The entry for Jugis/Jogis in Herbert Risley's 1892report on the British government's EthnographicSurvey of Bengal identifies this householdercommunity as “a weaving caste” before turning to thequestion of their origins, which Risley deems“extremely obscure”. Judging that “since thebeginning of the century no fresh facts have beenadded” to the surveys conducted in 1807-1809 byFrancis Buchanan, he repeated the latter'sspeculation that the Jogis “were either thepriesthood of the country during the reign of thedynasty to which Gopí Chandra belonged, or Ṣúdrasdedicated to a religious life, but degraded by thegreat Ṣaiva reformer Ṣankara Áchárya, and thatthey came with the Pál Rájás from Western India”(Risley 1892, 355). This loaded but scattershotstatement contains several themes still fundamentalto discourse on the historical and present socialstanding of the Jogī/Yogī/Nāth community in Bengal:the idea (which is central to this chapter) thatthey were previously priests; the use of Nāthreligious literature (e.g., Gopīcandra songs) toreconstruct the community's history; the notion oftheir having been “degraded” to a low status by anagent of orthodox Hindu reform; links to non-Nāthascetic traditions including the Daśnāmī sampradāya (religiousorder) supposedly founded by Śaṅkarācārya; andassociation with the hybrid-Buddhist culture ofBengal under the Pāla Empire of the eighth toeleventh centuries.