Sant Janabai

Paṇḍharpūr fills up in Kārtik. The pilgrims come in for the month, the town takes them, and the crowd is thickest at the great door of the temple. The Bhaktavijaya says that one day in that month a small girl came out of the pilgrims and sat down at the door and would not get up. She told her mother and her father that she meant to stay there always and that she was not going home with them. The people standing about were astonished that a child of seven should say such a thing. Her parents were troubled by it. They could not move her. In the end they left their daughter sitting at the door and went home.

Nāmdev found her there afterwards, sitting alone. He asked her who she was, by herself in a town that was not hers and with none of her own people by her. He asked what town her father belonged to, and what trouble her people had been in that they should leave her in such a place. She said her name was Jani, that the god was her mother and her father, and that she had nobody else. He took her hand and walked her back to his own house. Later, as she grew, men and women would ask her to tell them truly who she was. She said she was Nāmā's servant and had no mother or father but him. That is also how she signs her own abhaṅgas in the old gāthā, where they stand inside his: Nāmā's maidservant Jani.

A second account tells it without the crowd and without the door. In that one she was handed over to Dāmāśeṭī, Nāmdev's father, by her own father, while she was still a girl, and she spent her life doing the rough work of that house and singing.

A third account is shorter than either. It calls her a Śūdra woman who became a domestic servant of the household because she admired Nāmdev's devotion, and who gave the rest of her years to that household and to Viṭṭhal. In that telling nobody leaves her anywhere. She walks in.

Three accounts, and no way of choosing between them. What none of them disagrees about is the shape of the thing. She was a child. She was poor. She was left without her own people, whether by their act or by hers. And she spent the rest of her life working in another family's house. Not one of the three makes her a daughter of it.

The house was a tailor's house at Paṇḍharpūr and it was not a rich one. Goṇāī was in it and Rājāī was in it, and four sons, Govind, Viṭṭhal, Nārāyaṇ and Mahādev. Jani had a hut of her own on the ground and a handmill in it, and a bed. There was often not enough flour. Goṇāī says so herself later in the Bhaktavijaya, standing in the door of that hut with a cane in her hand: the household is in a weak way and there is not enough flour in the house. Jani was the servant in a poor house.

The work was the whole of the day and it started before the day did. Grinding at the handmill. Sweeping the floors of the house and the yard. Cow dung gathered and patted into cakes and set out in the field to dry. Water carried up from the river. Clothes taken down to the same water, beaten, wrung and carried back. The shortest account says only that she spent her life at the rough work of that house, which is accurate. Another lists the same jobs: grinding the corn, drawing the water, washing the clothes. When the Bhaktavijaya wants Jani in a scene and has to say where she is, she is away in the fields patting out cow dung, and has to wash her hands before she can come.

One prahar of the night was left, which is the last three hours of it. The Bhaktavijaya says Viṭṭhal came and sat down on her bed and told her to get up, that it was getting late, that she had her grinding to do, and that he had dusted the mill already and was waiting for her. He got a hand under her neck and raised her up. He drew the end of her garment over her head and plaited her hair. He sat her down at the mill and set the basket of grain beside her, and told her that he would turn it, and that she should keep her hand on the handle as though she were grinding, and sing. She woke up properly while he was still saying it, and began to sing.

Here is the same work in her own words. She says she grinds with dispassion for the mill and faith for the handle, and that what she puts in for grist is a handful of deeds done in earlier lives. Everything with an outward shape goes to dust in that mill, and it goes to dust where anybody can stand and watch it happen. Then she says the grinding is not hers. It is the Lord who does it for her.

Then the last line of that abhaṅga, which is the whole of her. It is a strange thing, she says, that a god should come and take a seat beside his own servant. She has had nothing to do with it.

Another of hers goes through the day a different way. She eats God and drinks God. She sleeps on God. What she gives is God and what she takes is God. God is on this side and God is on that, and no place anywhere is empty of him, within or without. Two things have been noticed about this one, and both are a translator's readings of her Marathi rather than her own statements: that she ends by saying she fills the world to the brim, and that the name she uses for Viṭṭhal in it is a feminine form of his name.

A reader coming to these from outside asked whether they describe a companionship at all, or whether what they really state is advaita, an identity with Brahman arrived at by way of the housework, and said of one of them that it “betrays itself in its conclusion as no more than a metaphysical affirmation”. The question is his and it is a hundred years old. Her lines are hers and they are seven hundred. Both stand in the record.

