Narahari Sonar

He lived a few streets from the most famous doorway in Maharashtra and spent most of his life not going through it.

The whole of his biography outside Mahīpati is one line: he lived at Devagiri first, and came down to Paṇḍharpūr later. It does not say when, and it does not say why. Devagiri in those years was the Yādava capital, and its king Rāmadevarāo was himself a worshipper of the god of Paṇḍharpūr: an inscription in the temple records that he came there in 1276 and that he stood at the head of the religious community of the place. So the man who moved south from Devagiri to the town on the Bhīmarathī was not moving from one world into a stranger one. He was moving closer to a shrine his own king had endowed, and he arrived with no intention of entering it.

A goldsmith in a pilgrim town is a man everyone eventually needs. Ornaments are brought to be mended, vows are paid in worked metal, and the temple itself is a standing customer for settings and plate. Narahari was good at it. When a stranger came into Paṇḍharpūr later on and asked a temple priest where to find a goldsmith who could cut settings into a waistband and hold diamonds in them, the priest gave him one name without hesitating. That is how the Bhaktavijaya introduces his trade: not as a humble occupation to be apologised for, but as the reason the story could begin at all.

His god was Śiva. The record puts it plainly. He was a great devotee of Śiva and could not appreciate Viṭṭhal-bhakti, the devotion to the god of Paṇḍharpūr who is also called Viṭhobā and Pāṇḍuraṅg, and whose wife is Rukmiṇī. That is the whole difficulty of the man in one sentence. He was not a sceptic, not lax, not a bad devotee who needed to be made into a good one. He was already spending his mornings the way a devout man spends them. It was simply that the god of the town was not his god, and he had decided that this should make no difference to him whatsoever.

Mahīpati gives his day in two lines. He got up early, went down to the Bhīmarathī and bathed, and then worshipped Mallikārjun, the form of Śiva he had given himself to. Body, speech and mind, Mahīpati says, all three went the same way. There is no sign in any source of a struggle in him about this, no dry season, no doubt. Among the artisan saints of these chapters he is the one whose devotional life was in good order from the start, and whose only fault was where he had drawn its edge.

Because the edge was drawn hard. He never went to the temple of Viṭhobā, though he lived in the holy city and passed its walls on the way to everything. He would not look at the spire from a distance. Mahīpati says he would not so much as raise his eyes to the dome, and compares the avoidance to the way men and women will not look at the moon on the day of the Gaṇapati festival, when looking is held to bring trouble on the one who looks. It was not carelessness. It was a discipline, kept daily, at some cost in inconvenience, in a town laid out around the thing he was refusing.

Mahīpati does not treat this as bigotry. Every image he reaches for is an image of faithfulness. The cātak bird, he says, will not drink water off the ground and waits with its beak open for the cloud. The lotus sees whole fields of stars overhead and stays shut, and opens only when the sun comes up. An infant has no use for any other beautiful woman than its mother. A wife has no other deity than her husband. These are not the comparisons a poet chooses for a man he means to expose. Mahīpati is telling his listeners at the outset that what they are about to watch being broken is not a vice.

And the town was full of the alternative. In these same years Paṇḍharpūr held Nāmdev, and Jñāndev and his brothers and sister when they came, and Visobā Kheçar, and Bankā, and Sāvatā the gardener out at his plot, and Gorā the potter, and Cokhāmeḷā. Narahari's refusal has a particular weight when it is set beside that last name. He was a goldsmith with the run of the town, who could have walked through the great door any morning of his life and chose not to, while Cokhāmeḷā, who wanted nothing else in the world, was kept outside the wall by his caste and had to do his worship from the road. (see Cokhāmeḷā, The man at the great door)

A merchant came to Paṇḍharpūr and made a vow of the ordinary kind. If he were given a son, and a son of good character, he would give the god a waistband. The Bhaktavijaya says the vow was accepted, which is its way of saying that the son was born. The man came back to pay what he owed. He bathed and worshipped, and then asked the priest the practical question that follows every such vow: who here can do the work? A girdle of gold with cut settings and diamonds in them is not a thing you commission from anybody. The priest sent him to Narahari.

The merchant brought his gold and his stones and laid them out, and Narahari agreed to the job with one condition attached. Measure the body yourself, he said, and bring me the measurement. And if the thing turns out too big or too small, do not come back blaming me. The merchant was taken aback. Mahīpati lets us hear him thinking it over: the god is standing a few hundred paces from this man's bench, and he will not go and look. Then he let it go. It was not his business how a craftsman kept his vows. He took the measurement himself and brought it back.

The work was very good. Narahari set the diamonds and the other stones into their places, finished the band, and handed it over. The merchant carried it to the temple, bathed the image, worshipped with the sixteen articles, and then lifted the waistband and brought it round. It would not meet. It was short by enough that there was no arguing with it.

