Chokhamela

He spent his life a few steps from a door he was not permitted to walk through.

He was born a Mahār, and in a Maharashtrian village that word named a set of tasks before it named anything else. The Mahār carried messages, watched the boundary, and when a bullock or a cow died in the lanes he came with a rope and dragged the carcass out past the houses to the pit beyond the village line. The hide and whatever else could be got from it came to him in place of wages. An English account of 1919 describes it as one of the perquisites permitted to that community, which is to say it was counted his right as much as his duty. It was also the reason the rest of the village would not take water from his hand, would not eat food he had touched, and would not let him past the threshold of a temple.

Where he was born the sources do not agree. Mahīpati says plainly that Paṇḍharpūr was his birthplace and that he lived there with his family. The other account makes him a resident of Maṅgaḷveḍhe, the town a morning's walk to the south, and has him working there on the day he died. Both places have a claim on him and neither account can be folded into the other. He died under a wall at Maṅgaḷveḍhe. He is buried at Paṇḍharpūr. The chapter that follows holds both and does not try to settle them.

The Bhaktavijaya gives his day in four movements. He went down and bathed on the bank of the Bhīmā. He walked the whole circuit of the town. Then he came to the great door of the temple and lay down flat in front of it. He had no authority to go in and stand before the god, so he brought the god into his mind where he was and worshipped from there. He did this not once but as a habit, for years, in the ordinary way that other men go to their work.

Inside, past the door, the image stood on its brick with both hands on its hips and its eyes lowered to the tip of its nose, waiting. That is Viṭṭhal, the form of Kṛṣṇa that Paṇḍharpūr keeps, also called Pāṇḍuraṅg, with Rukmiṇī his consort in the shrine beside him. Cokhāmeḷā never saw that image in the years this chapter mostly covers. He knew the outside of the building, the step, the stone, the spires from a distance. The whole of his bhakti, the love and self-giving that the Vārkarī movement was built on, was conducted from the wrong side of a wall.

One day he was sitting at the great door, as usual, and some men who did not like the sight of him decided to explain his position to him. They did it in images, which is how argument was conducted in that world. If Viṭṭhal had any love for you, they said, he would have brought you inside by now. You do not actually lay eyes on him. Why go on worshipping thin air?

Then they sharpened it. When the good food has been cooked in a brahmin's house, they said, the dogs are not allowed to sit down among the clean plates. Beggars do not walk into a king's pleasure-house. A man with no luck can wander a whole forest and never find the wish-granting tree standing in it. A dying man can lick his lips over the thought of a well of nectar and it will do him no good at all. The god is in his temple. He will never meet you.

Cokhāmeḷā got down and prostrated himself in front of the men who had just said this. He called them mother and father, which was his usual way of addressing anyone who abused him, and he asked why he should want so great an honour in the first place. Then he answered them in their own currency. The sun stands a hundred thousand miles off, he said, and from that distance it still attends to the lotus. The moon is further again, and the whole love of the chakor bird is fixed on it. The mother tortoise cares for her young from far away. So Kṛṣṇa can be in his temple and still keep me in mind out here. And a man may stand right beside him without loving him, in which case being close has accomplished nothing.

Then he went home. Mahīpati says he hurried, holding the god in his heart as he walked, repeating the name. No one in the story is converted, nothing is resolved, the men at the door remain at the door. The argument simply ends and he goes back to his house.

His own voice on this is harder and less patient than the voice Mahīpati gives him.

In the first of the abhaṅgas given here in summary, Cokhāmeḷā tells God what people say to him. What they say is: get away, get away. That is the whole of it. He puts the question straight to God: if this is what I hear, how am I supposed to come and meet you? He asks him to have pity and to come quickly, and not at a slow pace.

The second is an account of a beating. The men who served in the temple beat him, he says, and he had done nothing. They wanted to know how he had come by the garland that had been on the god's chest. They abused him and told him he had polluted God. And then the line that is the hinge of the whole thing: I am a dog at your door, he says, so do not send me away to some other man's door.

