Muktabai

She was the last of four children born to Viṭṭhalpant and Rukmiṇībāī, and the only daughter. Her brothers were Nivṛttināth, Jñāndev and Sopāndev. Their father had been a householder, then a sannyāsī at Benares, then a householder again on his guru's instruction, and Āḷandī would not forgive him for it. The four grew up outside every ceremony the town had to offer, and then outside their parents' lives as well (see Jñāndev, Four children and a verdict).

Two traditions give her birth date and they do not agree. The usual one puts her in 1279, Śake 1201, at noon on the bright first of Āśvin. The tradition that comes through Janābāī puts her two years earlier, in 1277, Śake 1199, which is the year the usual tradition gives to Sopān. Both traditions are old and neither has been closed.

Mahīpati says that the primal power of the world came down in her, as Śiva came down in Nivṛtti, Viṣṇu in Jñāndev and Brahmadev in Sopān, and that all four were avatars in part rather than in whole. When Cāṅgdev's disciples came back from Āḷandī and reported on the household, they said Nivṛtti was seven, Jñāndev six, Sopān five, and Muktābāī four, and that what was remarkable about the girl was that she had power and no pride about it.

The four walked to Paiṭhaṇ to ask the brahmins there for a certificate that they were fit to be spoken to, and came away with it after a buffalo in the road recited the Veda (see Jñāndev, Paiṭhaṇ). On the road home they buried the animal in the Āḷandī forest. It was Muktābāī who said to Nivṛtti that they must go and look at the place where they had been born, and so the four of them came back into the town that had thrown them out.

The letter from Paiṭhaṇ was read out and the brahmins of Āḷandī accepted it. One did not. His name was Visobā Cāṭī, and Mahīpati says he went about the town repeating that these were a sannyāsī's children and that a person should not so much as look them in the face, because looking at them would make you one of them. At Daśarā, with the festival of lights coming, Nivṛtti asked her to make pancakes. She went out to the potters' yard for an earthen pan to bake them on. Visobā was in the street. She saw him and got behind something, and he came across and asked her where she was going in such a hurry. She was shaking when she answered. She told him she was going to buy a pan because Nivṛtti had told her to make the cakes today. He laughed, and then he hit her.

Then he went ahead of her to the potter and told him that if he sold her a pan he would call in the money he had lent him. The potter owed him and said nothing. When she reached the yard and asked for a pan, the potter told her the earthenware was not fired yet and she should come back later. She walked home and sat down and cried, and Jñāndev, coming back from his bath, heard her and asked what was wrong. She told him. Visobā had followed her and was standing outside the window to hear what they would say.

Jñāndev kindled the fire inside his body until his back went the colour of heated gold, and told his sister to bake the cakes on it. She rolled them out and baked them there, and the four of them ate. Visobā was at the window for the whole of it, and what he did afterwards earned him a new name and put him into the line that runs out of this house to Nāmdev (see Jñāndev, Āḷandī again).

The door of her brother's hut was closed against her and stayed closed, and she took him to be angry. That is the whole of the occasion as the one note on it records it, and it is all the occasion the poem needs. The abhaṅga she made at the door, a short unrhymed Marathi devotional song of the kind the Vārkarī saints composed in thousands, is known as the tāṭīce abhaṅga, the abhaṅgas of the door.

She did not plead and she did not apologise for him. She told him what a saint is. The poem survives in Marathi. A 1919 English rendering of it, in the rhyming couplets of that period and not in her measure, runs as follows. Its compound punctuation has been normalised to this book's, which alters no word of it:

Graciously thy heart incline:

Open to me, brother mine !

He's a saint who knoweth how

To the world's abuse to bow.

Great of soul indeed is he,

Wholly purged of vanity.

Surely he whose soul is great

Is to all compassionate.

Thou pervading Brahman art.

How should anger fill thy heart ?

Such a poised soul be thine.

Open to me, brother mine !

The argument has three steps and it takes eight lines. A saint is not a person the world treats well; a saint is a person who can take what the world says and bend to it. Greatness of soul is not a size, it is compassion, and it has nothing left over for vanity. And the last step is the one that closes the door's argument: you are yourself the Brahman that fills everything, so where in you is there room for anger. Then the poem ends where it began, on the request: open the door.

