Bhanudas

Of all the things the Vārkarī saints are remembered for, only one of them is a rescue. The image of Viṭṭhal was taken out of the temple at Paṇḍharpūr and carried several hundred miles south to Vijayanagara, and a cloth merchant from Paiṭhaṇ who had no rank, no soldiers and no money went after it alone and brought it back. He was nearly impaled for it. That is the story, and the tradition has never told it as anything but an adventure.

It is also the best attested story in this book, in the narrow sense that more poets told it, earlier, than told any other. Viṭṭhalkavi of Bīḍ sang it around 1679. Keśavsvāmī sang it around 1682. Mahīpati told it twice, in the Bhaktavijaya he finished in 1762 and again in the Bhaktalīlāmṛta he finished in 1774, and the two tellings do not agree. Bhīmasvāmī Śirgāvkar told it again in 1797 with two episodes nobody else has. And Bhānudās's own great-grandson Ekanāth, who was a considerable poet in his own right, wrote about him in his own books while the family memory was still three generations old.

Paiṭhaṇ stands on the Godāvarī. The books call it Pratiṣṭhāna, and it was old already: a seat of brahmin learning with a long memory and a high opinion of itself, the same town whose pandits had made Jñāndev and his brothers and sister wait on a buffalo reciting the Veda before they would write them a certificate of purity, a century and a half earlier.

Bhānudās was born there into a Deśastha brahmin family whose worship was of the sun. Ekanāth says only that the house he came into was one god was fond of. His father was a careful man who set his son to the Vedas, and one day when the boy would not learn, he lost his temper.

The boy ran. The Bhaktavijaya says he wanted somewhere nobody would find him, and that he looked for a long time before his eye fell on a temple outside the town, sunk below ground level and disused. Nobody went there. He went down into it and stayed.

There was an old image of the sun inside. He put his head on its feet.

He was about ten years old, and he was down there seven days, and what the source says happened is this: the sun was pleased with him, took human form, came to him, gave him as much milk as he could drink, and told him not to be afraid. Keep Pāṇḍuraṅg in your mind, he said. If you are ever in trouble, call me and I will be there at once.

Nobody in the sources explains how a child survived a week underground, or why the sun should recommend another god.

His parents were searching the whole time. On the seventh day a brahmin of the town caught sight of a boy stepping out of the ruin and shouted, and the boy bolted back inside, and the man went and told the father. They came with torches and went down and found their son asleep with his head on the image's feet. They asked him how he had eaten. He said a brahmin full of light had come and fed him with milk.

That is when the name was given. Bhānu is the sun. Dās is his slave. They carried him home on the hip, and on the way back they agreed between them that they would never again make the boy study, in case he ran off again. He was married when he came of age. Until then he did nothing anybody could see except worship.

His parents died. Bhānudās was now a householder with a wife and children and no visible intention of supporting them.

He would not take a salary. He would not trade. He would not lend at interest or borrow. He would not go into the king's service. He wanted to be left alone with Pāṇḍuraṅg, and his wife, the Bhaktavijaya says, was distressed in her mind, and the household needed food and clothes.

Some men of standing in the town came and put it to him. Your wife needs feeding, they said, and you do not seem to understand this. While your father and mother lived, they carried it for you. You have no learning to sell either. So this is what we suggest. We will put a hundred rupees behind you. Buy cloth with it, carry it round the markets, feed your household out of what you make, and give us the hundred back whenever it suits you.

They bought the cloth for him themselves, and because they did not trust him to manage, they handed him to the peddlers who already worked for them. Take him along, they said. Sit him next to you. Put him in the way of a living.

The peddlers did. They taught him the trade language first, the private number-code that lets men price goods in front of a customer without the customer following: muḷu for five, udamī for three, aṅgḍu for ten, kuṇḍa for one, kāṭhī for twenty, pavitra for seven, selu for six, poku for four, dhākar for a thousand, āvaru for two. Then they taught him cloth: how to protect the principal, how to work a price up, and the last rule, which was that a man who tells a customer the exact truth will certainly be ruined.

Bhānudās said that as long as time lasted he would never say an untrue thing, and that he intended to speak only the absolute truth.

They laughed at him. It is written on his forehead that he will live by begging, they said. His name should be Poor Man. One of them said: give him a taste of profit and he will lie like the rest of us, nobody ever got rich telling the truth in business. Mahīpati breaks in here to observe that a man born blind assumes everyone is blind, and that a man who is false in himself cannot see a true man anywhere.

What happened was that Bhānudās kept his word and his stall did better than theirs. If a customer asked about a piece of cloth he was told what it had cost and what the margin on it was, and then: take it if you like it, or go to the next stall. That was the whole of his sales technique. He said it and went back to repeating the names of god. Word went round the markets and people came to him.

