Kanhopatra

She was the most beautiful woman in Maṅgaḷveḍhe, and the only use anyone in Maṅgaḷveḍhe could think of for that was the one she refused.

Maṅgaḷveḍhe stands fourteen miles from Paṇḍharpūr, near enough that the pilgrim roads run through it and far enough that a person has to decide to go. The Bhaktavijaya names the courtesan of that town as Śyāmā, and says Kānhopātrā was born to her. The modern account, going back over the Marathi sources, gives the same mother and the same trade: a dancing woman of Maṅgaḷveḍhe. Mahīpati says the women of heaven were ashamed of their own looks when they saw the girl, and that Brahmadev never made her equal among mortals. That is the conventional praise, and it matters here only for what it made her worth to other people.

She was taught the arts her mother's house existed to teach. Singing and dancing, from childhood, the full training; Mahīpati says Rambhā and Tilottamā and Menakā would have been ashamed of their own skill beside hers. This was not an accident of upbringing. It was an apprenticeship. A courtesan's daughter in a small Deccan town was raised into the profession, and Kānhopātrā was being raised into it very well indeed. Everything in the house pointed at the day she would be shown to a man with money.

The day came as a suggestion over the ordinary business of the house. Let us go to the king's palace, Śyāmā said to her daughter; he will see how beautiful you are, and he will give you ornaments. It was a reasonable proposal and the best outcome anyone there could picture: the king's notice, the ornaments, a settled life, a mother's plan for a daughter's security carried out exactly as her own had probably been. Mahīpati records no cruelty in it and neither will this chapter. He records the answer.

Kānhopātrā did not argue. Search as long as you like, she told her mother; no one will be found who is my equal in beauty. If any man can be found who is a million times more beautiful than I am, I am willing to marry him. Then Mahīpati tells us what she had already settled privately, before the conversation began: every man in this world looked to her like a firefly held up beside the sun. The condition she set was not a refusal dressed as a bargain. It was a price no customer could pay, and she named it in a house where the price was the point.

The other account puts the same vow more plainly. She said she would marry only the man whose beauty equalled her own; she found that beauty nowhere among men and found it in the God of Paṇḍharpūr; so she went there and stayed as Viṭṭhal's worshipper. Viṭṭhal is the god of Paṇḍharpūr, the dark image standing on a brick beside the Bhīmā with his hands resting on his hips, and the whole of the country's devotion to him is built on the fact that he came for a man who asked him to wait. The two accounts differ only in pace. In Mahīpati the condition comes first and the finding comes after; in the other they are a single movement.

What neither source says is that she was rescued. Nobody came and took her out of Maṅgaḷveḍhe. No saint arrived to instruct her, no husband to marry her away from the trade, no patron to buy her freedom. She set a condition, and when she heard of someone who met it she went to him herself, on foot, with her instrument in her hand. The refusal and the going are the same act, and every step of it is hers.

Then the pilgrims came through. Banners with eagles on them, drums, the Vaiṣṇavas shouting the name as they walked: a vārī, the walking pilgrimage to Paṇḍharpūr that the vārkarīs, the people who keep the vārī, have made in company for centuries. Kānhopātrā came out to the road and went down full length in front of them and asked where they were going.

To Paṇḍharpūr, they said, where the dweller in Vaikuṇṭh stayed at Puṇḍalīk's asking and has not left since. Describe him, she said. They told her that even Brahmadev cannot describe his glory, that he is generous and wise and beautiful and complete, that his beauty is a billion times Lakṣmī's, and that the sun and the moon turn by his light. Everything she had said to her mother was suddenly about somebody real, in a town fourteen miles away.

So she asked the only question she had left. If I go to him as a suppliant, will he accept me? The pilgrims answered with a list, because with her standing the list was the argument. The slave woman of Kaṃsa at Mathurā, whom Kṛṣṇa accepted and made like himself. Ajāmeḷa. And Cokhāmeḷā, who was not let through the temple door at Paṇḍharpūr in his lifetime and worshipped from the wrong side of the wall, and whom the god came out to anyway (see Cokhāmeḷā, The man at the great door). He calls himself the purifier of the sinful, they said, and the merciful one to the lowly. She went home, bowed to her mother, and said she was going to Paṇḍharpūr. Mahīpati does not record what Śyāmā answered. That silence is the last we have of the mother.

She picked up a vīṇā and walked, singing the qualities of Hari the whole way, and at the great door of the temple she went down on the stone. What she sang there Mahīpati gives as a string of lines that all end the same way. I heard your name and I have come to you as a suppliant, Viṭṭhal. Because you are generous and brave and beautiful and complete, I have come to you as a suppliant. When Ajāmeḷa and a courtesan came to you as suppliants you saved them, and the saints told me so, and that is why I am here. I wanted the things of the senses and I was proud of my body; I have put both down, and come as a suppliant. Now accept me. Then she put her head on his feet.