The scene is not in either of Mahīpati's two lives as they stand in the witnesses used here. Neither the Bhaktavijaya nor the Bhaktalīlāmṛta narrates it. What carries it is the poem, and a single editorial note about the occasion, and the fact that Marathi has kept the poem under a name that is simply the name of a door.

Cāṅgdev lived by the Tāpī and bathed in the Godāvarī at Puṇṭāmbā. Mahīpati says that when the hour of his death came at a hundred years old he moved his life to the crown of his head, let death pass, and brought it back down again, and then did it again, and that fourteen hundred years went by like that without his ageing. He had fourteen hundred disciples and he travelled with them through the air. He taught them, and he had never taken a teacher himself. He said he had looked through the whole world of men and found nobody fit to be his guru and nobody his equal.

The fourteen hundred years are reported and not explained. The figure is plainly impossible, and there are three ways of reading it: several different men of the same name, or one man who picked up different names in the different places he stopped in, or a name that ran in a family. Nilobā's abhaṅgas say there were fourteen names of Cāṅgdev, and fourteen names could become fourteen hundred years. Two of the names, Vāteśacāṅga and Cakrapāṇicāṅga, are inside the Cāṅgdev Pāsaṣṭī itself. Neither reading is settled here.

Word reached him that there was a boy at Āḷandī. He decided to write first and visit afterwards. He took up a pen and an inkpot and then could not begin. He could not address the boy as a junior, because he wanted teaching from him. He could not address him as a senior, because the boy was younger than he was. He sat with the pen for a while and then sent the sheet as it was. His disciples carried it to Āḷandī with instructions to find out everything about the household: what they worshipped, what they read, how they behaved in public, what they could do. He sent his respects to the three brothers and to Muktābāī by name.

In the Bhaktavijaya the page is opened by Jñāndev, and the verdict on it is his. He says that fourteen hundred years have gone by and the man is still blank. Then he runs it out: a nectar tree that grows green and never fruits, a lake dug and never filled, a woman grown and never a mother, a man who takes the robe without taking the indifference that goes with it, a house built high by a miser, a mouth that talks about mercy out of a heart that has none, a cloud that crosses the whole sky and lets nothing fall. Fourteen hundred years, and what has he done in them.

In the Bhaktalīlāmṛta the same judgement is in a different mouth. There Jñāndev turns the blank sheet over, sees there is nothing on either side, and asks Nivṛtti what it means. It is Nivṛtti who gives the account of the man and says that he is expert in powers and blank about Brahman, and that the letter matches its writer. Then Nivṛtti tells Jñāndev to write back something that will open the man's mind, and Jñāndev writes with his own hand the sixty-five verses that are called the Cāṅgdev Pāsaṣṭī, with a spoken message for the disciples to carry: that the point of keeping a body alive for fourteen hundred years will only be reached when their teacher has the reply in his own experience.

The line most often quoted in her name is the verdict on the blank page, and neither of Mahīpati's two lives gives it to her. The Bhaktavijaya gives it to Jñāndev and the Bhaktalīlāmṛta gives it to Nivṛtti. What the Bhaktalīlāmṛta does give her is the other half of the image and the harder half of the work. Under the banyan tree, when the man himself has arrived, the three brothers turn to their sister and say that his fourteen centuries are still blank like the page he sent, and that she is now to write the letters on it.

The reply reached the Tāpī and he could not read it. He got through the first verse, found that it would carry more meanings than he could hold at once, and stopped. The Bhaktalīlāmṛta has him say that the words are in Marathi, which he knows, and that he still cannot find what is inside them, and that the Vedānta books are easier. So he decided to go and ask in person, and to go in a way that would be noticed.

He came on a tiger with a live snake for a whip and fourteen hundred disciples behind him, each of them mounted the same way, and Jñāndev told the wall he was sitting on to go out and meet the guest (see Jñāndev, Āḷandī again). Muktābāī was on the wall when it went. He got down off the tiger a mile outside the town. His disciples got down after him and dropped the snakes, and the Bhaktalīlāmṛta says the snakes went into ant-hills and the tigers went back into the forest, since none of it had ever been anything but a display. The four of them came down off the wall and the whole company went and sat under a banyan tree that people still call the resting tree.