The other peddlers watched this from a few feet away, and the Bhaktavijaya is unusually good on what they said to each other. He is pulling our customers. He has put a spell on them, they pay whatever he asks and nobody haggles. People believe in him, that is all it is; we lie, and god does not care for that. Then one of them said: well, let us start telling the truth then. And another answered: we could, but nobody would believe us now. Once a character is set it stays set. A dog can sit quietly in the house while thieves take the bread, and the dog will get the blame. A tiger lying still is said to be about to spring. A miser who turns ascetic is said to be working a longer fraud. We have lied in public all our lives. If we tell the truth now they will call it hypocrisy.

And then, plainly: since we gave Bhānudās a place beside us, we are ruined.

They came, all of them together, to a market in a distant town, and put up in a temple precinct, and Bhānudās as usual set his stall beside theirs.

A Haridās had arrived in the same town and announced a kīrtan for that evening, and the invitation had gone round. It was an Ekādaśī, the eleventh of the moon, which is the Vārkarī's day. Bhānudās was delighted. He asked the others to come. They would not. So he asked them, since they would be sleeping beside the goods anyway, to keep an eye on his.

That made them angry. You have gone god-crazy, they said. You are always telling the truth. Go to your recital and take your goods with you. We are tired and we are going to sleep. Find somewhere else to lay your stall out. There are thieves about here and we do not want a word of blame from you afterwards. And what exactly do you expect to get out of this kīrtan?

Let it stay here then, Bhānudās said, or let it be stolen. My heart is fixed on Pāṇḍuraṅg and I am not going to leave him. And he went.

He made his bow to the Haridās and said what a good day it was, the Ekādaśī, and embraced the saints who had gathered, and sat down among them while they sang the Rāma and Kṛṣṇa stories, which he loved.

Behind him the peddlers worked out what to do. They would turn his packhorse loose and throw his bale of cloth into a pit, and when he came back they would say thieves had come while they slept. He would go home, and they would divide the cloth between them later. They did it, and clapped their hands over it, and said to one another: since Bhānudās came among us he has got rich and we have got poor. Now there is nothing more to worry about. The itch has cleared up without medicine.

The Bhaktavijaya says that Viṭṭhal saw this and came.

It says he thought it over first. Bhānudās is sitting in the kīrtan with his mind fixed, these men have thrown his goods in a pit, his horse will wander off, and where is he going to look for it. And then, in one of the passages where Mahīpati simply hammers the same line four times because he wants you to feel it: the one who lies asleep along the serpent out in the milk sea; the one Lakṣmī fixes her mind on; the one who will not come easily even to yogis who sit for him; the one no rite and no sacred place and no austerity can get hold of; the one who gave Puṇḍalīk his word. He took the shape of a brahmin, found the horse wandering near the market, and sat down in the public square holding it.

Meanwhile thieves came to the temple precinct, beat the peddlers thoroughly, took their goods and led away every one of their horses. They shouted, and nobody in the town came.

The kīrtan ran until four ghaṭikās were left of the night. They sang the last hymn of praise, waved the incense, handed round the sweets. Bhānudās made his obeisance and started back to his lodging, and passing a brahmin sitting by the roadside with a horse, heard the horse whinny at him. That is my horse, he thought. I do not understand this. The brahmin had his own scarf looped round the animal's neck. He looked up at Bhānudās and vanished.

At the lodging he found the peddlers crying. They told him everything: what they had done to him, and what had been done to them four hours later, and that they had lost the lot. Your capital god protected, they said. Ours is gone. The cloth is in that pit; come and let us get it out.

The Bhaktavijaya says his heart melted. Not at his own escape. At the other thing.

That was the Husband of Rukmiṇī, he said. Sitting in a public square. Holding my horse. This business is worthless. It is no storehouse of happiness for anyone. I have been seduced by it, and I will not go on with a trade that put Pāṇḍharīnāth to that trouble.

Then he told the peddlers to stop crying, pulled his bale out of the pit, divided the cloth among them, gave them his horse and his money as well, and walked away from all of it.

He went home and did not work again.

He took nothing that was not offered to him and never asked anyone for anything. He would not enter anybody's service and would not let his mind be drawn into household anxiety, though he still had a wife and children. He stopped keeping score of who honoured him and who insulted him. The Bhaktavijaya says the words mine and yours stopped meaning anything to him.

Twice a year, in Āṣāḍh and in Kārtik, he gathered companies of pilgrims and led them down to Paṇḍharpūr, and on the sand by the river he performed kīrtan with cymbals and drums and a great noise. He composed his own verses, in various metres, and used them to argue with the dark-complexioned one, and in the middle of his own kīrtans his voice would close up and he would not be able to go on. When he stood up to sing, the source says, everyone present was in tears, and Viṭṭhal came and danced there.

