How ancient is old? I asked a Naga sanyasi at the Kumbh Mela at Prayag Raj.
Not long ago, the artificial intelligence watchdog at Facebook had removed my video of one of them, for trading 'community' sensibilities for sensation by posting a penile projection that was anything but sensuous, before restoring the visual following my appeal for human intervention.
The Nagas, certainly, belong to tricky terrain. Dating them is a lot of hardwork that relies on human acumen exploring the memory of time, not terrabytes on your computer drive or transcontinental data centres.
How ancient is old?
The Nagas, who have rennounced everything, clothes, caste, community, family, name, and some, even, occasionally, food, have no memory of time. And those among them who have truly arrived do not even remember how long they have been in the buff.
They transcend time.
Small wonder then, the most revered of them all, the much loved lone wolf Deoraha baba had been there all along, since my great grand father arrived for his first job as lawyer in Allahabad, in the second half of 19th century, till I was settled in my first job as journo in Delhi, a little over a century later, seeding successive generations with a two-word password for access to a parallel universe: aseem daya! That translates to boundless compassion, a tough creed to adopt, leave aside follow.
Those who speculate on Deoraha, bet he lived to be 700 years old. But such a confirmation never came from the Baba himself, who despite his razor sharp memory that allowed him to recongise my family from 250 feet apart, insisted that he had crossed over to the far side of memory. His conciousness had dissolved in the divine. Such a state, he said, was to be Brahmaleen.
It is only after rummaging through scraps of history that I discovered that the high office of the Deoraha baba (he lived in a reed and plank hut propped up on stilts) could be as old as the empire of Vijaynagar, its founder Devaraja, an ascetic, set free by 14th century vandal and treasure hunter Muhammad bin Tughlak, following a sudden change of heart after he sacked a hilltop fort of the preceding Anegundi kingdom.
One way to understand the cult of the immortals, who dress in dead ash, that is carbon, is that the Indic spiritual legacy encourages the preservation of a chain of thoughts, belief systems, cognitive responses, and historical happenings without distortion or alteration, by downloading consciousness, that is data of memory and experiences, across generations of humans programmed and purposed for such endeavour through mortification of mind and body. That is what Shruti is all about, bequeathing to mankind the Vedas, unaltered, untampered, since time immemorial.
The rarefied realm of artificial intelligence is attempting to accomplish just that right now: downloading human consciousness, that is memory and experience, on digital data stacks so that we may go on to live forever.
That brings us back to how ancient is old, really.
The first documented evidence of the Naga is to be found in an Indus Valley seal of a yogi in padmasana from 5000 years ago, his headgear and sitting posture not very different from the savants yuu may have seen at the Kumbh.
A still more informed assumption, relying on memory and experience, might stretch their arrival on the scene from the rift valley of Africa where humans are said to have originated, and once lived naked. From there they penetrated the forested ravines of the Vindhyas flanked by the Ganga to the north and Narmada to the south, bringing with them the first seeds of farming around 7000 BCE.
This is good enough reason for a second guess that the Nagas may have first come around as a congregation around 500 BCE among the Ajivika who originally inhabited the Barabar caves, north of the Vindhya, in Gaya, Bihar, erstwhile Magadha, before Ashoka inscribed his signature on their walls.
Still two hundred years later, the Nagas make a fascinating appearance in Swat, in the Mahaban grove north of Abottabad, where, lately, the Americans hunted down bin Laden, and Indian jets bombed Islamic jihadis intoxicated on the divine.
There, not far from the neighbouring Tora Bora caves of Afghanistan, Alexander came across a group of gymnosophists (Hindu yogis) contemplating on the invader's existential dilemma in the realm of the divine. Alexander, the popular narrative says, was directed to the east by his guru Aristotle in the pursuit of wisdom. Instead, by a strange twist of fate, he was consumed by relenteless wars between the Euphrates and the Indus deltas.
Arrian's account of Alexander's ceaseless transcontinenal slaughter, interrupted by tireless riverbank sacrificial offerings, has it that he commanded one of his generals to seek out the sophists of Mahaban and deliver them to his tent. When the worthy arrived at the hermitage, and announced the God king's command, the Naga replied that a god destined to die as mortal could not be their lord and master. It would do well for Alexander to submit to the nirgun, nirakar, everlasting forever, the God and Lord of all, instead.