What she says about keeping your attention on something while your hands are busy is made of the same materials as her day. A bird goes out roaming the sky and still thinks of its young. A mother is at her housework and keeps thinking of her child. A she-monkey goes from tree to tree and the young one stays clasped to her the whole way. Think of Viṭṭhal like that, she says. And the rule she set herself, in three pieces: more forgiving than the earth, milder than butter, lighter than a flower.

The account of who was at her grindstone is her own, and she gives it as a list of the others Viṭṭhal had done it for. He danced in the mud with Gorā the potter. He sat and talked with Kabīr while Kabīr worked at his loom. He drove the cattle out for Cokhāmeḷā, who was not let near the temple. And then, she says, he came and ground grain along with her, and the gods were pleased to watch him do it.

She says he swept with her too. She would clear the floor of Nāmdev's house and he would gather the refuse into a basket, lift the basket onto his head, carry it out and throw it well away from the door. He was so far gone, she says, that he would do even mean work for her, and at the end of it she asks him how she is ever going to pay him back. In another she goes through the rest of a day. He put his own greatness down and did the grinding and the pounding. He took a woman's form and did her washing. He went out to the waste ground for cow dung and came back carrying the water. In a third she tells him that night and day he has been there beside her at the grinding and the pounding, and asks him to forgive her for it, and falls at his feet, and signs it his servant.

Two of her abhaṅgas are about somebody in the house noticing. In one she is asked the question outright. You are singing on your own, and a second voice comes up beside yours: who is it that keeps you company and sings with you without stopping? She answers that Pāṇḍuraṅg is her father and Rakhumāī has become her mother, and that she has come into a house like that and is a fortunate woman. In the other she says the grinding was only the pretext, that she was singing alone and a second voice answered her, and that it was Nāmdev who worked out what it meant.

The Bhaktavijaya has him at the mill on one of those nights, turning the stone himself and telling her to keep her hand on the handle and sing, and it gives what she sang. Nivṛtti, Sopān and Jñāndev were her own relatives, and it was by their favour that God was good to her. Nāmdev was her father, Rājāī her mother, Gorā the potter her dearest uncle, and Kabīr and Sāvatā her brothers. Then she sang what they had done. The buffalo at Paiṭhaṇ that opened its mouth and recited the Veda. Gorā treading his own child into the clay without knowing he was doing it, and cutting his hands off for the vow he had broken, and the child coming creeping back in while Nāmdev was singing. Viṭṭhal hidden inside Sāvatā and Nāmdev drawing him out again. Kabīr away in Benares with God sitting beside him doing his weaving. Viṭṭhal turned the mill and listened to all of it and moved his head to it.

Goṇāī heard her singing and came out to the hut to ask who was helping her grind. A hired woman, she wanted to know, or a neighbour. Jani said nothing at all. Goṇāī went back for a cane, came into the hut with it and asked again. The house was doing badly, she said, and there was not enough flour in it, and now she knew why. Jani was keeping a woman there and paying her out of the grain, stealing it from them handful by handful. Then she hit her. The blow landed on God's head, because he was the one at the mill. He said his name was Viṭhāī and that he came early in the morning to help Jani with the grinding.

Nāmdev heard what had happened and understood it, and told his mother that the person she had struck was God. Goṇāī was ashamed and said so, and went back to her house. Underneath the story the household facts do not move. The mistress of the house accused a servant girl of stealing grain, and took a cane to her for it, and the girl stood there and did not defend herself. What the story does with that is not to cancel it. It puts somebody else under the blow.

Viṭṭhal had fallen asleep in her hut with some of the night still to go. She woke him when the east began to show and told him to get up and go. His worshippers would be coming to the temple and would not find him there, and if the early songs and the waving of the lamp did not happen there would be an outcry in the town. He got up in a hurry. He went out in her blanket and left his own costly woollen garment where it lay, and he forgot the cluster of nine jewels strung on his pearl necklace as well.

The door of the temple was opened and the worshippers came in with the things for the worship, and he was standing on the brick in a servant's blanket. Everybody who saw it was astonished. One of them asked whose blanket it could be and said they had no idea at all. Another said he was a great mimic and was proud of his devotees. Another spoke to him directly and told him the blanket did not suit him. Then the priest went up to the image and lifted the blanket off, and the cluster of jewels and the pearl necklace were gone from his breast.

The talk turned at once, and it turned against her. Nāmā's maid was a clever girl. She must have deceived him and confused his mind. Somebody said to go and tell Nāmā, who would restrain his servant girl. Then came the jokes, and the Bhaktavijaya gives a good many of them. It was as though a person offered God milk and carried home butter. As though he handed crystal to the jeweller and took away diamonds. As though he gave the god a black garment and went off with his yellow robe. She had offered him her black blanket, they said, and taken the nine jewels on the pearl string for herself.

