Ramanandi Sampradaya

The Ramanandi Sampradaya is the largest Vaishnava ascetic order of North India and probably the most numerous body of Hindu monks in existence, and it centres on devotion to Rama.

The tradition of Ramananda

The order looks to the devotional teacher Ramananda, traditionally placed in the fourteenth or fifteenth century, who is remembered for preaching devotion to Rama in the vernacular and for admitting disciples without regard to caste, a strain of openness that the tradition preserves in its self-understanding. Its members are ascetics devoted to Rama and Sita, and the order is bound up with the great centres of Rama devotion, above all Ayodhya, held to be the birthplace of Rama, where the Ramanandis are the dominant monastic presence.

Sadhus and akharas

The sampradaya contains a great range of ascetics, from settled scholar-monks to wandering renunciants, and it includes militant regiments, the naga akharas, of armed ascetics who historically guarded pilgrimage sites and revenues and who take a prominent part in the bathing processions of the Kumbh Mela. This spread, from devotional poets to armed nagas, mirrors the pattern found in other large Hindu orders, in which a renunciate ideal coexists with organised bodies that once served practical and even military functions. Its sheer size makes the Ramanandi Sampradaya a major institution of contemporary Hindu monasticism and a central actor in the devotional and pilgrimage life of northern India.

Tradition holds that Ramananda taught disciples across caste and even religious lines, a memory that later devotional literature reinforced by associating figures such as Kabir and Raidas with his circle, though the precise historical detail of these connections is less certain than the tradition's enduring insistence on his inclusiveness. Centred on Varanasi and, above all, on devotion to Rama, the order Ramananda's teaching produced grew over the centuries that followed into the largest body of Vaishnava ascetics in North India, a growth that brought it into the same competitive pilgrimage environment the Shaiva Dashanami monks already occupied.

The Ramanandi response mirrored the Dashanami one directly: the order developed its own militarised ascetic regiments, generally called Bairagi or Vairagi Naga sadhus, who trained for armed self defence and for contesting bathing rights and precedence at major pilgrimage gatherings against the older Shaiva akharas, a rivalry between Vaishnava and Shaiva armed ascetics that shaped Kumbh Mela politics for centuries. The order's continuing centrality to Ayodhya, one of Hinduism's most contested and most sacred pilgrimage sites, keeps the Ramanandi Sampradaya at the centre of Vaishnava devotional life in North India today much as its size alone would suggest.