The Four Churches of the Reformation

Abstract

AbstractThe purpose of this article is to examine what was involved when the great linguist George Grierson framed the history of Indianbhaktiin terms of ‘the four churches of the reformation’ in one of his most widely read publications, ‘Bhakti-Mārga’, an entry in theEncyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics(1910). This was his translation of the concept ofcatuḥ(orcār)sampradāy, which plays a significant role in Nābhādās's HindiBhaktamāl(circa1600). The weight of the target language and its enveloping culture (‘church’, ‘reformation’) raise obvious red flags. Grierson did not submit them to the sort of self-critical scrutiny we might today, nor did he examine the adequacy of Nābhādās's historiography. But did he get it all wrong? I will suggest that there are in fact some intriguing, if distant, analogies between the early modern world out of which Nābhādās wrote and its contemporary Protestant European counterpart, and I will ask whether Nābhādās may have been encouraged to adopt the framework he did because of precedents established in contemporary Muslim historiographical practice. In outlining his foursampradāys, Nābhādas played a role in creating a set of assumptions that long survived his own time in North India—and not just because Grierson would later be listening.