Gora Kumbhar

He was the eldest of them, and so they called him uncle.

Gorā made pots at Ter, a town the older books write as Teradhoki. His birth is put in 1267, three years ahead of Nāmdev and about eight ahead of Jñāndev, which made him the senior man of that whole generation of saints, and the community settled the matter by calling him Uncle Gorā. The name went everywhere with him. Janābāī, who had been handed over as a girl to Nāmdev's household and ground grain there all her life, used it when she counted up the family she did have: Nāmdev was her father, Rājāī her mother, Kabīr and Sāvatā were her brothers, and Gorā the potter was her dearest uncle. She was singing at the mill when she said it, and nobody needed to be told who was meant.

Mahīpati's account of him is short on incident and long on habit. Eating, walking, getting up, lying down, working at his trade, the names of the Lord of Paṇḍharī went on underneath all of it without a gap. He heard ordinary talk with his ears and looked at ordinary things with his eyes and went on holding Viṭṭhal in mind, the dark god of Paṇḍharpūr, Viṭhobā in ordinary speech, who stands on his brick with his hands on his hips and has been waiting there for Puṇḍalīk ever since. Good report and bad report were the same weather to him. A prince at his door and a pauper at his door got the same face.

The trade itself is worth knowing, because the whole of his life happens inside it. Clay has to be trodden before it can be thrown, and that is slow barefoot work, hours of it, with nothing for the eyes to do. He had raised a low border of earth in his front yard and made his clay inside it. Beyond the treading came the wheel, then the drying, then the furnace, where the jars are stacked so close that they cannot help knocking against one another. His wife knew that furnace as well as he did. She used it later to explain herself to him, and he would not listen.

One morning she went out for water and left the baby playing in the yard. Gorā was in the clay with his eyes shut. He was holding the form of Viṭṭhal in his heart and the tears were running while he worked, and he had stopped knowing that he had a body at all. The child crawled about the yard, came to the edge of the clay, and crawled into it. He trod it in.

His wife came back with the water, and her breasts filled with milk, which is how she thought of the child first. She looked round the yard and could not find it. She went to her husband and asked him: I left the child with you when I went for water, and I cannot see it anywhere, tell me at once where it is. Then, looking about her as she spoke, she saw blood. Then she saw, in the mud, bone and flesh.

She beat her breast and cried out, and what she said to him was this. You have trodden the child into the clay. You seem to have lost every sense you had. What is this thing you have done. You threw away your household to go looking for God, and I am walking out of this house now to kill myself. The grief is hers and so is the accusation, and Mahīpati writes both down without taking anything off either.

Gorā came up out of it slowly. What he said was that she had broken into his contemplation without thinking what she was doing, that the Husband of Rukmiṇī had been sitting in his heart, and that she had confused him and driven the Lord of Paṇḍharī away. Then his anger took him. He picked up the handle of his wheel and came at her to beat her with it. She was frightened, and she stopped him in the only way that would work in that house: for Viṭhobā's sake, she said, mind you do not so much as touch me with your finger. He heard the oath, put the handle down, sat where he was, and went back to the names.

The neighbours came into the yard and stood about talking to each other over the top of it. The child has been trodden into the clay, they said, we have seen this great wrong done. One of them said he had gone completely mad. Another said that this is always what comes of giving yourself up to the worship of Hari. Mahīpati says he paid no attention to any of it, and that the thing did not so much as enter his mind again. Here the two sources part company and should be left parted. In the shorter account Gorā trampled the child while he was dancing in joy, and by God's grace the child was saved. Mahīpati has the child dead in the clay and restored a long time afterwards. Tukārām, three centuries later, was still singing of the god who brought the potter's dead child back to life, so the line Mahīpati was following was at least an old one.

For a while she would not speak to him, and then she thought it through and saw where it left her. If a king does wrong, what can his subjects do about it? She had no authority to punish her husband. So one day she came to wash his feet, and he pushed her away. You have laid me under an oath in Viṭṭhal's name that I am not to touch you with my fingers, he said, and an oath taken in my Viṭhobā's name I do not break.