Even the worst men in the audience were caught. We could listen to this for ever, they said, and went away thinking about how little time anyone has.

Ninety-four abhaṅgas have come down under his name. What comes through them, where they are his, is a man with no interest at all in the metaphysical end of Vedānta and an overwhelming interest in a god who can be met. He calls him father and mother. He calls himself a sinner and a wrongdoer with some frequency. He asks for nothing material: I will not take up the wearisome trade of keeping this body fed, he says; satisfy my hunger out of whatever is left over from the favours you hand to other people. And once, in a line that could stand over this entire book: I have found this out for myself, that nobody who asks is sent away, king or commoner, high-born or outcaste.

He was, by now, a man the saints at Paṇḍharpūr knew by sight.

At this point the tradition divides, and it is worth stopping to look at the join, because the two versions of why the image left Paṇḍharpūr are not variations on a theme. They are different stories with different moral shapes.

In the Bhaktavijaya it begins with a quarrel between two men about whose god is better.

A brahmin of Paṇḍharpūr, short of money, went on a long begging journey and ended up in the far south at the capital of the Vijayanagara empire, which Mahīpati calls Vidyānagar. He decided he might as well go and see the king.

The king, whom the Bhaktavijaya names Rām Rājā, received him well and bowed to him and asked what he wanted. The brahmin said he lived in the holy city of Paṇḍharī and had heard of the king's generosity. He was invited along to watch the king worship, and he went.

The royal goddess was Rājāī. Her temple glittered, the king had planted costly gardens all round it, and he performed the sixteen rites on her himself with his ministers in attendance and a very great deal of noise. She was dressed and jewelled and garlanded and perfumed, the lamps were waved, gifts were handed out, and then the king sat down pleased with himself and turned to his guest.

You will not find her equal in the three worlds, he said. You see this temple. You see this garden. I put it in so that I would have flowers to give the Mother of the world. My ministers serve her; I do the rites myself. You live at Paṇḍharī, but it cannot be anything like this. I doubt Pāṇḍuraṅg gets worship of this quality. When it is poor brahmins doing the worshipping, where would they get garments and ornaments like the ones I provide?

The brahmin lost his temper.

You have never seen Paṇḍharī, he said, and you sit there in your pride telling me your god is the only great one. You have plated your temple with silver and you announce it to people. Our city was built by Viśvakarmā and plated with gold.

And then he went on, and Mahīpati gives him a long run: that wish-trees grow in forests there, and touchstones lie underfoot like gravel; that the banners flash there like lightning; that the herds are wish-cows; that the tuḷasī altars are set with jewels; that the Candrabhāgā runs nectar and outranks every other sacred water, and the sight of her alone frees a man; that Rambhā and Tilottamā dance on the eagle-platform, and the gandharvas sing in the temple doorway. That the supreme god, who was living in the ocean of milk, saw his devotee Puṇḍalīk and came at once, and has been standing there ever since with his hands on his hips, and comes in person the moment he sees one of his people in trouble. That Lakṣmī is embarrassed by her own looks when she sees his form, and ten million suns go dim rather than compete with his crown. That Indra stands in front of him with his palms together, and so do the whole three hundred and thirty million. That Śeṣa praised him with a thousand mouths until every tongue split in two, and then gave up and was quiet.

Then he finished. Rājāī is your family goddess. I think nothing of her. She comes to Paṇḍharī regularly to sweep the temple and smear the floor with cow-dung.

The king wanted him killed on the spot and said so, and then said that as a ruler he would be blamed for it, so he would have him flogged and driven into the jungle instead. You have lied, he said. I have never heard of any golden Paṇḍharpūr. And you have called the goddess who revealed herself here of her own accord a slave of your Pāṇḍuraṅg.

Every word of it was true, the brahmin said. Come and see. His glory is ten million times what I have described. If it is not, punish me then.

So long as a man has not seen the sun, the king said, a lamp seems bright to him. A man who has never stood at the sea thinks a river is a large thing. Very well. I will go, and if it is as you say it will be well with you, and if you have lied I will punish you at once.

He ordered the baggage prepared.

They went north with horses, elephants, chariots, palanquins and a small army, and music the whole way, and at the back of the column walked the brahmin, working out what was going to happen to him.

He prayed as he walked. He said he had fed his family by proclaiming that name from door to door, and that all he had done was repeat what the saints of old had said, and the king could not believe it. Then he said the thing that was really frightening him: if the king does not see what I described, he will punish me, and I will take my own life, and the old saints will stand convicted of lying, and after this when good people read about the glory of Paṇḍharī they will not believe that either.