Under the tree the brothers praised him first, for the eightfold yoga and the six spheres pierced and the powers made to wait on him like servants, and he answered that his pride had gone at the sight of them and asked to be cut loose from the world. Then the three of them turned to their sister and told her to begin. Mahīpati says he will not paraphrase what she said, and quotes her verses as verses: know who this "I" is, and when you have that in experience, the sense of two things ends; then the mind will not need to hold the thought that it is God, because where there is no "I" there is no "you" either.

He answered that for fourteen hundred years this had been buried under his feet where he could not get at it, and that he had come riding a tiger with a snake in his hand to put on a display of religion, and that his mind had been the mind of a rich and evil man. He said it in front of his own disciples. By then it was noon and they took him home to eat. Jñāndev asked his sister to get the meal, and she went to the back of the house. Cāṅgdev came round there, saw her, and turned to go. In the Bhaktavijaya she is bathing. She called after him. In Mahīpati's Marathi the phrase is an insult and a diagnosis at once: the man has no teacher, and that is why he turned.

He came back at a run and took hold of her feet and asked how she had known. She told him she had known from the turning. If a guru's favour had been on him the thought would not have arisen. A wall has niches in it and a man walks past them without stopping; he would have walked through her body the same way. And then the line that ends it: cows go about among people and out in the forest, and do they put clothes on? She was no different from one of those. Why had that not come into his experience?

The Bhaktalīlāmṛta gives the same scene at more length and makes the argument a lesson in what a body is. He was still carrying his passions and still short of the knowledge of the soul, she told him, and that was why man and woman looked to him like two different substances. There is a soul in her and a soul in him. Ornaments have many shapes and are all one gold. A water jar and a grain jar are one clay. A woman's sari and a man's shawl come off the same thread. Then the same ending, with the animals counted out: a bitch, a cat, a cow, do any of them wear a garment, and she was no different. He said the teaching could not be resisted and took her feet.

He had not finished showing off. He tied grain in a cloth, set it on a hungry disciple's head with his own hand, and it popped there as though over a fire. Jñāndev said the man was still in love with his own powers. So they answered him in kind, and the answer went through her: she asked for a pan to bake on and was told to use her brother (see Sopāndev, The fire and the cakes). She rolled the cakes out and baked them on Sopān's back while the guest watched, and then she served the meal.

Afterwards he asked for the meaning of the letter. Jñāndev told him the price was one of his disciples, offered as a victim. He said he had fourteen hundred of them and would pick one in the morning. That night the fourteen hundred worked out that a teacher can always get more disciples but a man has only the one life, and they went. He woke up and called and nobody answered, and had to fetch his own drinking water. Nivṛtti said to Jñāndev that this was his doing, since he was the one who had asked for a man's life. And Muktābāī, Mahīpati says, laughed out loud.

With the fourteen hundred gone, the brothers turned to her again and she made him a second abhaṅga: find out who "he" is, look at yourself as you actually are, think day and night of your oneness with what is; knowledge is above the three qualities; wake up and keep in front of you what I have given you. He fell at her feet. Mahīpati says that everything he was proud of, the sixty-four arts and the fourteen sciences, went soft while she was speaking, and that he stayed a month at Āḷandī listening to Jñāndev's kīrtans, the night-long sung tellings of God's doings that hold this whole community together.

At the end of the month Jñāndev asked him whether he now had the letter, and he answered in verse. It is raining and will not stop and there is flood on flood; people are drowning out there and nobody looks up; they drown in this world and the next and they drown in a pool with no water in it; Jñāndev was the raft and Muktābāī was the ferry boat, and that is how Cāṅgdev got across.

Then she gave him his instructions. His body was fourteen hundred years old and at that rate he would never be finished with it. He was to leave it, take another birth, and spend the new one on Viṭṭhal: worship the image, sing Rāma and Kṛṣṇa, go to Paṇḍharpūr and meet the husband of Rukmiṇī. He took her feet and said her command was his authority, and he kept to it. Two chapters later Mahīpati still has him doing things because Mother Muktābāī told him to.

Whose disciple he became is not agreed. The Bhaktavijaya ends the meeting by having him go to Jñāndev, take the mantra from him, and become his disciple, with Jñāndev's hand on his head. Read out of the abhaṅgas instead of out of Mahīpati's narrative, it looks as though Cāṅgdev was initiated by Muktābāī, and the record of their meeting is what is pointed to for it. The Bhaktalīlāmṛta, which calls her his mother and his teacher in the same breath, leans the second way without saying so. Both claims stand.