She apologised for the whole of it. She had spoken as she should not have spoken; would he forgive her and let her serve him again; if he simply sat there refusing her, where was it going to end? Then she gave him the reason in the language of his own trade: when the jars go into the furnace they cannot help touching one another, and a woman busy about her house cannot help saying what she should not. He answered with a string of impossible things. The sun might come up in the west. Air might be kept in a cage and open space shut in a jar. Fire might be hidden in a load of hay. A pumpkin might sink. His mind was made up and it was not going to move.

She stopped arguing, and then there was nothing left but the fact that she had no child and would not have one. The relatives were already laughing at them, saying the line had ended. She could not be divorced and she could not be touched. So she decided to marry him again, and she walked to her parents' house and told them everything, and asked them for her youngest sister. She held her mother's feet and cried while she asked, and said she was begging for no more than a jacket. Her father and mother said yes. They called a brahmin and the day was fixed.

She went home and made the clothes and the ornaments herself, sent out the invitations and gathered the whole family, and the marriage party set off with the bands playing. On the road the guests muttered about it among themselves. They could not approve of a man who put his wife aside for the sake of God, and Mahīpati lets them run on at some length about the sort of people who cannot stand the sight of devotion. The ceremonies went on for four days and the procession went through the town. Then the bride's parents worked out what they had just done, which was to put both their daughters into a house where one of them was already set aside, and they took the same precaution the elder had taken. Both of these women are yours, they told him: treat them alike, the way your two eyes are alike to you, and if you do not treat them well, Viṭhobā is your witness. Gorā agreed to it. He said that if the Lord of the world was merciful the knot of this life would come undone of itself, and that God does not let his people be dragged about by their appetites.

He kept both oaths exactly. The same garments, the same ornaments, and he treated the younger sister precisely as he treated the elder, which meant that he did not touch her either. The elder saw what was happening and asked him why the younger did not please him. He explained her father's oath: he was not to favour one over the other, and he had those words fixed in his mind and was keeping to them. At that the younger began to cry and asked her sister why she had tangled her up in this. Do not be troubled, the elder told her. When night comes we will test his heart.

That night, with the two of them lying on either side of him while he slept, each sister took one of his hands and laid it on her breast. He woke and lay there working it out. My mind was not on any pleasure of that kind, he said, but it was my hand that broke the vow. Then he got up, took a sword, fixed it firmly to a post, and cut off both his hands.

He was sitting at his worship when the sun came up and the two women saw the stumps. What they cried out was practical and frightened. This is a disaster. Who is going to run the household now? Everywhere the spiteful will laugh at us when they see what we have brought about. We arranged a second marriage to get children out of it, and what can we do now against the anger of God? He told them there was nothing there to mourn over. If the Husband of Rukmiṇī is your protector, why grieve? A man who has been given the wish-cow does not lie awake over his dinner. A man sitting under the wish-tree does not go short of clothes. A man with a touchstone in his hand is not poor. He went on repeating the names and did not stop.

In Āṣāḍh, when the roads fill with vārkarīs, the pilgrims who walk down to Paṇḍharpūr and back twice a year and who call the walk itself the vārī, Gorā went with both his wives. They bathed in the Candrabhāgā and paid their respects at Puṇḍalīk's shrine, went round the town the way pilgrims do, and came to the great door of the temple. All three of them put their heads on the ground. The two women worshipped the god's feet.

Nāmdev was at the eagle platform with his cymbals and his singers, in the middle of a kīrtan, the sung telling of God's story in which the singer and the crowd answer one another back and forth until nobody is a spectator. He was dancing in front of Pāṇḍuraṅg, which is another of that same god's names. Nivṛttināth, Jñāndev, Sopāndev, Sāvatā Māḷī and Jagamitra were sitting and listening, and a great many other people besides. Then Nāmdev lifted his arms above his head and waved his hands about like flags, and called out to everybody there to do the same.

Every pair of hands in the place went up. Gorā stood in the middle of that with two stumps, and the tears came. He said it out loud where he stood. Why have you left me now? I put up my armless arms and I am ashamed. You are the only property I have, and there is nobody in the three worlds besides you. I have put the whole weight of myself on you and there is nothing else holding me up. The Bhaktavijaya says that hands came out of the stumps, the same hands he had cut off. He clapped them together and shouted the name along with the rest, and the whole assembly shouted victory.