The priests could not account for it. Every door had been locked and they did not understand how he had got out. Somebody said to go to Nāmdev's house and put it to the girl. They went, and they told her that the god had taken to being with her. They did not understand how she had turned him. He took no pleasure in their worship or their offerings any more, and their own good deeds were lost. She had taken his jewels and his necklace and given him her blanket in their place. Bring it back this minute, they said, or we will punish you. She swore an oath. If she had taken the jewels, she said, her eyes might burst.

Then they searched her, and the pearls were in her clothes. She has an abhaṅga of her own about this day and it tells it differently. In hers the brahmins say that Jani has taken the god's pendant, and she says she has not and swears it by Viṭṭhal, and then she shakes the blanket out herself in front of them to show them there is nothing in it, and the pendant falls out of it at her feet. Ten or twenty men came at her together. They put ropes on her arms.

The brahmins said she must be put on an iron stake. She had stolen the ornament of God, they said, and all of them agreed that she must be punished for it. They took hold of her and brought her down to the bank of the Candrabhāgā. The stake was already fixed in the ground. Her own abhaṅga has it planted there at the river and the party coming up to fetch her to it, and has her calling out to Viṭṭhal to run, and asking him where he had got to now that it was her turn. A servant woman was being taken down to the water to be put on a stake, on the word of the temple brahmins, over a piece of jewellery that was in her clothes because the god had left it there.

At the water she called on him. She said she was helpless and low and without a protector, and asked who there was who would come to her. The Bhaktavijaya says the iron rod had been fastened well into the ground, and that it turned into water. Her own abhaṅga says it in four words: that stake became water. The priests were puzzled and said that her bhakti was blessed and that he had come the moment she remembered him, and the devotees who had gathered clapped their hands and shouted. She went back up from the river to the same house and the same grinding. The Bhaktavijaya has him, not long after, taking paper and pen and ink and writing out the verses she was making up in her head as she sat in her hut, catching them from where he stood in his temple. It is the same hand that turned the stone for her.

She was not only sweet, and it is as well to have that first. She grew angry with Viṭṭhal often, and once she stood in the courtyard of the house and abused him. Viṭhyā, Viṭhyā, she called him: the spoilt child of primeval Māyā. His wife had become a courtesan. His body was dead. She stood there and abused him right and left, and says so herself. In another she says what she would do with him if she had him. She would pen him inside the prison of her heart, chain him with the Name, and beat him with the lash of identity until he cried and asked to be let out for life.

She did not describe bhakti as anything comfortable. It is a pit of cinders. It is a deep place in a river that cannot be got near. It is a mouthful of poison, and it is the edge of a sword. To be a real bhakta, she says, is as hard as any of those.

On the guru she is practical. Hand him everything, she says, the wealth and the body and the mind, and take God's form from him in exchange. It will not come to sight without his grace. It is already inside us and we do not know that it is. We wave a rosary and count off numbers of prayers, and the one who makes us wave it and puts the prayers in us we do not know, though he is inside. He alone is the guru, she says, who can show a person the Self directly.

What she saw she gives in order. First a red ring. Above it a white one. Beyond that a dark blue one, and then a full blue one. There was a sound with nothing striking it, and it struck her. She says she cannot describe the light. The form of God came on her like a flood and she shut her eyes without meaning to. Her weariness went, and her sin and her torment came to an end. Where the Name is, she says, nothing can go wrong.

One abhaṅga of hers is worth having for its strangeness. She says a great wonder happened in her guru's company. Camphor was burnt and left no soot. Sugar was sown and sugar cane came up out of it. The ear turned into an eye. They married an old woman to a husband who was still a child. That is what she saw with her own eyes, she says, and she could not explain it.

Her own account of how she came by any of it is short. It was Nāmdev's company that got her God. People who arrive at a wedding with the bridegroom eat well, and that, she says, is what happened to her.

The modern reckoning puts her next after Muktābāī among the women saints of Maharashtra and calls her the greatest of the women in Nāmdev's circle. She is also a witness. Some of her abhaṅgas are what let anybody argue about Nāmdev's dates at all, so the generation she worked for is partly on record because she wrote it down. She is the one who tells how Nāmdev once saved Paṇḍharpūr from a great flood. How she died, and when, these sources do not say. The same survey that dates the deaths of half the men in that circle gives her none. Not one of them follows her out of the house.

She signs herself Nāmā's maidservant Jani. Not his pupil, not one of the family, and not a poet of Paṇḍharpūr. She was still putting those words at the foot of her verses after the god had ground her grain and carried out her sweepings, after her mistress's cane, and after the riverbank. The work is how she named herself and she never stopped doing it.