or "hagiographical," but presenter #1 suggests how a shifting model of textual and ritual authority produced a "biographical impulse" towards teacher-sage life stories in later literature.

Presenter #2 examines genre in sacred life stories through a close study of al-Khutb̤ āt al-Aḥmadīyah (1870), a sīra (biography of the Prophet Muhammad) by Sir Sayyid Aḥmad Ḳhān. Sir Sayyid directly engages questions about the types of writing that ought to be employed for a sīra, concluding that it should mirror styles resembling the facticity and objectivity of historical writing. This paper historically situates this argument by contrasting it with the writing types and the objectives that sīra have traditionally sought to employ and fulfill. Presenter #2 focuses on two questions. First, how did South Asian scholars read and respond to the conception of sacred biography laid out by Sir Sayyid; second, what impact did this proposal for sacred biography have on three early twentieth-century compositions?

Presenter #3 examines the hagiographical structures in social media posts about Rakesh Jhavery (b. 1966), the guru of the Shrimad Rajchandra Mission in Dharampur, Gujarat. The mission boasts the largest online presence of any Jain organization, appealing mainly to upper-class Gujarati Śvetāmbar youth in India and the diaspora. Jhavery’s persona is constructed on two types of posts: (1) YouTube videos and his Wikipedia page, which portray him as a “spiritual prodigy” closely modeled on twentieth-century biographies of Śrīmad Rājacandra (1867-1901); and (2) on Instagram and Facebook using the hashtag #sadguruwhispers. The first employs empiricist language to establish Jhavery’s divine status, while the second uses aphorisms and images to assert his divinity. the paper examines three key elements of hagiographical writing in both and shows how SRMD's social media posts construct a dynamic archive, contributing to an ongoing hagiographical campaign.

Presenter #4 analyzes the practices and discourses concerning smṛti surrounding experiences with and life stories of Swaminarayan in the nineteenth century. He argues that smṛti, which generally translates to remembering, is the central operating factor in the processes of biography and hagiography production and reception. Examining texts from the community, which include recorded discourses of Swaminarayan elaborating on the topic and several texts by monks who demonstrate the practice, presenter #4 proposes the concept of (re)experiencing to explain smṛti practices in the context of life stories. (Re)experiencing is a generative framework that situates biography/hagiography as a category in a more complex web of material and cognitive practices by which Swaminarayan followers actively engaged with episodes they experienced personally or through some other medium.

The presenters consist of a mix of senior and junior scholars as well as one advanced Ph.D. student. The respondent is a senior scholar in South Asian, Tamil, and literary studies.