He took it back. Narahari lengthened it, neatly, without complaint. The merchant carried it in again and this time it hung loose. He brought it back once more and it was let out further and was longer still, and when it was made to the exact measurement that the merchant had taken with his own hands it was short again. That was the third failure, and the merchant stopped thinking about goldsmithing and started thinking about the god. Why has the husband of Rukmiṇī turned against me, he says in the Bhaktavijaya. He does not regard what I meant by it. He will not take the thing from me.

So he went back to the shop and asked, patiently, for the only thing he had not yet asked for. Come to the temple yourself. Look at him. Put it round him with your own hands, and then you can go home. Narahari gave him the answer he had given everyone for years. I am under a vow. I have never been into that temple. I have never in my life looked at any god but Śiva.

What he did next was a craftsman's solution, and it kept both halves of the problem intact. He took a length of cloth and tied it over his eyes, and let himself be taken to the temple. The vow said he would not look. It had not said anything about his hands. He went up the street he had avoided for years, blindfolded, in the middle of the day, and Paṇḍharpūr came out to watch him do it.

They were not kind about it. Mahīpati reports the remarks. Here is a poor man, somebody said, who finds treasure buried in his own ground and shuts his eyes over it. He is like a man who leaves the wish-granting stone at home, said another, and then tramps round every bathing place in the country looking for one. A third said it was the appetite of a man in fever, who will not eat good food when it is put in front of him. And one voice in the crowd said what people always say, that every man knows his own case best, and what was it to them.

At the great door the merchant took his hand and led him in. The talk followed them inside. He will not look at the god, somebody said, so how is he going to worship his feet? A man who will not give a visitor a seat is not going to cook him a meal. A man who will not water the tulsi is hardly going to walk round it. A man who will not tell a traveller the road will not be putting him up for the night. So if Narahari will not look, he will not bow either, and this is all for nothing. Narahari, who could hear every word of it, went forward with both hands out and felt for the god.

His hands found ten arms. They found five faces, one after another. At the neck there was a serpent worn as an ornament; on the head, a heavy mass of matted hair; over the whole body, the grain of smeared ash. Then an elephant's hide, and a tiger's skin. He was standing in the Viṭṭhal temple with his fingers on the body of Śiva. He said to himself, in the words Mahīpati gives him, that this was the very god he worshipped, and what had he shut his eyes for.

He pulled the cloth off. On the brick stood the dark blue one, crowned, the Vaijayantī garland and the Kaustubha jewel at his neck, crocodile-shaped rings in his ears, the chest broad and the waist narrow, both hands set on his hips, the yellow cloth round him, the two feet level and parallel on the brick. Narahari stood looking at that. Then he tied the cloth back over his eyes, and his hands found the matted hair and the ash and the serpent again. Then he pulled it off, and it was the husband of Rukmiṇī standing there, exactly as before.

He bowed then, and the praise he made ran both ways at once, victory to the dweller in Kailās and victory to the lord of Vaikuṇṭh in the same breath. Not knowing how large you were, he said, I took the two names for two gods. And the Bhaktavijaya has the god answer him directly: I wanted you for my own, and this was the way I took to get you; now do not count Śiva and Kṛṣṇa as two. Narahari took hold of his feet. From that day, Mahīpati says, Pāṇḍuraṅg has worn the emblem of Śiva on his head.

The story does not go back for the waistband. Whether it fitted at the fourth attempt, whether the merchant paid off his vow and got his son's girdle onto the god, Mahīpati never says. He had finished with the object the moment it had done its work.

Mahīpati then stops the story to deal with an objection, and it is worth following him into the interruption. Somebody in the audience, he says, will want to point out that Narahari the goldsmith was named among the guests at the feast Nāmdev gave, several chapters earlier, before any of this happened. How was a Śaiva who would not enter the temple sitting down with the Vaiṣṇav saints?

The answer he gives is short. Śiva had brought him. Śiva came to the feast and brought his devotee along with him, the way a father takes his son when he goes out to dine. Mahīpati could have quietly dropped the earlier mention and nobody would have caught it. Instead he stood by both, which tells you that the people he was reciting to knew these lives well enough to check the order, and expected to be answered when they did.

The modern account, going over the same life six centuries later with the records in front of it, gives it in four sentences and tells the story differently. Narahari was of Devagiri first and then of Paṇḍharpūr. He was a great devotee of Śiva and could not appreciate Viṭṭhal-bhakti at first. It seems, that account says, that it was through the influence of Jñāndev and others that he came into the Bhāgavata line. He died in 1313, Śake 1235.

Then it adds, in one clause and without elaborating, that a story is also told of how he came to recognise the identity of Śiva and Viṣṇu, and moves on to the next saint. It knows the afternoon with the blindfold and declines to tell it. So the two accounts of the turning do not agree, and there is no point in pretending otherwise. In Mahīpati the change is done in an hour, by the god himself, with a pair of hands and a piece of cloth. In the other it is slow, and it is done by company: a Śaiva goldsmith living among Vaiṣṇav neighbours who were the best men of their generation, until one day he was on their side of the line. Both are in the sources. Neither is a version of the other.