The Bhaktavijaya says Viṭṭhal heard this and turned to Rukmiṇī. The king of Vidyānagar is on his way here, he said. The brahmin is being disgraced for praising us. We will have to make it look the way he described it, or he will take his own life and the saints will be laughed at. Rukmiṇī bowed at his feet and said she would bring the buildings of Vaikuṇṭha down at once, and by the time she had finished thinking it, it was done.

Near Paṇḍharpūr the king called the brahmin up and told him that if his doubts were not satisfied now he would be dishonoured. Then he had an elephant brought and climbed up onto the canopy to see over the walls.

What he saw, the source says, was the temple pinnacle with lustrous buildings glittering around it the way the constellations stand around a full moon.

He got down off the elephant and prostrated himself in front of the brahmin. It is exactly as you told me, he said. It was my own ignorance that made me proud.

Then he walked in. There were the wish-trees, and the touchstones lying about like pebbles, and out on the open ground the wish-cows. Birds sang in the trees. Swans and peacocks danced. Ascetics were at their austerities and brahmins were reciting and the Vaiṣṇavas were going at it with drum and vīṇā. The hundred and eight sacred rivers took bodies and came and bathed in the Candrabhāgā while he stood watching. And among the servants around the god the king suddenly recognised somebody.

Our family goddess, he said. The one we worship at Vidyānagar. She is sweeping the yard.

Mother, he called out to her, what are you doing here? You are sweeping with your own hands.

You are carrying vain pride in your heart, she said. There are endless slaves like me who come to Paṇḍharī to serve.

He went into the temple. The light off the god was such that he had to shut his eyes and take hold of the brahmin's hand. Then he looked, and saw him: fair, delicate, lotus-eyed, in the yellow silk, smiling. He embraced the image and took hold of its feet and would not let go, and told the brahmin he was his dear friend and his sadguru and that he could never repay him.

And then the whole thing went out like a lamp, and he was standing in a temple in a town with mud walls.

Mahīpati does not soften this. The sacred city of Paṇḍharī really is what was shown to the king, he says, and because of a man's karma it looks to him like earthen walls. The king looked at the city as it appears to us today and said: I have seen a great miracle.

Then he reasoned as follows, and the reasoning is his own and the source sets it out without comment. Why should I go on worshipping Bhavānī? If the ocean of milk is at hand, why bathe in a river? Why turn alchemist when the touchstone is already in your hand? If a wish-cow walks into your yard, what do you want with a goat? With the sun coming in at the window, who lights a lamp?

So he asked. Come with me to Vidyānagar.

The god made two conditions. If you set me down on the ground anywhere on the road, I stay where you put me. And if you do injustice in your kingdom, I come back to Paṇḍharī.

The king, delighted, posted relays of men all the way from Paṇḍharpūr to his capital, lifted the image out of the temple, and had it carried south hand to hand. The officiating brahmins did not resist. The source says why, in one sentence and without any indignation: they knew their power was no match for the king's.

The Bhaktalīlāmṛta, which Mahīpati wrote twelve years later and drew largely from Keśavsvāmī, has no brahmin, no quarrel, and no goddess.

There the king of Vidyānagar simply comes to Paṇḍharpūr in state on a journey, looks at the image, and wants it. He fasts seven days over it. Then Kṛṣṇa appears to him in a dream and turns him down, and the refusal is the warmest thing in either version: because I saw what Puṇḍalīk did for his parents I came and lived here, and I keep the promise I made him, and I meet pious men here. This place suits me. There is no rest anywhere like it. The milk sea and heaven itself are poorer places than this. Devoted people keep arriving here on pilgrimage and I live among them without a care. So you are asking in vain.

And then, in the same dream, he tells him how it could be done anyway. Only on one condition: that ceremonially pure brahmins carry me in their hands, and that nowhere on the journey am I set down on the ground.

The king woke up delighted and called in his ministers, who advised him to make large gifts to the brahmins of the country and station them along the route and pass the image hand to hand. He wrote humble letters to the twice-born of every village on the road, arranged food and water at intervals, and collected a crowd of brahmins who were glad to do it because they took it for service to god.

Here the image's own servants and priests protested violently, and the king overruled them, and men and women of Paṇḍharpūr stood and watched it happen with tears in their eyes. The moment it was gone the town looked like a corpse.

At Vijayanagara the king installed it with a kīrtan and banners and diṇḍīs, gave away garments and ornaments and money, hung the god with jewels and pearls, and proclaimed a festival, and could not contain himself for joy.

Then, in a second dream, he was given the terms of tenancy. Rule justly. If the least injustice happens here I will not stay. I am fond of loving devotees, and if you persecute one of them when he is innocent, I go back to Paṇḍharpūr.

The king woke up frightened, and from then on he watched himself.