Her own abhaṅgas survive under her own name and they are short. In the first she says she had been living blindfold and that Nivṛtti's grace woke her. In the second the same grace is the bank of a river: the thing she swam towards and the thing that let her reach it.

The fourth is the one people know. An ant went up into the sky and ate the sun. A barren woman gave birth. A scorpion went down into the world below and the great serpent lay down in front of it. A fly gave birth to a kite. Muktā, she says, looked at all this and laughed. It was put into English verse in 1919 under the heading The Land of Topsy-turvy, and that version opens:

An ant has leapt up to the sky

And swallowed up the sun on high !

A marvel this that I declare,

That barren wife a son should bear.

The fifth asks who has seen moonlight by day, or the heat of the sun at night. The sixth is the sandal tree standing in the middle of a forest, which makes every tree round it smell of sandal, and that is what one lover of God does to the people among whom he stands.

Four of them are addressed to Cāṅgdev, and they are candid. Turn back from the stream, she tells him in the seventh, do not try to swim across it. The water runs hard and it has thrown down better swimmers than you. Life does not last and you are not to spend it. Watch for the sign inside, because it is grace that gets a man over and not his stroke. In the ninth she tells him to speak words of silence. In the tenth she tells him to sleep the sleep in which the unstruck sound is heard and the breath holds the mind on a thread, a state on the far side of both sleeping and waking. In the twelfth the bridegroom comes out of the bride's womb, and as he comes out the bride is gone from in front of him, and after that there is no end to it.

She is also a witness about her own family. Of the two tombs at Āpegāv, the evidence that the older one is Trimbakpant's is a line of Muktābāī's saying that Trimbakpant had a samādhi there.

In 1296, in the dark half of Kārtik, on the thirteenth day, Jñāndev went into the stone chamber at Āḷandī in front of the temple of Siddheśvara and it was closed over him (see Jñāndev, The sañjīvan samādhi at Āḷandī).

Nāmdev was there and his own abhaṅgas are the closest account of that day. Rendering his Marathi freshly: Jñāndev made his obeisance, Nivṛtti and Sopān came quickly, Muktāī, which is the name the Marathi gives her, met him at once, and she took Jñāndev by the hand. In the next abhaṅga she is the one who speaks. Jñāndev, she says, commend me to Viṭhobā. Let his love stay on me, and Rukmiṇī's, and tell Puṇḍalīk, and give everyone my greeting, and look at me kindly.

Sopān went first, at Sāsvaḍ on the Karhā, in the same year. Then Muktābāī. Nivṛtti went last, at Tryambakeśvar. Her samādhi is at Edlābād, and the year given for her going is 1297, Śake 1219. She was about eighteen, or about twenty in the other tradition.

How she went is told two ways. The story says she was in the middle of a kīrtan when the lightning came and she went into it. That story is repeated everywhere, and beside it sits a flatter suggestion: that it grew out of an abhaṅga of her brother's. Both are given in the same breath and no choice is made between them, here or anywhere else.

The abhaṅga is Jñāndev's and its subject is his sister. Powder of pearls thrown up into the sky. A flash of lightning. The sky dressed in purple. A point of brilliant blue beginning to shine. A young serpent dancing. And then, in a thunderclap, the lightning going out into itself. Muktābāī met Goroba, who is Gorā Kumbhār the potter, and in that meeting, Jñāndev says, knowledge of the Self came to be known.

The people who had known her kept saying so afterwards. Cāṅgdev, who outlived all of them and died on the Godāvarī about ten years later, has an abhaṅga in which Jñāndev drinks his fill of the water of pearls, Nivṛtti catches the shade of the clouds in his hands, Sopān puts on a garland of fragrance, and Muktābāī eats cooked diamonds, and the secret of all four, he says, has come into his hands. An abhaṅga that goes under Cokhāmeḷā's name asks God for a daughter like Mīrābāī or like Muktābāī. Nāmdev, listing what the saints had and nobody has now, got to the end of his list and stopped there: God, he says, say what we like, your secret, Muktābāī, escapes us still. She had been dead six hundred years by the time a modern survey set her beside her brothers and called her perhaps the greatest of the women poets India has had. She was eighteen when she died, or twenty, depending on which tradition you take.