MPSC 2023 Prelims Paper-I · Question 6 of 100

Correct — option (4), Kanifnath. The stem is an attribution question: it does not ask what happened but what Setu Madhavrao Pagadi wrote, and Pagadi — the civil servant, linguist and historian of Maratha and Deccan history — is the authority usually cited for the claim that one of the Nau Naths, the nine Nath gurus revered across Maharashtra, took the name Shah Ramzan and was initiated into Islam by the Sufi saint Nizamuddin. The saint in question is Kanifnath. The shrine that carries the story is at Madhi, in Pathardi taluka of Ahmadnagar district, and it is one of the clearest surviving cases of a shared sacred site in Maharashtra: Hindu devotees know the saint as Kanifnath, once called Kanhoba, while Muslim devotees know the same figure as Shah Ramzan Mahi Sawar, and the annual gathering at Madhi has for centuries been attended by both communities, with hereditary Muslim families among those with a role at the shrine. That double identity is exactly why the stem calls it a mystery of the cultural history of Maharashtra: a single saint stands in two religious traditions at once, and the two accounts of him cannot easily be reconciled into a single biography. The candidate is being asked to attach the Shah Ramzan identity to the right one of four Nath names, and the association is with Kanifnath and with the Madhi shrine. Two points of caution are worth noting. The stem is a question but is printed ending in a full stop rather than a question mark, in both language columns; and the claim itself is presented as Pagadi's reading of a tradition, which is how the card treats it, rather than as an independently documented event.

• (1)Gorakhnath — Gorakhnath is the most famous of the Naths and therefore the natural guess, which is why he heads the list. He is remembered as the disciple of Matsyendranath and as the organiser of the Nath sampradaya itself, the ascetic order of the Kanphata yogis; his name is attached to the Gorakhnath Math and to the city of Gorakhpur, and his influence runs from Nepal through the Gangetic plain into the Deccan. Nothing in his tradition involves the name Shah Ramzan or the shrine at Madhi. The mistake here is one of magnitude rather than of category: the candidate reaches for the biggest name in the Nath tradition instead of the one to which the particular story in the stem belongs.
• (2)Gahininath — Gahininath matters greatly in Maharashtra, but for an entirely different reason. He is the Nath guru who initiated Nivruttinath, the elder brother of Jnaneshwar, and it is through that initiation that the Nath current flows into the Varkari tradition and into the Jnaneshwari itself. Because Gahininath is the Nath name a Maharashtra syllabus is most likely to have taught, a candidate who has read the Varkari chapter carefully may pick him by familiarity. But the link he carries is Nath-to-Varkari, not Nath-to-Sufi, and the shrine and the Shah Ramzan identity described in the stem are not his.
• (3)Jalandharnath — Jalandharnath is counted among the nine Naths and his name recurs through the Navnath cycle of legends that circulates in Marathi, so he is a wholly plausible-looking option in a list of this kind. He is not, however, the figure to whom the Shah Ramzan identity and the Madhi shrine belong. This option exists to punish a candidate who knows that the answer must be one of the Nau Naths but has not learnt which of them the Sufi story is attached to; in a question that names a specific author, a specific new name and a specific Sufi initiator, only the individual who carries all three details can be the answer.

The Nath sampradaya is an ascetic tradition of yogis that took shape in the early medieval centuries and spread widely across northern and western India; Matsyendranath and Gorakhnath are its founding figures, and Maharashtra reveres a group of nine, the Nau Naths, whose legends are gathered in the Marathi Navnath Bhaktisar. The tradition matters for Maharashtra's cultural history because of what it touched at both ends. On one side it fed the bhakti movement: Gahininath initiated Nivruttinath, who initiated his younger brother Jnaneshwar, so the Varkari tradition's greatest text stands at one remove from the Naths. On the other side it met Sufism. The Deccan from the fourteenth century onwards was a meeting ground of yogic and Sufi ascetic practice, and a number of shrines came to be venerated by Hindus and Muslims under different names for the same saint. The shrine of Kanifnath at Madhi in Ahmadnagar district is the standing example: the saint is Kanifnath to one community and Shah Ramzan Mahi Sawar to the other, the annual fair draws both, and hereditary Muslim families have long held a place in its ritual. Setu Madhavrao Pagadi (1910-1994), who wrote extensively on Maratha history and on Sufism in the Deccan, is the historian most often cited for the account the stem summarises.