Because the image was covered in priceless ornaments there was a fear of thieves, so locks were put on the temple doors through all eight watches of the day, and nobody in the city could see the god until the king came. He worshipped it himself with the sixteen rites and had rich food offered three times a day with melted butter over it, and rows of camphor lights burning round it, and flowers and musk and every fragrant thing laid on it.

And the Bhaktalīlāmṛta says that separation from Paṇḍharī went into the god like an arrow, and that he was not comfortable, and that what he said to himself was: I am imprisoned here. When am I going to get out?

Between a god who agreed to go and a god who was taken, the two books are not telling the same story. Neither of them is embarrassed about it.

In Āṣāḍh the pilgrims came as usual, and found out when they arrived.

The Bhaktavijaya piles up the comparisons: Paṇḍharpūr was like a body with the life gone out of it, like a river with no water in it, like an army with no king, like the constellations with the moon taken away. The saints and the mahants sat down by the eagle-platform and stayed there. Whose praises are we supposed to sing now, they said. He has deserted us, and the promise he gave Puṇḍalīk is broken.

Somebody should go to Vidyānagar and bring him back, they said to each other, and they discussed it, and nobody volunteered.

The reasons they gave are worth keeping, because both books record them and neither has any patience with them. One said: he did not honour his own promise to Puṇḍalīk, so he will not come back for anything we do. Another said: we have no way into a king's palace, and if he finds out why we have come he will deal with us. Another produced a philosophical argument, that god is inside us in any case, and fills everything that lives and everything that does not, and that you could not find a spot anywhere he is absent from; and that if none of us has actually experienced it, then the knowers of the self have been misleading us all along. One said that whatever happens happens by the will of god and we should watch it and not be troubled. And one, in the Bhaktalīlāmṛta, said simply that it was none of our business.

The Bhaktalīlāmṛta also names the company sitting there, and the list is famous and cannot be right. It puts Nivṛtti, Jñāndev, Sopān and Muktābāī there, and Nāmdev, and Sāvatā, and Gorā the potter, and Janābāī who was Nāmdev's servant, and Gonābāī and Rājāī, and Kabīr and Rohidās, with Nāmdev performing the kīrtan, and has Jñāndev make the proposal that somebody should go. Jñāndev and his brothers and sister had been dead for two centuries, Nāmdev and his circle for a century and a half, and Kabīr and Rohidās lived far away in the north. The error has been traced back to Keśavsvāmī's Ekanāth-caritra, and the plain explanation of it stands: neither Keśavsvāmī nor whoever told him knew the dates of either Bhānudās or Jñāndev, and to him they were all simply the distant past, so there was no difficulty in putting them on the same platform.

It is an anachronism and it should be called one. It is also, in its way, a true statement about what these people were to each other.

Into that company, in the Bhaktalīlāmṛta, comes a man with a lute on his shoulder, playing it and singing as he walks.

He bowed to the saints, and he heard what the trouble was, and he said: give me the word and I will bring Pāṇḍharīnāth back quickly. Put your minds at rest. Stay here.

The Bhaktavijaya gives him a harder line. Then I will fetch the Husband of Rukmiṇī back, he said, or die on the road.

He left at once. The Bhaktalīlāmṛta says he went the way Māruti went to look for Sītā, and that he forgot hunger and thirst on the road, and asked nobody for food, and ate what he was given.

He reached Vijayanagara and started asking people where the king had put the image from Paṇḍharī. Nobody would tell him; they were afraid of the king and said they did not know. Eventually he got one man alone and was told: it is in the palace temple, the king worships it in private, nobody else is allowed to see it, the doors are locked and there is a guard.

The Bhaktavijaya says that when Bhānudās heard this he was filled with joy.

He waited for the evening hymns that put the god to bed. The king came, hurried through them and went back to the palace. Then Bhānudās walked to the temple door. The priests were outside, asleep. There were four doors, one inside another, each with heavy locks on it.

Both books say the locks fell.

He went in. And there, inside a king's palace two hundred miles from the river he belonged to, stood the same figure: the two feet together on the brick, the hands at the hips, the eyes down at the nose-tip.

Bhānudās looked at his face and was overjoyed, and then, the Bhaktalīlāmṛta says, he pretended to be angry, and started telling him off.

The scolding survives in two forms. In the Bhaktavijaya it runs long and it is close to grief:

Have you stopped caring about us? Do you belong to this king now? You gave Puṇḍalīk your word that you would never leave Paṇḍharī, and the word turns out to be worth nothing. Obviously our poor worship is not good enough. The king here does you the sixteen rites and you find that more comfortable, so here you stay. These heavenly clothes and these ornaments and these dainty dishes have made you forget us altogether, poor as we are. You have left Rukmiṇī and Rādhā and Satyabhāmā. The king talked to you about love and you walked out on us. Or is it some terrible fault of ours, that you were so frightened of it you ran away? Or was it that we asked you too often for signs of your affection? Or is it the noise, is that it, the kīrtans go on so late that you cannot sleep, so you have picked yourself out a quiet spot? Or the crowds, the endless pilgrims, is it that you get tired meeting them and came down here for a rest?