That is not a metaphor he reached for. They had already called him a dog, out loud, at the temple entrance. He takes the word they threw at him, keeps it, and turns it into the only claim he has any intention of making: a dog at this door. He does not ask to be reclassified. He asks not to be moved.

The Bhaktavijaya tells how it was settled from the other side. At night the Lord of Paṇḍharī spoke to Cokhāmeḷā and said that he intended to take him into the temple that night. Then he took him by the hand and led him into the innermost shrine. In there he told him what Mahīpati calls the secrets of his heart. I cannot get through a single moment without you, he said. I could be eating with Nāmdev, I could be drinking nectar, and even then I am remembering you. Cokhāmeḷā fell at his feet and said that he called himself the helper of the helpless and had done what his servants wanted.

A priest sleeping near the door heard the conversation and got up. He woke others and brought them to listen, and what he told them was that somebody very much like Cokhā was in there talking to Kṛṣṇa. The doors were locked. The locks had not been touched. He could not work out how the man had got in. What he said next is the clearest statement in the book of what was actually at stake: if a low-caste man can touch the god, who has garments and ornaments on him, then our work as brahmins comes to an end. What shall we do?

They took the lock off the door and questioned Cokhāmeḷā about the whole affair. Tell us exactly how it happened. He said: I am your child. He took me by the hand and brought me in by force. Forgive me the wrong and look on me kindly. And having said it he started to leave without being told to.

They told him. He was to stop living in Paṇḍharpūr altogether, because as long as he was in the town the god kept bringing him inside. He was to go and live on the far side of the Candrabhāgā, and if he did not go they would punish him. He had done a very great wrong, they said. He had defiled the supreme God, and for that sin he would go to hell.

Cokhāmeḷā answered that the charge was false, and he argued it. If an outcaste and a brahmin bathe in the same Ganges, nobody blames the Ganges. The earth is held to be pure, and every caste alive walks on it; where is it written that it can be dirtied? If wind blows across a wicked man the wind does not pick up his wickedness, and it is a foolish thought to blame the wind. Space fills a washerman's vessel and space fills an earthen jar, and it is not caught in either. To God, all castes are the same thing. He fills the whole of it and is attached to none of it. The wrong thoughts are yours, and it is you who have made yourselves blameable.

That was the mistake. The brahmins had been angry about the trespass; now they were angry about the reasoning. He is from a low and filthy caste, they said, and he is teaching us. Their own images came fast and got more extravagant as they went: a locust instructing an eagle in flight, a shepherd lecturing the teacher of the gods, tin showing off its lustre to gold, common snakes displaying their jewels in front of Śeṣa, ordinary elephants demonstrating their walk to Indra's elephant, Śiva's own attendants performing the dance to show Śiva how it ought to be done, a firefly making a point of its brightness in front of the sun. We are brahmins of high caste, they finished. We are expert in every śāstra. You are an outcaste and you are trying to give us knowledge. Cross the river. If you are seen here tomorrow we will deal with you properly.

His answer was not another argument. Mother, father, he said, I am your servant and I call myself your sweeper. You looked after me for many days, and now you are driving me out. Mahīpati says his eyes filled. Then he said it to the only person left to say it to: merciful mother Viṭṭhal, from today I am cut off from your feet; my fate is very strong; what am I to do?

He went home and told his wife everything, and what he said to her was that the Lord of Paṇḍharī had given them up. Let us go across the river and live there. So they went. He picked a spot on the far bank directly opposite the temple, and there he built a pillar for lights and set it up facing the shrine he could no longer approach. He lived by it, keeping the god in mind, saying of him that he had abandoned me and thrown off his love, or so it appears. Mahīpati, writing four centuries later, adds that anyone going on pilgrimage to Paṇḍharpūr can still see that lamp-pillar standing.