She was not given a room inside. She stayed at the great door and sang there, and that is where Mahīpati leaves her for the length of a life: at the threshold, in public, holding the form of Hari in her mind and describing his goodness out loud to whoever was passing. The temple kept a courtesan at its door singing its god's praises, and let her stay.

Some two dozen of her abhaṅgas, in the unbroken verse form the Maharashtra saints sang in, survive, and the handful that follow are the closest thing to her own voice that this chapter has; where it can be heard it should be preferred to anybody's account of her.

The first is about ruin. It is bad pursuit to follow the path of sensual pleasure, she says, and then she reads out the record: Indra's body perforated, Bhasmāsura burnt to ashes, the moon carrying her spots, Rāvaṇa losing his life. That is not a moralist's list assembled at a distance. It is what the trade she was raised for had taught her to see coming, set down by someone who had watched men arrive at her mother's house.

The second claims nothing at all. I am verily an outcast, she says. I do not know the rules of conduct. I only know how to approach thee in submission. There is no defence in it and no plea of special circumstances. She does not argue that she is better than her reputation. She has no standing, says so, and comes anyway, and the coming is the whole of what she has.

The fourth is about the first sight of him. When she saw the image of Viṭṭhal, she says, it was as though whatever merit she had came to its completion. Happy am I that I have seen thy feet. The fifth is the one that places her. The god of death himself would be terrified if the Name were spoken, she says, and the Name has lifted up Ajāmeḷa, and Vālmīki, and even a courtesan; and she wears the garland of God's names. She is not talking about some other woman when she says that. She is putting herself into the standing list of the rescued, in her own verse, using the word her town used about her, and she is not asking permission.

An evil man, Mahīpati says, with no name given and no motive given, went to Bidar and told the king that at the main door of the temple at Paṇḍharpūr there was a beautiful courtesan and that no woman in the world was her equal. That is the entire mechanism. One man talking in a court a long way off.

Mahīpati stops the story to be angry about it, and the anger comes out as four comparisons in a row. A fisherman kills fish that have done him no wrong. A hunter kills wild animals that have done no wrong. A tiger looks at a man and wants to eat him. Bedbugs bite people who are asleep and entirely blameless. That, he says, is how the wicked behave towards the good, always, without provocation. Kānhopātrā had wronged nobody. The king heard, and sent his officers to Paṇḍharpūr.

She was inside the temple singing when they came in. Come to Bidar at once, they said. If you refuse we will take you there by force.

Let me make my namaskār to the god, she said, and I will start with you at once. That sentence is the whole episode. She does not fight them, does not run, does not beg. She asks for the length of time it takes to bow, and they grant it, and they go out and stand in the assembly hall to wait for a woman they have every intention of carrying off.

Inside, with her palms together, she made the argument she had. Giver of blessing to Puṇḍalīk, Pāṇḍuraṅg, she said, using the other name of the same god; I have called myself yours. If you abandon me now, who will be blamed for it? If I say I belong to you and the king carries me off to Bidar, who will be blamed for it? Then the precedents, one after another, every one of them ending in the same question. You heard Gajendra the elephant calling and went straight to him. You got a pigeon out of its distress. A doe caught in a snare remembered you and you came. Ambarīṣa was persecuted and you took the pain of birth for him. You accepted Ajāmeḷa, and you accepted Cokhā the Mahār. A young toad was put in a frying pan and remembered you and you came to it. Now if I am taken to Bidar, on whom does the blame fall?

The last line is not a plea. My heart has been joined to your own form, she said; if those men lay hands on me, every saint and every good person will laugh at you. She is not asking him to be kind. She is telling him what it will cost him.

One of her surviving abhaṅgas is thought to have been composed at exactly this moment, when the king of Bidar sent for her. She says: thou callest thyself the reliever of the fallen, why dost thou not lift me up? I have once called myself thine. If I am now obliged to call myself another's, on whom would the blame rest? If a jackal were to take away the food of a lion, who would be blamed? The jackal and the lion are her figure, and nothing in it is meek. The king of Bidar is the jackal. The shame of the theft, she is saying, belongs to the lion who let it happen.

Mahīpati tells it as the god's act. As she pleaded, Nārāyaṇ melted with compassion; he took her soul out of her body and united it with his own essential form; saints and priests standing nearby watched it happen; he hid her in his lap, and she died there, on his lap. The evidence of it is still there, the Bhaktavijaya says, for anyone who comes to Paṇḍharpūr and looks with reverence.

The other account tells it as hers, and the difference is not small. She implored God to save her, it says, and when the messengers insisted on taking her to the king of Bidar, she decided to give up the ghost rather than go. Then the dead body was laid at the feet of God. In the one account she is taken up; in the other she goes. The two accounts are not reconciled here, because the sources do not reconcile them, and both are worth having: the second is a death chosen in the same voice that chose everything else in this life, and the first is a god who would not let her be handed over. Either way she is dead on the temple floor with the king's men in the hall outside, and neither source pretends that is anything other than what it is.

