Nets of Maya: Gorakhnath as a Trickster Saint in the Folktale of Raja Bharthari and Gopi Chand

In this paper I explore Gorakhnath as a trickster hero in the North Indian folklore of Raja Bharthari and Gopi Chand. Gorakhnath—a popular yogi figure in many folklores—creates, through his traversal of rigid structural boundaries between social and religious delimitations, a new idiom of social and religious acceptance that results in an acceptance of a higher metaphysical positioning. He holds a unique space in folk imagination as a figure who combines an earthly existence with a saintly core, unveiling nets of illusion and revealing essential unity in dichotomous divisions between entities such as body/soul, sacred/ profane and animate/inanimate