MPSC's Maharashtra culture section regularly tests the meeting points between traditions rather than the traditions themselves, because those meeting points are what distinguish Maharashtra's religious history from any other state's. Questions turn on the Nath-Varkari link, on shared shrines, on the Mahanubhav sect, on the Sufi silsilas established in the Deccan, and on the historians who wrote about them. This item adds a further layer by naming its source: the stem is not asking whether the conversion happened but who among four Naths the account concerns, so the candidate has to attach a specific story to a specific name. That is a useful discipline more generally, because MPSC frequently frames a contested or traditional claim as somebody's statement, and the answer is then a matter of correctly reporting the attribution rather than of adjudicating the claim. It is also worth noting that this stem is printed with a full stop instead of a question mark, which changes nothing in its sense but is characteristic of this paper's typography.

• Kanifnath is counted among the Nau Naths, the nine Nath gurus revered in Maharashtra, and his shrine stands at Madhi in Pathardi taluka of Ahmadnagar district.
• The same saint is known to Hindu devotees as Kanifnath, formerly Kanhoba, and to Muslim devotees as Shah Ramzan Mahi Sawar, which makes Madhi one of Maharashtra's best-known shared shrines.
• Setu Madhavrao Pagadi (1910-1994), a civil servant, linguist and historian of Maratha and Deccan history, is the authority cited for the account that Kanifnath was initiated into Islam by the Sufi saint Nizamuddin.
• Gorakhnath, the disciple of Matsyendranath, is the organising figure of the Nath sampradaya and of the Kanphata yogis, and gives his name to the Gorakhnath Math and to Gorakhpur.
• Gahininath's importance in Maharashtra is that he initiated Nivruttinath, the elder brother and guru of Jnaneshwar, which is the link between the Nath tradition and the Varkari sant parampara.

• Answering with Gorakhnath because he is the best-known Nath; fame is not the test when the stem names one particular story, shrine and second identity
• Substituting Gahininath because he is the Nath name most often taught in Maharashtra's bhakti chapter; his significance is the link to Nivruttinath and Jnaneshwar
• Treating an attributed claim as a fact to be adjudicated rather than an attribution to be reported; the stem asks what Pagadi wrote
• Missing that the stem is a question in spite of ending in a full stop, and reading it as a statement to be matched rather than answered

Maharashtra's religious and cultural history reaches MPSC as identification questions built around one distinctive detail — a second name, a shrine, a text, a guru-disciple link or a historian's attribution. The Nath tradition is asked about most often through its points of contact with something else, either the Varkari sant parampara or Deccan Sufism, so it repays learning the Naths as a set with one distinguishing fact attached to each rather than as an undifferentiated list of nine names. Expect the Commission to name its source in the stem from time to time, as it does here with Setu Madhavrao Pagadi, and expect stems in this section to carry the loose transliteration and irregular punctuation that this paper shows throughout. The safe method is to locate the single detail that only one option can carry, and to answer from that.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The shrine at Madhi in Pathardi taluka of Ahmadnagar district, venerated by Hindus and Muslims under two different names for the same saint, is associated with which of the Nau Naths ?

  • (a)Gorakhnath
  • (b)Gahininath
  • (c)Kanifnath
  • (d)Matsyendranath

  Answer(c) Kanifnath — at Madhi the saint is worshipped as Kanifnath by Hindu devotees and as Shah Ramzan Mahi Sawar by Muslim devotees, and the annual gathering there has long drawn both communities. Gorakhnath and Matsyendranath belong to the founding layer of the Nath order generally, while Gahininath's significance in Maharashtra is his initiation of Nivruttinath.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Nath tradition is connected to the Varkari sant parampara of Maharashtra chiefly through which guru-disciple link ?

  • (a)Gorakhnath and Kanifnath
  • (b)Gahininath and Nivruttinath
  • (c)Jalandharnath and Gahininath
  • (d)Matsyendranath and Gorakhnath

  Answer(b) Gahininath and Nivruttinath — Gahininath initiated Nivruttinath, who in turn initiated his younger brother Jnaneshwar, and it is by this line that the Nath current enters Marathi bhakti and the Jnaneshwari. The Matsyendranath-Gorakhnath link is the founding pair of the Nath order itself rather than the point of contact with the Varkari tradition.