The body was carried out and buried by the southern door of the temple, and Mahīpati says a taraḷi tree sprang up at that spot at once. A visitor who knew these places put it without ornament: a strange tree has sprung up where she was buried, the tree still remains, and it is worshipped by all the pilgrims.

Later in the chapter the Brahmans of the temple explain the tree to the king by telling him that Paṇḍharpūr is a very ancient place, and that all the gods became trees and stayed here. They offer it as a local fact rather than an argument. Mahīpati ends the chapter by saying the tree is still standing at the southern door and that pious people coming to Paṇḍharpūr see it.

The messengers were still in the assembly hall. They asked the priests what had become of Kānhopātrā. Her soul has been absorbed into the form of Hari, the priests said. Bring out the corpse and show it to us, the messengers said. Her body has turned into a tree, said the priests.

They did not believe a syllable of it, and their disbelief is the most human thing in the chapter. You wanted her for yourselves, they said. You dug a hole in front of the temple door and got her out through a tunnel, and now you stand here telling us she is a tree. You are lying. They arrested the priests on the spot and took them to Bidar and told the king the whole story.

Frightened men in a foreign court do what they can. The priests set before the king a coconut and black powder as prasād, the offering that comes back from the god to be shared out; and a hair appeared in it as he took it, and the king wanted to know what that meant. They had nothing prepared, and what they came up with was the boldest answer available. The hair belongs to the god, they said: to the dweller in Vaikuṇṭh who stands on the brick on the bank of the Bhīmā, who is Kānhopātrā's advocate. Come to Paṇḍharpūr and see whether the god has hair on his head, and if he has not, punish us then. They put it in writing. He asked them how a woman could be absorbed into God, and they told him she went into him the way salt goes into sea water.

So the king set out to see for himself, and on the road ahead of him the priests understood what they had signed. If he finds no hair on the image he will kill us, they said to each other. Whether the dweller in the world spares us the shame or takes no notice of us, we do not know. Then they prayed as they walked, in the only form they had, which was the list: you rushed to the Pāṇḍavas when the lacquered house was burning, you turned Draupadī into the four-armed one when she was serving food to wicked men, you swallowed a forest fire to save the cows and the cowherds, you held up Govardhan on the tip of one nail. Knowing what you can do, we told a king in writing that the curly hair was yours.

He came to the great door and found the Brahmans lying flat near the eagle platform, still pleading. Then he went in, into the god's bedchamber, and looked. Mahīpati sets down what he saw as an inventory: the brilliant crown, the curling hair, the long lotus eyes, the earrings shaped like crocodiles, the Kaustubha jewel at the neck, the ornament on the breast, both hands resting on the hips, the yellow cloth at the waist, the Vaijayantī garland. The thing the yogis sit and contemplate was standing in front of a king who had come to check a story about a hair, and the hair was there.

He turned round and told the Brahmans he had seen the image exactly as they had said he would. Then he prostrated himself, and put his arms round the image, and said the sentence Mahīpati wants on the record: Kānhopātrā's fortune is supreme, she has been united with the form of Hari, and I am the unfortunate one, ignorant, and it was I who persecuted her. After that he asked about the tree, and they walked him round to the southern door and showed him. He does not appear again.

The modern dating puts her at about 1468, and Senā Nhāvī the barber at about 1448. Set against that, Sāvatā Māḷī died in 1295, Narahari Sonār in 1313, and Cokhāmeḷā in 1338 under the wall he was working on at Maṅgaḷveḍhe, in her own town. A century and a half stands between her and the saints she is always named beside. Yet the same book files her in a chapter called the biographical introduction to Nāmdev and his contemporary saints, and Mahīpati's Bhaktavijaya gathers the whole company into one book, and the pilgrims in her own chapter hold Cokhāmeḷā up to her on the road as a case already decided rather than as a man she might go and meet. The gap is in the sources. Neither source closes it, and it is not closed here.

One smaller thing sits oddly, and may be nothing at all. In that book's pages the king who sends for Kānhopātrā and the king whom Senā Nhāvī served, and kept waiting one day because he was at his meditation, are the same king of Bidar (see Senā Nhāvī, The barber who came instead). Two of these lives turn on the same throne, a generation apart, and in one of them the god goes to the palace and in the other the woman will not.

Three women are named when the great mystics of Maharashtra are counted: Muktābāī, Janābāī, and Kānhopātrā. Two centuries after her, Tukārām made a longer list, of those the pride of caste could not keep out, and she is fifth on it, between the barber and the outcaste (see Senā Nhāvī, Saints great of heart). She is in that list under the word her town used about her, which is the word she had already chosen for herself in her own verse, and she is in it on exactly the terms she set at the beginning, in her mother's house, when she said that she would have nobody less.