In the Bhaktalīlāmṛta it is shorter and it opens with a detail that goes through you: what are these badges doing on your feet?

What you do and what you promised are two different things, he says. I know this now from experience. You gave Puṇḍalīk your word that you would stay at Paṇḍharpūr always, for the sake of the slow and the unlearned. It seems to have gone out of your head. You have found yourself a nice private room in the king's palace and got yourself up in good clothes and a lot of ornaments and you are being given savoury food. That is what you are staying here for. You have forgotten us.

And then he made an abhaṅga of it on the spot, and Ekanāth sang it, and it has survived:

Down on the Bhīmā, up on his brick, Viṭhobā had Paṇḍharī to rule. Wealth and power attended him with all their people, and Brahmadev and the gods could not lay a hand on you. And you left it and came here. Who talked you round, Kānaḍiyā? Conch and kettledrum and hand-drum and horn go all night and will not let you sleep. They sprinkle campaka on you, they rub you with scents, the sandal oil comes off you in little rivers. Rambhā and Tilottamā and Urvaśī and Menakā are here, and plenty more of the heavenly women besides. Jewelled lamps go round that splendid face of yours on trays of gold. And mother Rakhumāī has gone flat with sorrow, and Puṇḍalīk has not a word left in him. Your own people are out of sorts, and with you gone they have fallen silent. A blessing on Paṇḍharpūr, where the world was mothered. A blessing on the sand along the Bhīmā.

Come along with me, says Bhānudās. Let god remember the debt he owes on the promise he made.

Then he fell at the feet of the image and asked again: tell me who talked you into this.

The god heard him out and answered. You are saying these wretched things without thinking, he said.

I am not enjoying any of it. Not the rites, not the clothes, not the ornaments. My soul is pining for the banks of the Bhīmā. The king carried me off and shut me up here. And every one of you went hard in the heart, because none of you came for me. I used to give people prosperity and powers and the four kinds of deliverance, and you worshipped me out of love alone and would not take any of it. Outside those things I had nothing left to give you. I could not repay what your love had put me in debt for. So I deserted you.

The Bhaktavijaya says that as he said this he choked, and tears came, and then the two of them sat there and sobbed together. The Bhaktalīlāmṛta has him pull Bhānudās against his chest and say: do not leave me here and go away, I cannot stand one moment without you.

Then he told him to come back tomorrow, and gave him something to take with him.

Here the two books part again, and the difference matters, because it decides whether what follows is a gift or an accident.

In the Bhaktavijaya the god takes the necklace of nine jewels off his own neck and puts it round Bhānudās's, deliberately, and tells him to hurry back to his lodging before the king comes.

In the Bhaktalīlāmṛta what he gives him is the garland of tuḷasī leaves and flowers off his own neck, as a love-token. The string of nine jewels comes away tangled in the garland, and Bhānudās, hurrying out, does not notice.

He stepped outside and the locks went back on behind him.

The king got up early, bathed, bowed, and waved the lights in front of the image, and saw that the necklace was gone.

He turned on the officiating priests. What thief has been in here. Bring it back. If you cannot produce those jewels you will search the whole world for them. He had them beaten.

They searched house to house and found nothing, and went looking outside the city, and found a man sitting on the bank of the river who had bathed and was repeating the names of god, with a string of nine jewels round his neck.

That is the thief, they shouted.

They tied him up and brought him in, and the city came out to laugh. This one goes about dressed as a saint to fool people. Look at him: he has laid violent hands on a god, so he is hardly going to be frightened of men. If a butcher met the sacred cow herself, would it occur to him to worship her? One officer reminded the crowd of the proverb about a tuḷasī garland on a highwayman's neck, and said they had all seen the truth of it today.

Bhānudās walked through it repeating the names of god and gave no sign of having heard any of it.

They brought the necklace to the king and asked what punishment. Impale him, the king said, in a rage, without asking who the man was or what kind of thief he might be. Mahīpati notes in the second telling that the order was given without consideration and without justice, and that the king had no idea what he had just set in motion.

The Bhaktavijaya gives Bhānudās one request: that since he was about to die, he be allowed to see Pāṇḍuraṅg first. Some of the officers were decent men. They got the king's permission and took him.

He stood in front of the image and said: so this is for coming to get you out quietly. You have had the king deal with me. Very well. Kill everyone who comes here for you, and stay here enjoying yourself in the king's house. Was that what you had in mind when you put the jewels round my neck? And yet when you were talking to me, tears came out of your eyes.

