Damaji Pant

This is a short life, and the shortness should be said at the start rather than padded over. Almost everything we have about Dāmājīpant is one chapter of Mahīpati's Bhaktavijaya, the fortieth, written in 1762. The series of English monographs on these poets has no volume about him. The anthology of Maratha hymns in English does not mention him. The modern study of the whole tradition gives him two lines, and they are about the date of a famine. No collection of abhaṅgas circulates under his name, so unlike almost every other saint in this book he never speaks in his own voice anywhere in these pages.

What he has instead is one act, which two later poets thought it worth putting in a list of the things god has done for people, and which anybody in Maharashtra can still tell you.

One other thing should be cleared up before we start. There is a second Dāmājī in these sources, a tailor of Narasiṅgpūr who was the father of Nāmdev, and he appears earlier in the Bhaktavijaya in a quite different story about a son and an offering. He is not this man and the two should not be run together.

Maṅgaḷveḍhe is a town about sixteen miles from Paṇḍharpūr. In the fifteenth century it belonged to the sultanate whose capital was at Bidar, which Mahīpati spells "Bedar", and Dāmājīpant was the Muslim king's revenue officer there.

He was good at it. The Bhaktavijaya says the king, seeing he was a reliable man, put the royal grain stores into his keeping as well as the revenue, and that Dāmājī lived there with his family. He served the king, Mahīpati says, with a single mind, while knowing in his heart that everything he was administering was illusory.

He had one settled domestic habit. At noon he fed whoever had turned up uninvited. That is all the source says about his private life, and it is the hinge the entire story turns on.

Then a famine came. The source is brief and terrible about it: even the animals died of hunger, and there were people who reached the house of death with gold coins still in their possession, because there was nowhere to buy food. Anyone who could leave the country left it. The weak had to stay.

At Paṇḍharpūr there was nothing at all. The Bhaktavijaya explains why in a practical aside: there are no vegetable plots or cornfields there.

One day a brahmin from Paṇḍharpūr, very hungry, walked the sixteen miles to Maṅgaḷveḍhe hoping to eat. He came to Dāmājīpant's house, and Dāmājīpant, as soon as he saw him, bowed to him and told him to go and bathe and come back quickly for god's favour.

He bathed, and was seated beside his host, and served many kinds of good food, and at the end of it the ghee was poured and the offering made to the gods and the priest asked him to sip the water, and the brahmin began to cry.

Everyone at the table stared at him. The master of the house asked him what was wrong.

Four days, the brahmin said. My wife and my children have been sitting at Paṇḍharī starving for four days. I am a hard, unthinking man. Here I sit eating at your table. What happens after this? That is what I am crying about.

Dāmājī said: I will feed all of you for a year. Now settle your mind and eat your dinner. I will send grain to your house this evening.

The brahmin ate, and was given betel and a gift of money on the way out, and Dāmājī called his servants and told them to run two ox-loads of grain over to Paṇḍharpūr for him.

The bags went onto the oxen and the oxen went to Paṇḍharpūr, and when the men and women of the town saw sacks of grain coming up the road in a famine they went for them.

They had the bags open and the lot away. Nobody could stop them; nobody there had eaten. The brahmin stood in the middle of it shouting, who are you, that is my grain, and got none of it. Mahīpati compares it to a cloud of locusts coming down on a crop that has just ripened.

The other brahmins of Paṇḍharpūr came and asked him where the grain had come from, and he told them: from Dāmājīpant, who had pity on me. God gave it and my own fate took it away. The whole town has stolen it.

So they went to Maṅgaḷveḍhe, all of them.

Dāmājī bowed to them when he saw them and they blessed him, and then they said their piece. A severe famine has fallen on us. You fed one brahmin and we heard about it, so we have come. You are generous and when you give food you do not first work out whether a man is great or small, or whether he deserves it. When the sun comes up it shines on everybody the same way. We belong to the holy city and we are starving to death there. Your name reached us. So we came.

The Bhaktavijaya says pity rose in him. He told them not to be afraid, and sat them all down, and went inside to talk to his wife.

The brahmins who live at Paṇḍharī are dying, he said. They have all come here. If we say no to them we lose our character for goodness. But we do not have enough grain of our own to satisfy them, and this is what is worrying me. The grain I gave that brahmin was taken off him. People are in distress. Some have already left the country.

His wife said: do whatever plan comes to you, and satisfy them.

Then Dāmājī said the thing that this chapter exists to record, and Mahīpati gives it to him plainly, in his own mouth, without any working up to it.

There are two royal granaries here and the keys are mine. I should let the brahmins loot them and keep every one of those men alive. The moment the king hears of it he will take my life. But one life spent, and every brahmin in the holy city stays alive. If I am the only man here who loves his own body, then they all die.