Alexander, it turns out, heeded the call and submitted himself to the Naga and was blessed, in return, with a companion from their own, Kala~nous (the end of time, spelt Calanus in English renditions). Calanus' journey to Persia and subsequent self immolation, en route, foreshadowed Alexander's own death in Babylon.
Subsequent jottings by Megasthenes, the emissary of Alexander's successor Selucus, to the court of Chandragupta Maurya, locate a large congregation of Naga gymnosophists deep in the Deccan, in the proximity of Anegundi, in the vicnity of modern Vijaynagar-Hampi, far from Alexander's Swat. Many of these gymnosophists can still be located in caves there today, where, probably, our story of Deoraha baba begins.
But the Nagas traversed a much larger territory than the swathe between Hampi and Swat. Early accounts of Arab adventurers, among them ibn Faldun, into the far north of the Caucasus, and the regions bordering Siberia, locate wandering mystics and their rituals in distant, far off locales.
Much has changed for the Nagas between Alexander and our time.
Facing the onslaught on Islamic invaders, and perhaps, in anticipation of the takeover of Hind in the wake of the annexation of Sindh by Muhammad bin Qasim around 707 CE, the Nagas, otherwise devoted to the divine and hardened by mortifaction, were mustered into a military force and defenders of the faith by 8th century savant Sankaracarya.
On the flip side, 11th century Turkish invader Mahmud of Ghazni, too is said to have maintained contingents of Naga warriors in his army, and exclusive neighbourhoods were reserved for them in Ghazna, until then, the preserve of Hindu Shahi kings.
His successor Muhammad, the Ghori, who established the Islamic dominion in Delhi, was a Sun worshipping Suri warrior, force converted by the Seljuk and Ghaznavid armies who outflanked his clan from opposite ends of their mountain stronghold in Ghor, where the aGhori sect is likely to have originated.
By the time Babur launched his raid on India, the Nagas had transformed into a military machine. The Mughal patriarch writes of a massive moutain-like dark force of warriors rushing down the hilltop towards his own formation. In the event, they were blown to bits by the Mughal's technology onslaught. Babur introduced cannon for the first time in north Indian warfare. Interestingly, his army too had contingents of Uighur Shiva worshipping warriors, whose descendants have since settled down south across communities in modern Andhra Pradesh.
Wrote Babar of the Indian saint soldiers: The Indians are brave. They are not afraid to die. They are trained to offer themselves in sacrifice (balidaan, made famous as Indian war doctrine to this day).
"But they are not trained to win wars."
Subsequent military campaigns of Muslims against Indians, glorify with monotonous regularity, naked horse back warriors with nothing other than saffron bandanas on their heads and swords and javelins in hand, riding fearlessly into war. Despite capitulating kingdoms, the valour of the Nagas was never in question.
Which is why even the early Safavids of Iran, contemporaries of the Mughals, maintained large contingents of unarmoured Nagas, from the Khurasan-Hindu Kush region on the Indo-Iranian frontier, with cannibalistic practices akin to the Aghori Nagas who roam the sandbanks of the Ganga at Kumbh now.
But the story of Nagas is not one of relentless confrontion. It is of persevering compassion, that, in Deoraha baba's words, aseem daya, survives to this day, shared with little else than an exchange of benign glances.
Muslim generals, warlords, and governors, among them converted Hindus who swiftly rose up the Mughal ranks to command vast territories and fortunes, patronised Naga akharas as well.
One such was Murshid Quli Khan, Aurangazeb's governor of Bengal and founder of Murshidabad, who, as a Brahman lad, was sold into slavery, but rode his merit to become the most prosperous commander of the Mughal Court.
The Nagas too marched at the vanguard of the military formations at the Muharram tazia processions of the Shia rulers of Golconda, once the world's sole supplier of diamonds.
How old is ancient, I asked the Naga yogi at the Kumbh in Sangam. He stared at me with a benign gaze.
SILENT!
His eyes revealed he had truly walked a long distance to where we were standing now.
© Shubhrangshu Roy
Kumbh, Prayag, 7 February, 2025
Adapted from my forthcoming work, pixel: Decoding Hinduism, The Metamorphosis of the Metaphysical into the Monolith