Very well. To the end of a hundred thousand births I will not leave you.

They dragged him out, put the stake on his shoulder for him to carry, smeared the red śendūr on his forehead, and led him through an enormous crowd of men and women out of the city, where they drove the sharpened stake into the ground.

There is an abhaṅga about this that the tradition gives to Bhānudās himself, and both of Mahīpati's tellings put its words into his mouth at the foot of the stake. Ekanāth sang it in his kīrtan at Paṇḍharpūr. It goes:

Let the sky break open over me. Let the round of the worlds go to pieces. Let fire take all three of them. I will still be standing here waiting for you, Viṭhobā.

Let the seven seas run together into one. Let the five elements come undone. You will be beside me, Viṭhobā.

Whatever falls on me, however heavily it falls, let me not stop saying your name, the way a wife keeps to the man she has given her life to.

Listen to me, says Bhānudās.

There is a second one the tradition puts at the same moment, which is less heroic and more useful. How long are you going to go on testing me, it asks. My breath is stopped in my throat. Every kind of torment is coming down on me and my mind is under water with grief. There is no way out of this except to fall down in front of you.

Whether these are his own words is a real question and it should not be waved away. Ninety-four abhaṅgas circulate under his name in a collection whose manuscript basis has never been published, so nobody has been able to do the textual work. The translator who knew the collection best pointed out that three of them give the deliverance at Vijayanagara in concise form, and said flatly that if they are genuinely by Bhānudās they would have great historical value, and that there is room for just suspicion that they are not. A later account, going over the same ground, quotes them without that reservation as Bhānudās's own. Neither is followed here. The abhaṅgas stand as the tradition's, sung by Ekanāth three generations after the man died, and whether the voice in them is Bhānudās's own is not settled.

They lifted him to put him on it.

Both books say the same thing. The stake, standing driven into the ground, put out branches and leaves. Then it flowered, and then it fruited.

The officers went and told the king, and added their own explanation, which was that the man was a Vaiṣṇava and Pāṇḍharīnāth had come for him. The king came out and looked at the tree. In the Bhaktalīlāmṛta he finds Bhānudās sitting with his eyes shut, still repeating the names, and prostrates himself on the ground in front of him: you fearless Vaiṣṇava, I am sinful and dull and I did not recognise you. Bhānudās opened his eyes then, and saw the tree, and said: he has shown himself for me. A miracle has taken place.

The king took him by the hand and led him to the temple.

The Bhaktalīlāmṛta says that what they found there was the image of Pāṇḍuraṅg with a dejected face and tears running down it. The king went full length on the ground and then stood with his palms together and said that he had done wrong in many ways, and that he had persecuted a devotee.

Stay here in peace, the god said, and keep my form in your mind. I am going back with Bhānudās to see Paṇḍharī. And if you use any pressure to stop this, a great calamity will fall on you here. The king said nothing further.

In the Bhaktavijaya it is gentler. You did a wrong, the god says, though you did not mean to. You had done some good in your earlier births and that is why I stayed here with you as long as I did. But I have to go now.

Then Bhānudās raised the practical objection. How am I supposed to lift you? I have no royal authority; I cannot call up relays of men the way he did.

I am entirely at your service, the god said. All my powers are yours now.

And the image made itself small. In the Bhaktavijaya Bhānudās puts it in his deer-skin bag. In the Bhaktalīlāmṛta it is a little bamboo basket, and the king is standing there watching it happen.

Mahīpati is aware that this is a lot to ask of a reader, and he does not apologise for it but he does argue. Space is infinite, he says, and yet the space inside a jar is exactly the size of the jar. There are great currents of air everywhere and a man with a fan makes one of the same kind. When Kṛṣṇa was a child and Yaśodā was churning, her hand closed round him in the vessel, and it is the same one who went into Bhānudās's bag.

So he hung it on his shoulder and started walking north, shouting victory to Śrī Viṭṭhal, and the god talked to him out of the basket as they went and told him his private thoughts: the world is full of joy today, because I am going to see the saints.

Close to Paṇḍharpūr he stopped at the water to bathe. He rinsed out his dhotar and laid it along the stone lip of the tank to dry. Behind him the god went large again, and the lid of the basket went up over his head and the bottom of it was smashed to pieces.

What have you done, Bhānudās said. You have become big again. How am I supposed to lift you now?

Go and tell the saints, the god said. They have been waiting at the eagle-platform without stopping. They will come out for me.

They were still sitting where he had left them, saying to each other that Bhānudās had been gone a long time and the god had not come back.

Then they saw him walking towards them, grinning, shouting that he had brought him as far as the water.

The town went out with a palanquin, with diṇḍīs and banners and every festal instrument they had: priests, headmen, men and women, the whole sacred city, great and small. The Vaiṣṇavas sang and danced the entire way, saying to each other, how are we ever going to repay what we owe Bhānudās, blessed is this fearless Vaiṣṇava, he has brought ours back.