Whatever brought him over, he had a teacher for it. In one of his abhaṅgas, the short Marathi devotional verses that these saints composed by the hundred, he says that his own waywardness was never mastered by anything until his guru took him in hand. An elephant is controlled by the goad. A tiger, however bad, can be penned in a cage. A serpent's poison can be drawn off by a mantra or by the right root. In that way, he says, Narahari was brought under control by Gahinīnāth.

That name is worth setting down plainly and then leaving alone. Gahinīnāth, the disciple of Gorakṣanāth, is the teacher who initiated Nivṛttināth at Brahmagiri near Nāsik, and Nivṛtti is the brother and guru of Jñāndev: the whole Jñāndev line comes down from him. The one book that states both facts does not remark on the coincidence and does not say whether this is one man or two men of a name. Narahari's own verse names the name and stops. If it is the same teacher, then that quiet sentence about the influence of Jñāndev and others has a rope running through it. Nothing in the sources lets that be said more strongly than this.

What follows is Narahari's own workshop, told in his own images.

The best thing that survives of him is not the temple story. It is a poem in which he takes his own trade, bench by bench, and finds it is already what he does with God. He begins by naming himself: a goldsmith, and the commodity he deals in is the name of God.

The body is the melting vessel, and the gold in it is the soul. That is the first move and everything else follows it. The crucible is not a comparison for something more important happening elsewhere; it is the thing itself, with a fire under it. Into the matrix, the mould that will take the poured metal, formed of the three guṇas that all made things are made of, he pours the juice of God. Anything a goldsmith does next, he does to that.

With the hammer in his hand he breaks anger and passion to pieces, which is what a hammer is for. With the shears of discrimination he cuts the gold leaf of the name of God, the way leaf is cut for an ornament, in thin sheet, to measure. With the balance of illumination he weighs the name of God, because nothing leaves a goldsmith's shop unweighed. Then he shoulders the sack of gold and carries it to the other side of the stream. Narahari, says the poem, gives himself night and day to the name.

Nothing in that has been renounced. The fire, the mould, the hammer, the shears, the scales, the load across the water: the whole shop walks into the poem and comes out on the far bank still a shop. It is the same answer that Sāvatā gave from his garden and Gorā from his wheel, and Narahari gives it with more equipment than either of them. It is also, read next to the story of the girdle, the same man. He was always someone who found things out with his hands.

He was also, on the evidence of a third abhaṅga, entirely done with the world. He says it is a picture drawn on a wall, and means that it has no depth to walk into. Then he gives the comparison that carries it: children build houses out of stones, and when they are finished with them they knock them down. People take up worldly life in just that spirit, he says, and then take leave of it. There is no bitterness in the image. It is a man watching children at the end of an afternoon.

Another of the abhaṅgas, again in summary only, is about hearing rather than making. The unstruck sound, he says, is forever sounding in his ears, and his mind has been taken captive by it. He tells whoever is listening to use it: to think on God by means of that sound, and to hold him in the heart. That will give a man real love of God, and it will show him the road, as it showed Narahari the road.

He does not argue for it and he does not explain what it is. It is simply a noise that has been going on in him and will not stop, and he treats it as directions.

After the turning, the Bhaktavijaya stops treating him as a separate case and simply keeps listing him. When the saints come to Paṇḍharpūr and prostrate themselves and shout, he is in the crowd with Nivṛtti and Jñāndev and Sopān and Visobā Kheçar. When Kṛṣṇa walks out to invite the brahmins, Narahari the goldsmith is in the procession, between Cokhāmeḷā and Bankā the woodcutter. When Nāmdev's wanderings are completed and everyone sits down in rows to the feast, he is seated with Gorā and Sāvatā. And in the chapter where God names the bhaktas who have worshipped him without a break, the goldsmith Narahari is in the list. The man who would not look at Viṭṭhal is by then part of the furniture of Viṭṭhal's household.

Two centuries later Ekanāth made a poem listing the work God had done with his own hands beside the saints (see the opening chapter). In the middle of that list is the line that fixed Narahari for good: melted gold with Narahari. Whatever else was remembered about him, what stuck was the furnace and somebody standing at it with him.

His death is given as 1313, Śake 1235, and nothing more is said about the end of him. Mahīpati gives him no death scene at all. Chapter twenty simply finishes with him and moves on to Nāmdev and the dog. The Devagiri he had come from was ransacked by Malik Kāfūr's horsemen in 1306 and confiscated outright by Delhi in 1318, and no source connects either event to him, so nothing will be made of it here. What is left of Narahari Sonār is a date, a trade, a small book of poems, and one afternoon in which he consented to measure with his own hands a body he had refused for years to see.