BPSC 69th CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 71 of 144

Correct — A, Northern India. The stem names three groups as though they were three separate movements; they are in fact one early-medieval milieu, and the question is really asking where that milieu did its work. The Nathpanthis are the Nath sampradaya, traced to Matsyendranath and his disciple Gorakhnath (usually placed in the eleventh or twelfth century), organised into twelve panths and seated at the Gorakhnath Math in Gorakhpur, eastern Uttar Pradesh. The Siddhas are the Siddhacharyas, the 'eighty-four perfected ones' of the Sahajiya-Vajrayana lineage. The Yogis are the practitioners who carried hatha-yoga technique out of both. What united them was a critique rather than a creed: they attacked the ritual apparatus of Brahmanical religion and the caste order resting on it, preached renunciation, and located salvation in meditation on a formless Ultimate Reality reached through yogasana, breath control and mental discipline. Two things made that critique socially explosive in the Gangetic plain — it was addressed to artisan and 'low'-caste audiences rather than to Brahmins, and it was delivered in spoken languages rather than in Sanskrit. That is precisely the ground from which north Indian nirguna bhakti grew: Kabir at Banaras, Ravidas, Dadu Dayal and Guru Nanak all inherit the vocabulary and the anti-ritual stance, and Kabir's verse uses Nath technical terms — surati, sunn, the inverted ulatbansi idiom — without explanation, because his listeners already knew them. The tradition's own institutional map says the same thing: Gorakhpur, Devi Patan in Balrampur and Tilla Jogian in the Salt Range are all northern seats, and the jogis' own legend cycles — Bhartrihari of Ujjain renouncing his throne, Raja Gopichand taking the ochre robe — circulated as folk ballads across the Hindi-speaking belt. Hence northern India.

• (b)Southern India — Chronology alone rules this out. South India's great devotional wave — the twelve Alvars of Vishnu and the sixty-three Nayanars of Shiva — ran from roughly the sixth to the ninth century, two to three hundred years before Gorakhnath, so it cannot have been made popular by him. The option is tempting because the south has its own 'Siddhas': the Tamil Sittars, such as Tirumular, whose Tirumantiram forms the tenth Tirumurai of the Shaiva canon. They are a separate lineage with a separate literature, and UPSC has tested them in their own right.
• (c)Eastern India — The most serious rival, and worth understanding rather than dismissing. The Siddhacharyas were at home in the Pala monasteries of Bengal and Bihar, and their Charyapada songs, composed roughly between the eighth and twelfth centuries, are the oldest surviving verse in an eastern Apabhramsha. But the question asks where devotional religion became a popular force, and the east's own great devotional surge — Chaitanya's Gaudiya Vaishnavism, 1486 to 1534 — is saguna Krishna-bhakti drawing on the Bhagavata Purana, not a descendant of the Nath critique.
• (d)Western India — Western India's devotional tradition is the Varkari movement of Maharashtra — Jnaneshwar, Namdev, Eknath and Tukaram — centred on Vitthala at Pandharpur, which is saguna image-worship of exactly the kind the Nathpanthis criticised. There is a real connection, and it is worth knowing: Jnaneshwar (c. 1275-1296) received initiation through his elder brother Nivrittinath, who belonged to the Nath lineage. Nath influence therefore did travel west, but the popular force the statement describes took shape in the north.

Between roughly the ninth and thirteenth centuries a yogic-tantric substratum grew up in northern India alongside temple Hinduism. Its practitioners went by three overlapping labels — Nathpanthi, Siddha and Yogi — and shared a body of technique rather than a theology: postures, breath control and the manipulation of an inner subtle body were treated as the road to liberation, in place of sacrifice, image-worship and priestly mediation. The Nath sampradaya, named for Matsyendranath and Gorakhnath, is the organised survival of that world; the Siddhacharyas of Vajrayana Buddhism are its Buddhist face; and hatha yoga is its most durable export, codified in the Gorakshashataka attributed to Gorakhnath and in Svatmarama's fifteenth-century Hathayogapradipika, which opens by saluting Matsyendra and Goraksha by name. The crucial consequence for Indian religious history is that this movement made two ideas ordinary among ordinary people: that the divine is nirguna, without attributes and therefore beyond image and temple, and that birth confers no spiritual advantage. Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century north Indian bhakti splits along the first of those ideas — nirguna sants such as Kabir, Ravidas and Nanak against saguna poets such as Surdas and Tulsidas who worship Krishna and Rama in form — but the shared social premise, that a weaver or a leather-worker may speak of God in his own language, comes straight out of the Nath-Siddha critique.