He thought that, and then he walked outside, and opened the storehouses, and told the brahmins to take home as much as they needed.

They blessed him and started carrying grain away, and word went the sixteen miles back to Paṇḍharpūr, and then everybody came.

The source lists them, and the list is the point. Brahmins, kṣatriyas, vaiśyas and śūdras. Grocers. Gondhaḷīs. The helpless and the poor. Carpenters and labourers. Potters and barbers. Masons, milkmen, stoneworkers, fishermen, coppersmiths, gardeners. People from Gujarat, dyers, salt-makers, yogis, saints and mahants. Tailors, washermen. And then, because the list would not be honest without it: castes beyond counting, and the out-castes along with them, and they carried off as much as they liked.

Mahīpati knows exactly what some of his audience is thinking at this point, because he stops and puts it into words for them: somebody listening is going to object. Why did every caste have to be dragged into this? Could he not have sorted out the deserving ones first?

His answer runs six verses. Everyone who lives at the sacred city of Paṇḍharī is to be considered alike, and the old verses the saints composed say so, so stop turning it over. Nine million creatures live down in the sea, and the sea has one way of looking at all of them. A million kinds of birds fly about and to the Husband of Rukmiṇī they are all one. Two million sorts of tree grow, and the ground under them does not know the difference. Men who actually know what the self is are the ones who understand this, and that is exactly why they never speak of one caste as higher or lower than another.

Dāmājīpant understood this, Mahīpati says, and so in his kindness he handed out food to every creature there was. Through that famine he kept the helpless and the weak and the destitute alive, and it never once crossed his mind that the grain was coming from him.

It went on for a month.

The talk started at Paṇḍharpūr, where his name was now known everywhere, and the mean-minded burned about it.

He has handed out the king's grain, they said. What has come out of his own pocket? Nothing he ever earned by his own labour.

Others said something more sensible and more frightening. Why are you people sitting around reviling him instead of doing your work? If the king hears about this he will be furious and handle him very roughly. A man ought to hand out what he has earned himself, and this man has gone further than that. Once the Muslim king hears of it he will take his life.

Dāmājīpant, the Bhaktavijaya says, went on being happy, and was not touched by either the praise or the alarm.

The man who wrote the letter was a Kannada brahmin, the mūzumdār, the deputy revenue collector, and the source describes him as an evil man who hated Viṣṇu. What he wrote to Bidar was short. Great king, lord of the city, listen to your servant. Dāmājīpant has had your grain looted by brahmins. I am your servant and your service is my whole business, and that is why this has been put in front of you.

The king had it read to him and went up like ghee poured on a fire. He did not investigate anything. He said: Dāmājī did not get my permission first, so how is it he has given away the grain in my storehouses. He sent soldiers to collect the money, and he privately intended to have the man's head off the moment he arrived.

The officers came to Maṅgaḷveḍhe and showed Dāmājīpant the royal order, and the whole town understood what it meant and was badly shaken. Dāmājī read it through and said: the wrong is mine. Why would I be sorry about it now?

He asked the officers one favour: since the road to Bidar goes that way, let me see the Husband of Rukmiṇī at Paṇḍharī.

He went down into the Bhīmā to bathe, and came up to the temple's great door. He prostrated himself at the eagle-platform and went on in to the inner chamber and prostrated himself again.

Then he looked up.

The Bhaktavijaya takes its time here, because it wants the reader to see what the man was looking at. His face was extraordinarily beautiful. Brilliant earrings shaped like crocodiles hung from his ears. Round his neck were the Kaustubha jewel and garlands of flowers. The yellow robe was round his waist. The two feet stood level together on the brick, the hands were at the hips, and the eyes were down at the nose-tip.

Dāmājī embraced him and took hold of both his feet and put his palms together.

God supreme, Husband of Rukmiṇī, he said, this is my last visit. Do not stop loving me.

Then he put his head down on the feet and said the rest of it. I committed a wrong and everybody knows about it. The king is very angry with me and he has sent his soldiers to take me to Bidar and behead me there. Still, I think I have done one worthwhile thing at the very end of my life. And I have had sight of your feet.

His voice went, and he could not get anything else out, and the tears came, and he looked at the image again and asked permission to leave.

The soldiers, who had stood through this, told him to hurry up, they could not afford the delay. He bowed to Satyabhāmā and Rādhā and Rukmiṇī, did his reverence to the eagle and to Hanumant, and went.

The people of the sacred city stood watching him go down the road and said to one another: what the Lord of Paṇḍharī is going to do about this, none of us can understand.