He was eating his midday food one day in exile when Kṛṣṇa came and sat down next to him. There was deep shade under a nimb tree and the two of them ate in it. A priest turned up on some errand and stood there for a moment looking at what he was seeing. Cokhāmeḷā's wife was serving the curds. Something went wrong with the serving and the food went up and came down, and Cokhāmeḷā turned on her: that was badly done, the Husband of Rukmiṇī is eating with us and you have got curds on his yellow robe. Then he looked up at a crow in the branches that was pulling at the nimb fruit and dropping it, and told the bird to move to another branch, because Kṛṣṇa is sitting here and it is landing on him.

The priest, who could see a Mahār eating alone under a tree and scolding his wife and a crow about a god who was not there, lost his temper. He said, out loud, that the man was talking nonsense because he had been seen, and that the Lord of the world could not possibly have dined with an outcaste. Mahīpati gives him no words addressed to Cokhāmeḷā at all. He says it into the air, to nobody, the way a man states a rule. Then he walked over and hit Cokhāmeḷā across the mouth, and left.

He went down to the Bhīmā and bathed, which is what you did after touching such a man, and then he went into the temple. Kṛṣṇa was standing on his brick as always. The yellow robe was covered in curds. The priest looked up into the god's face and saw that one cheek was swollen so badly that the eye above it had closed.

He understood it at once and said so. I persecuted Cokhā, and this is how it has been shown to me. When a man torments an infant it is the mother who feels it. He came back to the riverbank and asked Cokhāmeḷā to come with him into the temple. I did not know what bhakti was, he said. I persecuted you for nothing, like a man hammering a diamond on an anvil and tiring himself out. I punished you and the Lord of Paṇḍharī took the blow in his own temple. When I saw the swelling on his cheek I was afraid. Come with me, and do something, whatever you can, to put me right with him.

So the priest took him by the hand and brought him in. Cokhāmeḷā saw the god and his mind went quiet. When he put his arms round the image the swelling went down out of its face. Mahīpati says the god had been worn out by the separation and that his joy when they met was past measuring. From that day Cokhāmeḷā went into the temple whenever he liked, and the saints and the Vaiṣṇavas were glad, and said that the Life of the world takes pride in his own. A second English account, working from other reports, gives a shorter and differently shaped version: that Cokhāmeḷā once crossed the temple threshold and was thrown out for impiety, that he excused himself by saying he had been carried in by an impulse he could not resist, and that he answered his enemies in words of great pathos. That is recognisably the same event with the night visit and the restoration stripped out of it. The two accounts are given here as they stand.

There is a scene in the same chapter where Rukmiṇī finds Kṛṣṇa exhausted and asks him to be massaged, and teases him about where he has been. Have you been weeding Sāvatā's garden (see Sāvatā Māḷī, The day God came to the garden)? Were you at Kabīr's loom, weaving a scarf with a gold border? Were you thatching Nāmdev's roof? Were you holding up the wall Jñāndev was sitting on? Then she asks the question that is the reason this passage is in the chapter: did you drag the dead cattle for Cokhā, and is that why your hands and feet are tired?

The book does not let that go by as a joke. The opening invocation of the very next chapter puts it in the list of what the god is: you do not look at caste or family; you dined with Nāmdev; you dragged the dead cattle for Cokhā; you wove a scarf for Kabīr. It is the plainest sentence in the whole of Mahīpati about what Paṇḍharpūr claimed. Not that the god tolerated a Mahār, or pitied him, or made an exception for a good one. That the god did the Mahār's work. He took the rope and dragged out the carcass, and came back tired, with dirty hands.

It is not an isolated line either. Janābāī has it: he drove away Cokhā's dead cattle, she says, as he wove cloth with the weaver, and then came and ground grain beside me. Ekanāth has it in his list of the trades, where the dead cattle are Cokhā's (see the opening chapter). Tukārām has it three centuries later in a list of everyone God has eaten with and worked beside, ending in the flat statement that caste does not matter, the name does. A separate tradition reports the same thing again, that Viṭṭhal helped Cokhāmeḷā carry off the carcass of a cow. Four independent voices keep hold of the same image, which suggests it was the one that would not let people alone.

