Pīr Ratannāth in Devī Pātan: Nāthyogīs, Monastic Networks and Historical Memories Along the Anglo-Gorkha Border

Abstract

Abstract Through my case study of Devī Pātan, a Śāktīpītha Nāthyogī maṭh and temple on the India–Nepal border subordinate to the Gorakhnāth maṭh, my article demonstrates that Nāthyogī monastic networks are produced through spatial practices. Specifically, it focuses on shrines connected with Pīr Ratannāth, also known as Hājjīrattan, a legendary yogī of the Nāth sampradāy, widely worshipped across religious boundaries, who is said to have built Devī Pātan. Through the elusive figure of Ratannāth, I analyse how robust monastic networks focused on pilgrimage, trade and power, ‘made’ space and borders in the colonial and postcolonial period. Devī Pātan’s relationship with the Caughera maṭh in the Gorkha kingdom of Nepal and the Gorakhnāth maṭh in British India and after 1947 illustrates how competitive Nāthyogī monastic networks were historically produced and transformed through struggles between monastic institutions over space, resources and power across fraught borders. Ratannāth’s hagiographies, which emphasise his mobility, elasticity and importance in the world of saint veneration, reflect this world in which competing Nāthyogī nodes of circulation reworked relationships with each other. Simultaneously, they challenged ‘fixed’ cartographic boundaries between British India and the Gorkha kingdom of Nepal before 1947, and thereafter of new nation states. My essay also illustrates that histories of monasticism, space and place which have been memorialised by these shrines in representations of Ratannāth and Devī Pātan in recent times question the hegemonic narratives relating to Ratannāth authorised by the Gorakhnāth maṭh, known today for its close alignment with the Sangh Parivār, and its exclusionary vision of Hindutvā. Thus, the figure of Ratannāth transcends efforts to subordinate such border-crossing yogis to problematic majoritarian cartographic and political projects.