The historical background of Muslim Rishi Movement in Kashmir

By Syed  Rooh Fatima

The Rishi movement calls for a word of explanation, if not an apologia, because of the Hindu origin of the term Rishi, which has created a misunderstanding among historians regarding the real historical nature of the movement. Rishi merely means a saint or an ascetic in Sanskrit literature but in the context of the history of Kashmir between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, it signifies a movement of indigenous mystics within the fold of Islam, erroneously, called an offshoot of the Bhakti movement. Kashmiri Muslims, who form nearly ninety-five per-cent of the total population of the valley for the most part in the rural areas, owe their entry into Islam to Nuruddin and a host of his disciples and their followers called Rishis, so much so that they take pride in calling their vast mountainous region the Rishwaer ‘the Valley of is Rishis’.

The term Rishi is undoubtedly of Sanskrit provenance, meaning “a singer of hymns”, an inspired poet or sage. According to orthodox Hindu belief, the Rishis “are inspired personages to whom these hymns were, revealed”, and such an expression as “the Rishi says” is equivalent to “so it stands in the sacred text”. In common usage among the Hindus, however, the Rishi meant “a saint or sanctified sage, an ascetic Anchorite”.

Kashmir seems to have been the abode of Rishis long before the advent of Islam and for this reason, it was known as Rishi Vatika. A strong folk tradition still persists, particularly in a number of villages of Kashmir, pointing out the existence of Rishis in very ancient times, and that some forests in the Valley are even named after them giving a certain degree of credence to the oral sources of the Rishi traditions. But it needs to be pointed out that before the coming of Islam to Kashmir, the Rishis were not socially active, since they led a secluded life either in caves or on the tops of mountains. It was not until the emergence of Nuruddin as the founder of an indigenous order of Muslim mystics (Rishi Silsilah) that the social significance of the Rishi tradition came to be established for the first time in Kashmir’s history. Under his influence, the Rishis emerged as a vital social force, so much so that they were found worthy of description by even outside observers of Kashmiri social reality. Kashmiri folk songs, which abound in praise of the Rishis, also testify to their social role. It may, however, be asked why Nuruddin called his order by a Hindu name and also why his order, in recent years, has been equated with “a new Bhakti movement”, said to have been started by Lal Ded, the Saivite mystic of the fourteenth century. Scholarly approaches to this day have mostly centred around the view that the Rishis were unconcerned about missionary activities, and that having borrowed “elements such as the mortification of the individual soul and hard ascetic exercises” from the Yogis, they had developed a “hatred of worldly life”. They did not claim any Sufi ancestry and did not hesitate to borrow ideas and practices of the Hindu ascetics, especially those of the Saivites of Kashmir with their emphasis on individual salvation and indifference to the fate of others.

The crux of the argument is not merely the fact that the Rishis developed their ideas in Hindu and Buddhist surroundings, but the distorted view that their social behavior, being in direct contrast to the Sharia-oriented behavior of the Sufis from Central Asia and Persia, led to the emergence of two different, broad trends in Sufism in Kashmir. While the orthodox trend was generally followed by immigrant Sufis, the Rishis, mostly native, practiced a broadly-based system of co-existence. Such stereotypes about the polarity between the Rishis and the Sufis also rest on the assumption that the Rishi movement was influenced very little by Islam and that it was a reaction against the so-called forcible conversions to Islam secured by Suha Bhatta, the zealous Brahman convert to Islam, who, as the most influential minister of Sultan Sikandar, let loose a reign of terror on the Hindus while the Sultan’s minister has been described as a champion of Islam, Nuruddin Rishi is made to appear as a crusader against “orthodoxy”. But the great danger implicit in such a view is that Nuruddin is almost uprooted from the Shari’a-oriented environment of the Kubrawi Sufis, by an arbitrary postulation of some misconceived parallelism between different developments characterising medieval society.

