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The Marathi Saint and Bhakti Literature

Dr. M. V. Kamath

My dear Gauri,

Among the Indo-Aryan languages devotional bhakti literature first appeared in Marathi. The process started in the 13th century with Jnaneshwar (1271-1296) who is also known as Jnandeva. Like Christ and Sankara, Jnaneshwar died very young. He was just about 25 years old when he passed away, but by then he had written a long commentary on the Bhagavad Gita called Bhavaaratha Dipika; it is better known as Jnaneshwari. (It was written at a time when Marathi and Konkani had not yet become two distinct languages and so scholars are not agreed on whether Jnaneshwari was written in Old Marathi or Old Konkani.)

Jnaneshwari is the fountainhead of Maharashtrian devotionalism and has to be chanted. Jnaneshwar was initiated into the Nath sect but his bhakthi was due to his connection with the Varkari sect that went on annual pilgrimages to Pandharpur to the shrine of Vithoba.

Among Jnaneshwar’s contemporaries was Namdeo (1270-1350) who was a tailor by caste. He was surrounded by other low caste saints like Gora the potter, Samvata the gardener, Chokha the untouchable, Sena the barber and Janabai the maid. The object of his devotion was Vithoba, the form of the great God Vishnu, residing in the Pandharpur temple.

Namdeo, too, composed songs; they reflect his passionate nature and his intense love for Vithoba. When Namdeo was immersed in devotion, he would forget everything in his bhakti. But when he returned to his day-to-day duties he would forget his Lord and then he would be like a tortured man. He would sing:

I die unless Thou succor bring

O haste and come, my God and King!

To help me is a trifling thing

Yet Thou must come, my God and King!

O come (how Nama’s clamours ring)

O haste and come, my God and King!

After the death of Namdeo, nearly two hundred years went by without Maharashtra producing any new saint. The coming of the Turks and of Islam drove the Bhakti Movement underground. The temple of Pandharpur was razed, but the spirit of bhakti did not die. It was Eknath (1533-1599) who revived the inspiration and the tradition.

Eknath was a Brahmin born in a family of saintly men. He wrote the first reliable edition of the Jnaneshwari and thus gave the work back to the people. Eknath also wrote a commentary on the Ramayana, calling it the Bhaavartha Ramayana. But it is his commentary on the eleventh book of the Bhagavata Purana that has earned him eternal fame.

In addition to his writing, Eknath introduced a new form of deep religious life that needed no institution or monastery and no renunciation of the world. He was a family man, devoted and austere, whose life was regulated round his home and his writings. Yet he was a mystic. He showed how, irrespective of whatever obstacles the Muslims put in the way, the Hindu could aspire to the deepest experience of his religion within the ordinary framework of life. He sang kirtans every day and his songs have become part of the Marathi heritage. They have strong moral basis and often soar to great heights of personal mysticism.

But the one Maharashtrian saint who stands out is Tukaram (1598-1650). Tukaram is undoubtedly the greatest bhakti poet Maharashtra has produced and, according to one British historian “has high claims to be the greatest in the whole of India”. He was born in a rural family of grain traders. A major famine claimed the lives of one of his two wives and his son and left him heart-broken and ruined. He turned to bhakti and wrote a large number of hymns expressing the anguish of his soul:

They say that I fabricate poems

Yet words are not mine, but Another’s.

It is not my art that clothes them in beauty

It is the Cosmic Lord who makes me speak.

I am only an ignorant peasant,

How would I know those subtle words?

I am only a simple secretary, says Tuka

On my books I print the seal of His name.

That is Tukaram or Tuka, as he called himself. More than any other of his fellow saints, Tukaram was a mystic overpowered by the force of love, by the presence or absence of his lord. Legend claims that he went to heaven in a vimana (a flying vehicle) singing all the time the glory of the Lord. That seems rather farfetched, but it is a nice legend anyway and it has been immortalized by a film which the distinguished director V.Shantaram made on the life of Tukaram in the 1940s. One does not have to believe that Tukaram went bodily to heaven in order to honour and love this extraordinary saint whose love embraced all.

Almost the last of the Maharashtrian saints was Sant Ramdas (1608-1681). He had been orphaned as a child. That did not deter him from choosing a path of renunciation. He left home and after long years of spiritual training and wandering, settled down on the banks of the Krishna river where he built a temple to Rama. His main work, Daasa Bodha, is not a commentary but a collection of his writings and sermons produced over many years. He was as much concerned with theological ideas as with the state of contemporary society and the threat of Islam. He was a devotee of Rama, unlike others who worshipped Krisha. He was held in great regard by Shivaji, the founder of the Maratha empire, and was indeed Shivaji’s guru.

There are many other saints in Maharashtra, Gauri, whom I have not dealt with here. Some day, I hope you will make your own inquiries about them. All of them together revitalized Hinduism and established the Marathi literary and cultural identity.

In my next letter I will move on to the saints of Bengal.

Your Loving,

Ajja