Prof. Ishita Banerjee Dube - Bhakti and Bhaktas: The Many Lives of Bhima Bhoi and Mahima Dharma

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An itinerant, abstemious ascetic who preached the mahima, glory of an omnipotent Alekh (indescribable) Absolute and pure devotion to him as a way to salvation in the tributary states of Orissa (Odisha) in the 1860s, came to be deified as Mahima Swami, an incarnation of the Absolute, and his precepts found entry into vernacular newspapers, colonial records and subsequent texts as Mahima Dharma/Alekh Dharma/Kumbhipatia Dharma. Bhima Bhoi, the bhakta-kabi (poet-devotee) of Mahima Swami, innovatively combined teachings of the Guru with aural comprehensions of popular religious texts and the epics in numerous couplets to elaborate a theosophy-philosophy that blended lofty ideals with the everyday metaphor of Kaliyuga and appealed to large groups of subordinate men and women. My intervention will revisit my earlier work on Mahima Dharma to trace the enduring presence, many meanings and diverse apprehension and deployment of Bhima Bhoi’s compositions and legends of his life by lay followers, particularly the more marginal ones. This will offer fresh insights into the distinct ways ‘religious’ teachings, rituals and codes of behaviour are grounded by followers to cope with the difficulties of the present, forge a sense of identity and community, and extend initial impulses of preceptors in myriad ways that at once resist and shore up to the institutionalisation of a radical, heterodox faith. Through a combined exploration of philosophy and its praxis, modalities of identity formation and gender dynamics in the practices of ordinary devotees, I hope to be able to discern the distinct textures in the quotidian existence of a ‘Hindu’ order at different moments.

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