The examiner has grouped three names that belong to a single textbook paragraph, which is itself the clue: treat them as one tradition and ask which region that tradition's institutions and successors occupy, rather than trying to place each name separately. Two discriminators then settle it. The first is chronological and is the cleanest tool on the paper: an effect cannot precede its cause. South India's Alvar-Nayanar devotionalism was already three centuries old before Gorakhnath appears, so option (b) fails on dates alone, and Maharashtra's Varkari tradition and Bengal's Gaudiya Vaishnavism both begin after the Nath period and rest on image-worship the Nathpanthis rejected, which weakens (c) and (d). The second is institutional: the Nath order's principal seat is the Gorakhnath Math at Gorakhpur, its twelve panths are spread across the north, and the saints who carried its critique into mass devotion — Kabir in Banaras, Ravidas, Nanak in Punjab, Dadu in Rajasthan — are without exception north Indian. Be honest about the one loose thread: the Siddhacharyas themselves were largely eastern, active at the Pala monasteries of Bengal and Bihar, so a student who picks (c) has thought about it. The stem asks about where devotional religion became popular, not where the ascetics lived, and that is what sends the answer north.

• The Nath sampradaya traces itself to Matsyendranath and his disciple Gorakhnath, usually placed in the eleventh or twelfth century; it is organised into twelve panths (Barah Panth) and its principal seat is the Gorakhnath Math at Gorakhpur in eastern Uttar Pradesh.
• The Siddhacharyas — the 'eighty-four siddhas' of the Sahajiya-Vajrayana lineage, including Saraha, Luipa and Kanhapa — composed the Charyapada between about the eighth and twelfth centuries, the oldest surviving verse in an eastern Apabhramsha ancestral to Bengali, Assamese, Odia and Maithili.
• Hatha yoga's textual core comes from this milieu: the Gorakshashataka attributed to Gorakhnath, and Svatmarama's Hathayogapradipika of the fifteenth century, whose opening verses salute Matsyendra and Goraksha.
• The north Indian nirguna bhakti that inherited the critique: Kabir (dates uncertain — c. 1398-1448 on one reckoning, c. 1440-1518 on another), Ravidas, Dadu Dayal (1544-1603) and Guru Nanak (15 April 1469 - 22 September 1539).
• Keep the southern stream separate: the Tamil Sittars, whose Tirumular composed the Tirumantiram forming the tenth Tirumurai of the Shaiva canon, and before them the twelve Alvars and sixty-three Nayanars of the sixth to ninth centuries.
• Nath influence did reach western India — Jnaneshwar (c. 1275-1296), author of the Marathi Jnaneshwari, was initiated in the Nath lineage through his elder brother Nivrittinath — but Maharashtra's Varkari devotion is saguna worship of Vitthala at Pandharpur.
• Nath ascetics are popularly called Kanphata, 'split-eared', from the heavy mudra earrings set in slit ear cartilage at initiation — the visible marker by which medieval Persian chroniclers and later travellers identified the jogis of northern India.

• Confusing the north Indian Siddhacharyas of the Sahajiya-Vajrayana lineage with the Tamil Sittars — the same English word covers two unrelated traditions
• Assuming the bhakti movement began in the north; it began in the Tamil country in the sixth to ninth centuries and travelled northwards centuries later
• Reading 'devotional religion' as image-worship — the Nathpanthi contribution was precisely to make a formless, imageless conception of the divine popular

BPSC takes this material as a one-line attribution — which region, which language, which saint wrote which work — and lifts its phrasing almost verbatim from NCERT school textbooks, so recognising the source sentence is often faster than reasoning. UPSC works the same milieu analytically and in statement form: whether the Tamil Siddhas were monotheistic and condemned idolatry, whether the Lingayats rejected rebirth, who first used Hindi to preach — testing whether a candidate can keep one regional stream apart from another rather than name a region.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Nath sampradaya is traditionally traced to which pair of teachers?

  • (a)Matsyendranath and Gorakhnath
  • (b)Basavanna and Allama Prabhu
  • (c)Ramananda and Kabir
  • (d)Nivrittinath and Jnaneshwar

  Answer(a) Matsyendranath and Gorakhnath — Gorakhnath, usually placed in the eleventh or twelfth century, gave the order its name and its principal seat at Gorakhpur.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Charyapada, the earliest surviving verse composed by the Siddhacharyas, is chiefly associated with which region?

  • (a)The Tamil country
  • (b)Bengal and Bihar
  • (c)The Malabar coast
  • (d)Gujarat and Saurashtra

  Answer(b) Bengal and Bihar — the Charyapada songs of Saraha, Luipa and Kanhapa are the oldest specimens of an eastern Apabhramsha ancestral to Bengali, Assamese, Odia and Maithili.