He was not the only poet in his house. The tradition remembers a household of them, and the sources used here give parts of it. One account names a son, Karmi, known to the tradition as Karmameḷā, and a sister called Nirmaḷā. About Nirmaḷā it says nothing further, and nothing further about her survives in any text used for this chapter. His wife appears in both accounts and in neither of them by name; she is simply Cokhā's wife, the woman serving curds under the nimb tree. Tradition calls her Soyarābāī, and this chapter calls her that, while noting that the name is not in these two books.

Bankā is harder, and it is more honest to leave him unresolved than to tidy him. The tradition makes Bankā Cokhāmeḷā's brother-in-law, Nirmaḷā's husband. In the English Bhaktavijaya a Vankā turns up three separate times standing immediately beside Cokhāmeḷā in lists of the god's devotees, once described as a woodcutter, and Kṛṣṇa himself names the pair of them together as men who have no close friends but him. Mahīpati never says this Vankā was Cokhāmeḷā's kin. And later in the same book, in chapter seventeen, there is a Bankā who is the wife of Rakā the potter, and a daughter of theirs also called Vankā, and Rakā earns his living gathering and selling faggots. The English spellings will not separate these people, and the texts to hand cannot settle whether the Vankā who stands next to Cokhāmeḷā is the brother-in-law the tradition names. That is stated here rather than decided.

Soyarābāī has abhaṅgas of her own, and one of them, given here in summary, stands beside her husband's. She is talking to God about a meal. The food I am putting in front of you is not worthy of you, she says, and asks him to be good enough to eat it anyway, and eat his fill. Then she does what any Marathi poet would do and reaches for precedent, and the precedents she picks are two low tables. Did you not eat the thin rice at Vidura's house? Were you not satisfied with one leaf of greens from Draupadī? Then eat with us.

Vidura was the son of a servant woman and Kṛṣṇa went to his house instead of to the palace. Draupadī had one leaf left in an empty pot and he ate it and the hunger of the world was satisfied. Those are the two stories that a woman in a Mahār household at Maṅgaḷveḍhe uses to argue that the god can sit down in her kitchen. She is not pleading. She is producing case law.

Her husband's abhaṅga on the same subject stands beside hers. Cokhāmeḷā says that God came to his house to take his dinner with him, that he set out sweet dishes of every kind before him and asked him to eat. In another abhaṅga that goes under his name he talks about children: if you are going to give me a son, give me one who will turn out a saint; if you are going to give me a daughter, let her be another Mīrābāī or another Muktābāī; and if you are not going to give them to me like that, then take all offspring away from me altogether. It is an odd, hard prayer from a man whose son grew up to be a poet in the same tradition, and it is the only glimpse these sources give of him as a father.

The abhaṅga that carries the whole of him is the fourth of them, and it is built out of three things anyone in Maṅgaḷveḍhe would have had in front of them that morning. A sugar-cane is crooked; the juice that comes out of it is not crooked. A bow is curved; the arrow that leaves it does not fly curved. A river winds all over the plain; the water in it does not wind. Then the fourth term, which is himself: Cokhā may be untouchable, but his heart is not untouchable.

He is not arguing that untouchability is a mistake about him personally, that he is the exception, the good one who should be let in. He takes the classification and leaves it standing. Yes. Crooked cane. Curved bow. Winding river. Untouchable man. And in every one of the four the thing that comes out of it does not carry the shape of the thing it came out of. It is an argument about form and substance made entirely out of field equipment, by a man who would have been beaten for making it out of Sanskrit.

The other abhaṅgas circle the same point from different sides. He says the real Paṇḍharpūr is his own body, that the deity standing in it is his own soul, and that the part of Rukmiṇī is played there by tranquillity of mind. Contemplating the town that way, he says, he holds on to the feet of God. That is a sentence written by someone who has been ordered to live on the other side of a river from a temple, and there is no self-pity anywhere in it.

And he says something bolder still. While we are occupied with the name of God there is no reason for fear and no reason for anxiety. Let the most wicked people on earth come to this place and be cleaned. Then he sounds his drum. The drum was a Mahār's instrument and a Mahār's office, the thing he beat to summon a village or announce a death. Cokhāmeḷā takes it and beats it as a public crier calling the impure in. The man who has been declared a source of pollution is standing at the edge of town offering to purify anybody who wants it.