Dāmājīpant walked out of Paṇḍharpūr keeping the town on his left, and behind him the Bhaktavijaya says Viṭṭhal looked at the situation and worked it out.

Dāmājī has put his burden on me, he said to himself, and had the king's storehouse looted. Now the king is furious and has called him in to have him killed. But I am the one who stands up for my own, which is what the śāstras and the purāṇas both say I am. If I do not run to help him now, I lose my reputation.

So he worked out what the grain had been worth, and took that much money along.

And then the Lord of Paṇḍharī made himself an out-caste.

He wrote a petition to the king in Dāmājīpant's own handwriting and made himself Dāmājī's messenger. He tied a rag of torn cloth round his head. He put a black cord round his neck and the pagar earrings that Mahārs wear in his ears. A loin cloth at the waist. A staff in the hand.

Rukmiṇī, watching this, asked what exactly the Lord of the world thought he was doing.

My devotee Dāmājī has been taken to Bidar to be put to death, he said. I have made myself an unnamable for him. There is no shame in me when my own are in difficulty.

He filled a bag with money and sealed it with the king's own seal, and arrived at Bidar.

At the gate he told the doorkeeper his business: I have come from Maṅgaḷveḍhe. Tell your master. The doorkeeper got the king's permission and brought him in.

And the Lord of Paṇḍharī greeted the Muslim king with the word johār, which is the greeting a Mahār uses.

Mahīpati stops the narrative dead at this point for one line, and what he says is: we are likely to find that strange.

Then he goes on. He whose glory is not understood even by the Vedas and the śāstras that describe him bowed his head low and gave the king johār. He for whom eighty-eight thousand ṛṣis perform austerities said to a Muslim king, you are my mother and my father, on behalf of a devotee who stood accused.

The king's minister asked where he had come from. I am the Mahār servant of Dāmājī of Maṅgaḷveḍhe, he said. I call myself his hereditary slave.

Mahīpati anticipates the objection again, because he knows his audience. You will want to ask, he says, whether the one whose home is the milk sea and who sleeps along the coils of Śeṣa would really talk in that cringing way. Do not keep any doubt about it in your mind. When he was minding the cows at Nanda's house he called himself a cowherd openly. At Dharma's house he was happy to clear away the used dining plates. Driving for Arjuna, he washed the horses down with his own hands. So he called himself the hereditary slave of Dāmājīpant without any hesitation at all.

The minister asked his name. My name is Viṭhonāik, he said, brought up as a child in Dāmājī's house.

Then he threw down the letter.

The minister recognised the handwriting at once and nobody doubted it was genuine, and he read the petition aloud to the king.

Greatest of kings, lord of the world: a request from your servant Dāmājīpant, humbly made. There was a famine in this country and food became very scarce, so for your advantage I sold seven hundred khaṇḍīs of grain. The rate was one rupee per pāyalī. I have filled a bag with the money and sent it into your service. Viṭhonāik is our servant and turns his hand to everything in our house. He will account for the money. Kindly send a receipt back by him.

Everybody in the room assumed it was a lie, because the bag was small. The accountants worked out what the grain was worth and came back to the king with a figure: one hundred and thirty-eight thousand rupees is what is owed.

They broke the bag open.

There was so much money in it that they could not count it. Their hands got tired counting. The Bhaktavijaya compares it to a hole dug in wet sand that keeps filling up with water no matter how much you take out. The king was astonished.

And nobody there understood what they were looking at. Mahīpati says it plainly: they were deluded by god's māyā, and what they did was congratulate the king on his good fortune. In the end they abandoned the count and tipped the bag into the treasury just as it stood, remarking that Dāmājīpant was a blessed man who understood his own interests.

The king said: I listened to my deputy's accusation and demanded money for nothing. It was like believing the braying of a washerman's donkey and driving away a wish-cow.

Then Kṛṣṇa called in from outside the room: let me have the receipt, and quickly. It is a long road to Maṅgaḷveḍhe and I shall be a long while on it.

The king wrote the letter himself. The money has come in, all of it. The deputy collector goes to prison; I have given the order. The moment this reaches you, strip him of every right he holds. Stay on at Maṅgaḷveḍhe; that is my wish.

He gave Viṭhonāik a suit of clothes and honoured him.

And the Life of the world, standing there in the torn rag and the pagar earrings with a king's gift of clothing in his hands, blessed him: long life to you, and may every kind of wealth there is in the world find its way to you. Then he made a low bow and took the letter away.

The king also sent Dāmājī garments and ornaments, and a palanquin and elephants and a chariot with servants to bring them, and the whole procession set off for Maṅgaḷveḍhe. Dāmājīpant knew nothing about any of it.

They passed each other on the road and missed each other.

