The Mahānubhāvas

Abstract

The Mahānubhāvas are a Hindu sect whose members are largely concentrated in northern and eastern Maharashtra, between the old districts of Khandesh and Nagpur, while they are strongest of all in Berar. In many respects they have a rather marginal place in the culture of Maharashtra today. Unlike the Vārkarīpantha, the much more celebrated and popular Vaiṣṇava sect, they are centred on a backwoods area. They tend to gather inmaṭhas(monasteries) in decayed villages that are a day's journey from the nearest railway or main road. Instead of Alandi, which is on Poona's doorstep, or Pandharpur, their holy places are Ritpur, a crumbling dusty village in the rolling country north of Amraoti, and Mahur, on a mountainside on the borders of Berar and the Adilabad district of Andhra. Like the Vārkarīs their followers are almost all non-Brahmans, but unlike the Vārkarīs they have, until recently at least, acquired few Brahman champions to lend them ethical and religious respectability, and indeed they are chiefly known in Marathi folk-lore as typifying a virulent brand of hypocrisy—the stereotype of a sweet tongue and professions of virtue that cover up all sorts of unseemly and unspecified ‘goings-on’. Their numbers are relatively small. Enthoven, whose section on them inThe tribes and castes of Bombayis one of the few references to the sect in English, gives it an estimated membership of about 22,000 in 1901, and it is hard to judge what relation this figure would bear to the number of professed Mahānubhāvas today. The modern census figures are of course no help, since Mahānubhāvas are included under the general heading of Hindus.