The elder wife got up while everyone was still looking at that, and joined her palms in front of the god, and said the thing she had been carrying all these years. Lord of the world, you have looked with favour on your servant. I have been sorrowful a long time without a child. Have you no pity for me? Your people call you the ocean of mercy. And then, flatly: taking your name, my husband lost all knowledge of his body and trod our child into the clay, and you remember it perfectly well. Out of the middle of the assembly a small child came creeping. The mother ran at it and caught it up against her heart.

Then Rukmiṇī, Viṭṭhal's consort, who stands beside him in the temple, spoke to Gorā and let him out. From today you are free of the oath, she said. Do not set your wives aside any more. Our command is your authority. The saints clapped and cried victory and swung their heads in the kīrtan, and lights were waved before the god, and that was how the day ended.

When it was over Gorā joined his palms in front of the saints and asked them all to come out to his house and make the place clean by being in it. They said yes and set off at once. So the road east from Paṇḍharpūr to Ter had that whole company walking along it: Nivṛttināth, Jñāndev, Sopāndev, Muktābāī, Nāmdev, Sāvatā Māḷī and others with them, going to eat in a potter's yard. One account puts what follows at Paṇḍharpūr, among the saints gathered there; Mahīpati takes them all home to Ter first.

He put out grass mats for them to sit on. He washed their feet and drank the water he had washed them with, and it satisfied him. He worshipped them with the full sixteen articles, fed them a meal of six tastes and gave them tulsī leaf afterwards, and everybody took the place that belonged to them. It is worth looking at the room for a moment before anything happens in it. Nāmdev the tailor, Sāvatā the gardener, the four from Āḷandī and the potter whose yard it was had all sat down together in a house where pots were made, and none of them was the odd one there.

When they were all seated Jñāndev spoke up. You have got your pots arranged on their seats, he said to Gorā; now sort out which of them are baked and which are still raw, and tell us what you find. Gorā did not need it explained. He got up and fetched the wooden paddle of his trade, the flat bat he used on the clay, the tool for finding out what a vessel is actually made of.

He went round the company and rapped each of them on the skull with it, the way he would have tested a jar. Nobody moved. Nivṛttināth took it, Jñāndev took it, Sopāndev took it, Muktābāī took it, Sāvatā took it; the greatest people in Maharashtra sat still on their mats and let a potter strike them on the head and said not one word. Then he came to Nāmdev, and Nāmdev shouted. Why are you hitting me for nothing? Gorā did not need a second stroke. This vessel, he said, is still raw and unbaked.

Muktābāī was the youngest person in the room and she said what she thought out loud. Gorā, how did you know? You are good, you are an expert examiner, and I can see there is no doubt about it. A jeweller knows a jewel by looking at it. A doctor knows a sick man by looking at him. You know a fired pot from a green one at a glance. And then the room laughed. All of them laughed, a good hearty laugh, and Nāmdev sat in the middle of it and could not bear it.

He got up and left. He walked back to Paṇḍharpūr and went straight in to Viṭṭhal and stood in front of him with his throat closing and the tears coming, and said: I have been badly insulted and my heart is full of anger. God laughed at him too, and put his arms round him, and asked who had insulted him. Nāmdev, who had walked all that way in order to say, would not say. A man ought to repeat the praise he gets, he said, and keep the criticism to himself. It had to be coaxed out of him: there is nobody as good and as dear to me as you, do not be ashamed to tell your secrets to the one who is nearest. So Nāmdev told the whole thing, and the part he had left out came with it, which was that he had been afraid when the paddle came near him. In his own retelling the words he gives himself are not even the words he used. The story has him shouting why are you striking me for nothing; he tells God that what he said was go away.

God did not take his side. What Gorā said about you is perfectly true, he told him. A man who has not gone as a suppliant to a guru, a teacher who hands over the thing itself and not a description of it, is called unripe, and that is all there is to it. Nāmdev went to pieces at that, the way salt goes the moment water is poured on it. He argued. Why do I need a teacher when you are standing here? If sugar drops into a man's hand, why walk to the bazaar for sugar? If nectar falls into his mouth, why climb the hill to graze? If there is money piled up at home, why wander about looking for it? God answered him out of his own history: when I was Rām I went to Vasiṣṭha and asked him about self-knowledge, and when I was Kṛṣṇa I went to Sāndīpani and was taught. Then he said the thing that actually settled it, and it was not about Nāmdev at all. Keep the custom, he said. If you will not go to a teacher, how are ordinary people ever going to be saved?

