ABSTRACT
The permanent organization of the devotional movement in Assam takes two forms: one is that of the village Name House and the other is the satra system. A satra consists of a guru and the disciples initiated by him. Every Assamese Vaishnava prior to marriage journeys to his satra to take initiation from the Gosain who imparts to him the esoteric mantras of the sect. Thereafter he is required to live the life of a disciple who has dedicated himself to god and to support the satra by the payment of annual dues. There are estimated to be some 650 satras in the Assam Valley. The head of the satra, who is termed the satrādhikār (‘owner of the satra’), or Gosain (‘god’), traces his spiritual genealogy by hereditary succession or by the link of initiation through his predecessors in office to the founder of his satra, and thence to the founder of his sub-sect who was one of the disciples initiated by Shankaradeva, a Mahapurusa and incarnation of Vishnu (according to the Mahapurusiya version of events). The lives of Shankaradeva and his immediate followers are recorded in an extensive biographical literature, which is said to date from the early half of the seventeenth century. The first four biographies, though not always in agreement, are held to be largely authoritative, while progressively less reliance is placed on the later works of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, by which time it had become an act of piety to model the career of the master on the episodes of Krishna’s life as recounted in the Bhagavata Purana (Neog 1965: 16). Another source of variation derives from the division of the movement soon after Shankaradeva’s death into rival sects which favoured different versions of events designed to legitimize particular lines of apostolic succession. The main facts of his life are, however, generally taken to be as follows.