The king's men brought Dāmājīpant in, and when the king heard he was coming he got up and went out to meet him.

He embraced him. Viṭho the Mahār came, he said. Paid in full. We sent you garments and ornaments by his hand, with affection. We took that Kannada collector's poison at face value and lost our temper. After we had sent for you, Viṭhonāik came here yesterday. He told us what you had done. He put your letter in front of us, in your own hand, handed over an enormous sum, and left.

Dāmājīpant stood there and worked out what had happened, and the Bhaktavijaya gives him a long speech about it, and it is not a speech of thanks. It is closer to horror.

The Lord of Paṇḍharī has worn himself out so that I would not have any trouble. He who has no qualities and no form and no desires, and who cannot be compared to anything, took the shape of an out-caste and carried a load of money on his head. A billion suns go dim in front of the light of his crown, and he tied a rag on his head. He threw away his crocodile earrings and put in the kind out-castes wear. He put aside the Kaustubha jewel and wore a piece of string instead. He put down the conch and the disc and took up a staff. He must have taken off the yellow robe and put on a loin cloth for me. He must have taken the ornaments off his feet and put on a pair of broken sandals.

Curse my life, that I have worn out the Life of the world.

Everybody in the room, the king included, was by now working on the same arithmetic and arriving at the same place. That was no out-caste, they said. That was the Husband of Rukmiṇī. We have learned that by experience. If he were an ordinary man, how did he carry a load that heavy? The count reached a hundred and thirty-eight thousand rupees and the bag was no emptier than when they began, and the counters gave out and tipped it into the treasury unfinished.

And Dāmājī, hearing all of them say it, showed nothing but grief. I will never do that again, he said. I will not repeat the act that wore out the Husband of Rukmiṇī. If you put an earring in and the ear tears off, what is the good of the gold?

He asked the king to release him. I do not want to work in your service any more. Give me permission to go and live at Paṇḍharpūr.

The king gave it, and said one sentence as he did: god is in your debt now, and it is through you that I have met the one who holds the disc.

Meanwhile the god had hurried to Maṅgaḷveḍhe, told Dāmājī's household that he was safe, and disappeared.

Dāmājīpant left the king's service and brought his household to Paṇḍharī. He embraced the image, and what came out of him was the same thing again, in a different key.

Purifier of sinners, Husband of Rukmiṇī, Brother of the lowly, Lord of Paṇḍharī, nobody could ever count my transgressions. Sanaka and Śiva and the other gods are fit to worship you and they sing about your feet. And you became an unnamable and saved my life. Brahmadev's father, and the Gaṅgā's father too. And for my sake you made yourself an out-caste man for nothing. Who was there to call you Viṭhonāik, brought up as a child in Dāmājī's house? And yet that is what you told the king.

He lived there with his family after that and performed kīrtans and talked about the goodness of Hari, and the people of the town said to each other that his bhakti was a blessed thing, because he had made the Husband of Rukmiṇī his debtor.

The modern chronology, working saint by saint, treats Dāmājīpant as probably a contemporary of Bhānudās, and the only anchor it has for him is the famine. It gives two candidate dates for a dire famine in the Deccan, about 1458, or the stretch from about 1468 to 1475, and says Dāmājī must have lived about one or the other. It adds, in passing, that Bhānudās must have lived through the same famine himself. That is the whole of the external evidence, and it is an inference from a famine to a man rather than the other way round.

Bidar fits, in the loose sense that it was the seat of the sultanate's government in this period and a revenue officer at Maṅgaḷveḍhe would have answered to it. That is background, not corroboration.

Beyond that there is nothing to check Mahīpati against.

What survives instead of evidence is the memory of one act, and the shape that memory took.

Ekanāth, four generations after the famine, made the abhaṅga that goes through the trades one at a time: the wheel, the cattle, the grass, the loom, the hide, the meat stall, the furnace, the basket of dung (see the opening chapter). There is one more line in it.

And he became Dāmājī's Mahār messenger.

Mahīpati made the same kind of list himself, in a prayer to Pāṇḍuraṅg that has nothing to do with the Bhaktavijaya, and Dāmājī is in that one too, in half a line, straight after Gorā's potter's wheel: and you went to Bidar and protected Dāmājīpant.

Two poets two centuries apart, reaching for one image to say what kind of god this is, and both of them reaching for the same handful of trades. A potter's wheel. A gardener's weeds. A goldsmith's furnace. A servant's basket of dung. Dead cattle dragged off a road by a man who was not allowed inside the temple.

And a man in a torn rag and Mahār earrings, standing in a Muslim court a hundred miles from home, saying johār to a king, and calling himself somebody's hereditary slave.