He sent him to Visobā Kheçar, who was asleep in the Śiva temple with his shoes on and both feet up on the emblem of the god. Nāmdev went off wretched, and arrived, and found a fault in his teacher before he found anything else, and told him so; and Visobā said, then move my feet somewhere where God is not. That story belongs to Nāmdev's life rather than to Gorā's, and it ends with Nāmdev lifting those feet and finding no direction in the world he could put them down in.

Some time later the saints were gathered at the eagle platform and saw Viṭṭhal with his arms round Nāmdev, and they had a complaint of their own. Ever since you took a teacher you have had no time for us, they said; how have you hardened your heart like this? Nāmdev answered that his teacher's form was inside him and that he no longer saw any difference between that form and himself. God was pleased, and told the assembly the sentence they had all been waiting for: you are not to call Nāmdev raw and unbaked any more. Mahīpati adds that Jñāndev, who had started the whole thing, understood what was really being said. The other account gives the ending with the words in a different mouth. There it was Gorā himself, once Nāmdev had come to know the secret of the spiritual life, who declared himself satisfied and told Nāmdev that from then on there was no distinction between the two of them. Either way it was the potter's verdict that had to be lifted, because the potter was the one who had been asked.

What follows draws on Gorā's own abhaṅgas, the short songs in the unbroken measure that these saints made everything in.

In the first of them he is speaking to Nāmdev, and what he tells him is that God's own form has been fixed in his eye, and that everything he has come to know is gathered in the pupil of his eyes. In another he says that as he began to look at the sky, he felt as though happiness had gone out to meet happiness. In a third he says he heard the unstruck sound, and that it was proclaiming the voice of victory; the Vedas, which can get no further with God than saying he is not this and not that, stand still in front of that sound with nothing to add. Then he tells Nāmdev to keep drinking that particular sweetness and not to stop. The advice is coming from the man who had just called him a raw pot, and it is being given as one gives a working instruction to somebody who can now use it.

In another he says the contemplation made him mad. He lost track of his body altogether. The first form of God took hold of him and he felt like a man possessed by a spirit, and after that, he says, nothing could smear him any more: not action, not merit, not sin. He puts it as mud that will no longer stick, which from a man whose arms were in wet clay every working day of his life is an exact measurement rather than a figure of speech. He says he was living free while still alive.

Then the last of them go quiet. His mind went mute and the bliss of the thing ran past any edge he could find for it. His eyes, with nothing outside them left to look at, turned back on themselves and stopped moving. You can only have this in silence, he says. A dumb man eating sugar cannot tell anybody how sweet it is; in the same way the bliss is enjoyed by means of itself, and that is what being free while alive amounts to. And then he closes the door: do not let the world know about this state, because they do not deserve to be taught it. It is the same judgement he made in his own yard with the paddle in his hand, made this time about everybody.

He went on the long pilgrimage north with Jñāndev and Nāmdev, and his contemporaries respected him. The tradition puts his samādhi, the resting place of a saint, a word that also names the settled absorption of the one laid there, at Ter, in the dark half of Caitra in 1317, and pilgrims still go to it; but no telling of his life gives him a death scene or a last word, and it would be dishonest to supply either. He simply stays in the company, which is where the rest of them wanted him.

What the community kept of him shows up in the lists that later saints made of the work God had taken on for the sake of his people. Ekanāth's runs through the whole set of trades and opens on this one: he baked pots with Gorā (see the opening chapter). Janābāī had said the same thing long before from inside her own work: God danced on the mud with Gorā the potter, he talked to Kabīr at the loom, he drove away Cokhāmeḷā's cattle, and now here he is grinding with me. Cokhāmeḷā, who was kept outside the temple wall for the whole of his life and is buried at the front door he was never let through (see Cokhāmeḷā, The man at the great door), stands in those lists beside the potter as a matter of course. In more than one of them the potter's name comes first, which is roughly where the community had always put him.