When they came in sight of the image they went down on the ground. Then Bhānudās put a hand under it and they lifted it into the palanquin and threw fragrant powders in the air and shouted. It was the month of Kārtik. The vārkarīs saw it with their own eyes, the source says, and if you want a comparison, the nearest one is the chariot procession at the full moon.

They bathed him in the Candrabhāgā and carried him to the temple and put him back on his throne on a good day at an auspicious hour, and did the sixteen rites over him with everything they had. The brahmins recited. The Vaiṣṇavas sang. Sweets went round the whole city from house to house and feasts were given. The Bhaktavijaya reaches for its comparisons again: it was like Rāma coming back to Ayodhyā after fourteen years, like rain on a mountain after a drought, like the spring arriving, like life coming back into a body and all the senses starting to work again.

And in the Bhaktalīlāmṛta, the moment the image was back on its throne, the god said one more thing to Bhānudās, and it is the sentence the whole chapter was built to arrive at.

I cannot repay your kindness, he said. You have given me Paṇḍharpūr back. I shall certainly be born as an avatar in your family line.

The story as Mahīpati tells it in the Bhaktavijaya is a story about theft. A king covets a god, takes him, and is made to give him back.

Set against that, three things should be said plainly.

The first is that nobody has found the history under it. The man who translated every surviving account of it wrote that the attempt to find a historical basis for the story of Bhānudās bringing back the image of Viṭhobā from Vidyānagara had not so far succeeded. He did not say it was untrue. He said the evidence is not there, in either direction.

The second is that the king's name is not stable. Mahīpati says Rām Rājā, in both books. The modern account says the image was taken to Hampi by Kṛṣṇarāya. Those two cannot both be right and no source here settles which is. That account is not even certain the image ever went. The Vijayaviṭṭhala temple still stands at Hampi and can be visited, and a man who had seen it describes a fine building with nothing inside, and allows that Kṛṣṇarāya may have built it meaning to bring the image later and never done so.

The third is that a different motive has been offered altogether, and it is worth sitting with. Paṇḍharpūr was exposed to raiding, and the image of Viṭhobā was in real danger of rough handling. A Hindu king with a secure capital in the far south might reasonably have moved it out of the danger zone for safekeeping, and handed it back to a saint like Bhānudās once the danger had passed.

Between a king who stole a god and a king who sheltered one there is a large gap, and the sources do not close it. What they all agree on is the outcome, and the modern account is as firm about it as Mahīpati: the one great thing Bhānudās did with his life was fetch that image back from Vijayanagara to Paṇḍharpūr.

As for the dates, they should be handled with the caution the man who published them used. He gives about 1448 to 1513 and says in the same breath that they are wise guesses. Ekanāth records that Bhānudās died about the time his own father Sūryanārāyaṇa was born; if Ekanāth was born in 1548, then 1513 for the death can be provisionally accepted, and 1448 for the birth follows from allowing the man sixty-five years. The later account prints the same dates. They rest on a chain of inference and not on a record.

Bhānudās is counted the beginning of the third age of the Paṇḍharpūr tradition, after Jñāndev's and after Nāmdev's.

He had a son called Cakrapāṇi. He named his grandson Sūrya, after the god who had come down into a buried temple with a jug of milk for a frightened ten-year-old, and then he died. Sūrya's son was Ekanāth, who is one of the great figures of Marathi literature and who does not have a chapter in this book.

Ekanāth wrote about him. Setting out his family at the head of one of his own works, he says the house he was born into was a Vaiṣṇava house, and that he stood fourth in the line coming down from Bhānudās, the Sun's servant, and that it was his great-grandfather's birth into the family that made god fond of it. He says the boy made himself dear to the luminous god by sheer unflinching devotion and so became, by that god's grace, the sun of spirituality himself. He says Viṭṭhal once came to Paiṭhaṇ simply to look at his feet, and that in the dead of night Bhānudās saw his own chosen god standing in front of him wearing those earrings, lighting up the whole world around him.

Then he names his grandfather, and his father Sūrya, and his mother Rukmiṇī, and adds the line his readers were waiting for: which is why Rakhumāī is my own mother.

And when the saints at Paṇḍharpūr asked Ekanāth to sing the life of his great-grandfather, and he sang the whole of it, from the king's desire to the blossoming stake to the basket at the water's edge, he finished on that promise the god had made on the throne about being born into the family. Then he came down off the platform, and the saints and mahants who had been listening said to each other that Ekanāth was not a man at all, he was Pāṇḍuraṅg come down in person.

The Bhaktalīlāmṛta says that the moment he heard them say it, he got up and left the room.