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Paper short abstract:

In Gopichand legends, the Queen insists the prince renounce the throne to become a Yogi. Bengali versions add that she personally teaches esoteric bodily disciplines to the prince, prompting controversy within the texts themselves around the possibility of women transmitting this knowledge.

Paper long abstract:

Mother, as the common saying goes, is one’s first guru. Usually this is taken to mean that one learns elementary life skills from one’s mother, but in Middle Bengali versions of the Nath Yogi legend of Prince Gopichand, it is also the Queen Mother who imparts teachings on yoga and other ascetic disciplines to the prince. This presentation, based on Sukur Mohammad’s Gopīcandrer Sannyāsa and Bhavānīdās’ Gopīcandrer Pāṃcālī, highlights both the queen’s teachings on bodily alchemy as a technology for attaining physical immortality and internal debates within these texts regarding the status of the queen —a married woman— as a teacher of male monastics. The poems focus on how the prince Gopichand renounces his kingdom to become a Yogi at his mother’s insistence. Familiar Nath themes of esoteric yogic methods, the pursuit of immortality, the interdependence of body and mind are more present here than in the oral traditions heretofore studied, as is the tension between the technical knowledge clearly possessed by Queen Maynamati and the Nath tradition’s general tendency to denigrate women as a way of encouraging its male devotees of the necessity of celibacy/renunciation. The texts seem especially preoccupied with the queen’s religious authority and mediating role in transmitting these yogic teachings and techniques in view of the wide assumed inherent impurity and unsuitability of women as gurus.