Nathpanthis, Siddhas and Yogis made devotional religion popular in

Question

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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.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) 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) 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'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.

Concept: 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.

State PCS 2023 Q71 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2023 Q71 — History PYQ with Answer