He was not a solitary. He is placed in the great pilgrimage that Jñāndev and Nāmdev made across the country, in company with Gorā the potter, Sāvatā the gardener, Narahari the goldsmith and Visobā Kheçar, and Mahīpati has him walking with that crowd more than once. When Nāmdev held a feast for the saints at Paṇḍharpūr, Cokhāmeḷā was at it. When the saints assembled and the Lord of Paṇḍharī spoke about which of his devotees he loved, he named Cokhāmeḷā in the same breath as the rest.

There is one small scene worth setting down. In Nāmdev's house, in the twenty-first chapter, the saints decided that somebody had to write down the verses coming out of the saints' mouths, and scribes were allotted. Saccidānand Bābā was given Jñāndev. Sopān was given Nivṛtti. Jñāndev was given Muktābāī. Visobā Kheçar was given Jogā Paramānand. Kāśībā Gurav was given Sāvatā. And Anant Bhaṭ, a brahmin, was appointed to write down the verses of Cokhāmeḷā. The book does not stop to remark on it. It simply puts a brahmin at the feet of a Mahār with a pen in his hand and goes on to the next name on the list.

One detail fixes Cokhāmeḷā in the community more firmly than any story does. When the year of Jñāndev's samādhi at Āḷandī has to be established, the date is said to be attested by the abhaṅgas of Nāmdev, of Visobā Kheçar, of Janābāī, and of Cokhāmeḷā. Cokhāmeḷā's own verse is being used as historical evidence about Jñāndev. Which means he was there, or close enough to it, and that the others kept and copied what he wrote about it. The chronology puts his death in 1338, forty-two years after Jñāndev's, and Nāmdev's in 1350. So Cokhāmeḷā was a younger man in that company who outlived Jñāndev by a long stretch and died twelve years before Nāmdev. That matters for what happened next, because it means Nāmdev was alive to be asked.

This last part of the story does not come from Mahīpati. It is not in the Bhaktavijaya chapter that carries everything else in this life. It is the received story of how Cokhāmeḷā died and what was done about it, from a later account, set down here as that and not as Mahīpati's own telling. He was working on a parapet wall at Maṅgaḷveḍhe. It was the heavy labour a man of his community was made to do, and there were other workmen on the job with him. The wall came down. He was killed under it, and so were the others.

The devotees at Paṇḍharpūr wanted his bones. They went to the ruin to get them and found the thing they had not thought about on the way: there was no way of telling which bones were his. Several men had died in the same collapse and the rubble did not distinguish between a saint and a labourer, and neither, by then, did what was left of them. So they asked Nāmdev. And Nāmdev told them to pick up only the bones from which the name of Viṭṭhal could be heard. They went through the fallen wall listening, and the story goes that the bones were sorted that way and carried to Paṇḍharpūr.

The conclusion drawn from it is worth keeping: that the name had gone all the way into the man, so far in that the dead matter he had been made of could still testify. It is also, told flatly, a story about a heap of anonymous workmen's bones under a collapsed wall, and about the one test that could be applied to them being a test that no priest and no register could administer. Nobody in the account asks whose caste the other bones were. They were not sorted. They were left.

His bones were brought to Paṇḍharpūr and put in a samādhi, the tomb-shrine of a saint, in front of the great door of the temple. Nāmdev's bones were placed at the same door. The two of them face each other across the entrance, and a visitor in 1933 said they can be seen there. Another, fourteen years earlier, independently recorded the same thing: Cokhāmeḷā's memorial stands facing the way in to Viṭṭhal's great temple.

So he is buried at the step. Not inside, where the god he spoke to at night is standing on his brick with his hands on his hips. At the step, on the stone in front of the main door, in the exact place where he used to come after his bath and his circuit of the town and lie down flat because he was not allowed any further in. Every pilgrim walking into that temple goes over him to get there.