According to Setu Madhavrao Pagadi, who of the following saint renamed himself as 'Shaha Ramjan' and got converted to Islam by a Sufi Saint Nizamuddin. It is a mystery of cultural history of Maharasht

Question

According to Setu Madhavrao Pagadi, who of the following saint renamed himself as 'Shaha Ramjan' and got converted to Islam by a Sufi Saint Nizamuddin. It is a mystery of cultural history of Maharashtra.

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

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.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) 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.  (b) 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.  (c) 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.

Concept: 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.

State PCS 2023 Q6 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2023 Q6 — History PYQ with Answer