Notwithstanding the universal nature of Nuruddin’s teaching, it would be pertinent to observe that for a deeper understanding of the impact of the Rishi movement, its cultural, social and historical aspects constitute the primary and formative categories. No definition of the term Rishi which fails to stress these aspects of Nuruddin’s movement will suffice. What is important to historians is how the Rishi tradition arose during a period of great social crisis consequent upon the advent of Sufis from Central Asia and Persia in Kashmir. And in fact, it is against the background of the establishment of the Muslim Sultanate in 1320, the influx of Sufi missionaries and the sense of revolt manifested by Lal Ded against the manifold abuses of the caste-ridden Brahmanic social order, that the social origins of the Rishi movement need to be traced. The Rishi tradition was part and parcel of a new cultural trend; the removal of the Rishi tradition from its socio-historical context would be a form of amputation. To understand the tradition of Muslim Rishis, therefore, it is also necessary to know the culture which gave rise to it.

Baba Nasib, a seventeenth-century hagiographer, sums up the impact of the Rishi movement in a long poem. A few lines are worth quoting here:

The candle of religion is lit by the Rishis;

They are the pioneers of the path of belief;

The heart-warming quality of humble souls

Emanates from the inner purity of the hearts of the Rishis;

This vale of Kashmir, that you call a paradise; 

Owes a lot of its charm to the traditions set in vogue by the Rishis.

It follows that the Rishi movement, though essentially rooted in the local tradition, became an important aspect or dimension of the Islamic civilization, consequent upon the adoption of cultural traits or social patterns of Muslim immigrants by the Kashmiri rural masses. Given the rural character of the movement, it would be worthwhile to approach the subject from the standpoint suggested by Robert Redfield.

A summary of his views would suffice here to make the discussion meaningful.

Redfield’s central assumption is that the culture of a peasant society is not autonomous, but an aspect or dimension of a civilization of which it is a part. Since a peasant society is only half a society, peasant culture is a half-culture. It can be fully understood only in relation to the civilization in which it is contained. In order to make ineligible the compound nature of peasant culture, Redfield introduces two important concepts: the Great Tradition and the Little Tradition. In any civilization, there is a Great Tradition of the reflective few, and a Little Tradition of the unreflective many, the social dimensions of these two traditions are the great community and the little community. Thus the Great Tradition is the culture of the great community of priests, theologians and literary men who may not even have seen a village. These two traditions are not mutually exclusive, but interdependent, two currents of thought and action, distinguishable, yet flowing into and out of each other. Thus Redfield assumes that any peasant culture is compounded of empirically and conceptually separable Great and Little traditions. Viewed in the context of Redfield’s definition, the Little Tradition of Kashmiri peasant society seems to have linked itself with the Great Tradition of Islam through Nuruddin, who, in his numerous verses, seems to have established channels of communication between the two Traditions and set up standards of mutual reference and influence. But the dichotomy between these two traditions should not divert our attention from the objective fact that, as a result of its gradual assimilation and absorption in the wider system of Islam, the so-called Little Tradition of the peasant society assumed the form of popular culture.

The development of this historical phenomenon was determined by a spontaneous and changing consciousness, expressed, under the influence of Islam, in the people’s mode of existence, daily life and collective behaviour. It would seem, then, that the exclusive distinctiveness of the Great Tradition or High Culture vis-a-vis the Little Tradition or Popular Culture is meaningless, considering the fact that, under the influence of the Great Tradition, the little Tradition itself became the vehicle of protest against certain established norms which were inimical to the ethical and spiritual development of the Kashmiri. It was in this sense that the Rishi movement was, in essence, a popular expression of mounting disagreement, disaffection, tension and conflict generated in the course of time by a particular social order, when it was drawn into the orbit of Islamic civilization. For a fuller appreciation of the argument, it would be necessary to know how Nuruddin himself is at pains to stress the Islamic dimension of the Rishi movement. But before doing so, it seems pertinent to set out certain parameters for further discussion.

References and readings

Kashmir’s Transition to Islam: The Role of Muslim Rishis. By M. Ishaq Khan.

A History Of Kashmir. By P.N.K. Bamzai