Person · Assamese saint & reformer · India
Shankaradeva
Also known as Shankaradeva — Bardowa / Majuli network
The 15-16 century Assamese neo-Vaishnava reformer Srimanta Sankardev (1449-1568), the founder of the Ekasarana Dharma movement and the originator of modern Assamese literary, musical, dance and theatrical traditions. Sankardev was born into a Baro Bhuyan family at Bordowa (Nagaon district) and devoted his life to reforming Assamese Hinduism through Vaishnava devotion to Krishna alone (eka-sarana, 'single refuge'). His scholarly output includes the Kirtan Ghosa, Bhakti Ratnakara, Nimi Navasiddha Samvad, Rukmini Harana and the 'Ankiya Nat' theatrical plays (which initiated Assamese drama). He created the Satriya dance (one of India's eight classical dance forms, recognised by the Sangeet Natak Akademi in 2000), the Borgeet musical tradition, and the Sattra monastic system (over 500 satras founded by his movement). His disciple Madhavdev continued the tradition. Sankardev's institutions at Majuli island remain central.
- Date
- 1449–1568
- Function
- Arts & performance
- Condition
- historical person + living institutions
- River basin
- Brahmaputra
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 26.440, 92.700
About the place
Placed at Bardowa in Nagaon, his birthplace. The movement he founded is centred on Majuli's sattras, a separate entry, and his own last years were spent at Koch Behar.
Connections (4)
- Monastic foundationMajuli
Shankaradeva's sattras on Majuli are monasteries, theatres and manuscript workshops at once: Borgeet is composed there, Sattriya danced there, and Ankiyā Bhāonā staged in the namghar. Assamese neo-Vaishnavism put the book rather than an image on the pedestal, and made performance the liturgy. Majuli has lost more than half its land area to the Brahmaputra since 1900, so the island holding the tradition's manuscripts and mask-making is physically disappearing.
- Court associationChaitanya Mahaprabhu
Shankaradeva in Assam and Chaitanya in Bengal were near-contemporaries leading Vaishnava movements four hundred kilometres apart, and there is no evidence they met. Both made congregational singing the central act; Chaitanya's produced ecstatic kīrtan, Shankaradeva's a structured drama with scripts. Shankaradeva also wrote in Brajavali, an artificial literary language mixing Assamese with Braj, which put Assamese devotion into a north Indian idiom without either man meeting the other.
- Canonised by textSattriya, Majuli
Sattriya is the only one of the eight classical forms that never left the building it was made for. Shankaradeva composed the Ankiyā Bhāonā plays, the Borgeet songs and the dance together in the sixteenth century as one liturgy, and the Majuli sattras have performed them without a break since. It was recognised as classical in 2000, which changed nothing about how it is danced.
- Contemporary capital withSuhungmung Dihingia Rājā
Suhungmung's reign and Shankaradeva's life overlap almost exactly, and the two together are what made modern Assam: a Tai dynasty absorbing the valley's smaller kingdoms and beginning to write in Assamese, and a neo-Vaishnava movement giving that Assamese a literature, a music and an institutional network of sattras and namghars. The Ahom court was initially hostile to the movement and later endowed it, which is the usual sequence.
On these journeys
Sources
Sangeet Natak Akademi Sattriya materials; Assamese literary and institutional histories.
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