Sant Namdev

The sources do not agree about where Nāmdev came from, and the disagreement is worth having in front of you before anything else. Read out of an abhaṅga of his own, he was born in 1270 to a tailor called Dāmāśeṭī at Narasiṅgpūr, which devotees know as Narsī Bāmaṇī. A second account puts the birthplace at a village near Karhāḍ in the Sātārā district. The Bhaktavijaya, which is the story the tradition tells, says he was not born to anybody at all.

In the Bhaktavijaya, Nārāyaṇ calls Uddhav and Śuka to him and tells them he wants them born as men. They ask not to be born in the ordinary way. So he makes them infants, shuts them in shells and drops them out of the rainclouds. One falls into the Bhāgīrathī and says Rām, Rām, as it goes downstream. The other falls into the Bhīmā and says Viṭṭhal, Viṭṭhal.

Dāmāśeṭī the tailor, whom the Bhaktavijaya calls Dāmājī, lived at Paṇḍharpūr with his wife Goṇāī. They had no children, and were past the age of having any. Goṇāī told her husband to go and ask Viṭṭhal for a son. He told her she was being foolish, and gave her his reasons in a row: seed the insects have eaten will not come up, there is no sense wanting rain after the rains are over, the mango does not fruit in Śrāvaṇ, and when the oil and the wick are finished what follows is the dark. She answered that Rām had floated stones on the sea, and asked him what trouble God would have with two old people. He went to the temple, said his wife wanted a son, and fell asleep at the door.

He was told in the dream to go down to the Bhīmā at sunrise and take up what came floating. He bathed, did his prayers, saw the shell, and waded in for it. Inside was a baby that looked as though it had been born that minute. His first thought was that there was nobody to nurse it. He wrapped it in his own cloth and carried it home, and when Goṇāī took it her milk came, which neither of them could account for at her age. They called him Nāmā.

Both accounts agree on the trade and on the town. The family were tailors, which in the Maharashtra of that century placed them well down the order and outside the learning that mattered, and they lived at Paṇḍharpūr, where the shrine of Viṭṭhal stood on the bank of the Bhīmā where it bends and is called the Candrabhāgā. Nothing in this life happens far from that bend in the river.

The shrine was older than either Nāmdev or Jñāndev. The stones say so. There is an inscription of Viṭṭhal and Rakhumāī at Āḷandī from 1209, another in the Paṇḍharpūr temple itself from 1237, recording a king encamped at Pāṇḍarige on the Bhīmarathī where people remembered Puṇḍalīk, and a third from 1273 saying the temple was then being rebuilt, with money coming in for four years, and with Hemāḍpant and king Rāmdevrāo Jādhav among those who gave. The tailor's son was born into a town in the middle of building its god a bigger house.

One morning Dāmāśeṭī went to the market and sent the boy to the temple with the family's food offering. Goṇāī handed it to him and told him to show it to the god and come back. He did the whole thing properly. He washed the image, put the yellow cloth on it, offered sandal paste and flowers, lit the incense and the lamp, set the plate down, put his palms together and asked it to eat.

Nothing happened, and the boy began to argue. He said the god must be angry about the offering being late, and explained that this was his father's doing, since he had gone to the market early and sent him instead. He said that if it was not eaten his mother would be angry with him. He asked what he had done wrong. It had never occurred to him that a stone image was a thing that did not eat, and so he stood there and sobbed and told it to eat. The Bhaktavijaya says it ate, and then told him to tell nobody.

He told his mother anyway, when she asked who had taken the food. His father came back from the market the next day, heard it from her, and did not believe it. He said they would both go and the boy could show him. At the temple the god told Nāmdev privately that he would not appear while Dāmāśeṭī was standing there. Nāmdev said to his face that he was a cheat, promising to meet him and refusing to meet his father. The Bhaktavijaya says the god laughed, showed himself to Dāmāśeṭī, and ate.

Nobody in the sources explains how. What the story is careful about is the child's reasoning, which is all household reasoning: the offering is late and somebody will be blamed, and the person blamed will be him. He was not asking for a vision. He was asking to not get into trouble with his mother. Everything Nāmdev later became is already in the tone he took with the god that morning, which was the tone of a boy who expects an answer and does not take no for one.

The two accounts of Nāmdev's early life cannot both be true, and it matters which of them is his own. The Bhaktavijaya takes him from the eaten offering straight to his marriage, with nothing in between and no fault anywhere in him, a child who had come down out of a rain cloud and had never done anything wrong. An abhaṅga that Nāmdev wrote himself has him a marauder and a waylayer who killed eighty-four horsemen. The first account is the tradition's. The second comes from Nāmdev.

The abhaṅga that names his family is the one that tells it. His father Dāmāśeṭī was a tailor by caste and lived at Narasiṅgpūr. Nāmdev's own life began lawlessly. He was a marauder and a waylayer, and on one occasion he killed eighty-four horsemen. The abhaṅga does not say why, and nobody since has supplied a reason.

He was in the habit of going to a temple at Auṇḍhā. One account writes the place Amvadhya and another calls it the temple of Nāgnāth. He went there one day as he usually did, and there was a woman outside it with a child. The child had nothing to eat and was crying about it, and the woman was scolding it for crying. He asked her what the matter was. She told him her husband had been one of eighty-four horsemen killed by a waylayer, that she had been a widow since, and that the child had no father. Eighty-four men were dead. One of the widows was standing in front of him with the hungry child, and he had asked her himself how she came to be there.

He went inside the temple. He struck his own neck with a scythe in front of the image, and the blood ran out over it. The men who served the temple came and found him doing it. They asked him what he was doing, and they put him out.

He did not die of it. He went to Paṇḍharpūr and stayed there and settled on another kind of life. What turned him was the tears of a woman he had widowed. For a long time afterwards what he did was go to the temple and lie face down in front of the god, and it was some years of that before he came to know anything about God.

The same thing was found in the abhaṅgas independently, by a translator putting the Maratha saints into English in 1919. Several of them refer to it, and one of the several is said to have been made by Nāmdev's wife. What they describe is an early life of lawlessness brought to an end all at once by the tears of a woman he had made a widow, a man who meant to kill himself in the temple of Nāgnāth, and a man who went to Viṭṭhal instead and never afterwards went anywhere else. There is one line at the foot of that page: the Līḷā Caritra, a book of the Mahānubhāv sect that is very early and had been found not long before, says the same.

The house stood at Paṇḍharpūr. It is still shown to people, and there is an image of Keśīrāj inside it. Dāmāśeṭī and Goṇāī were old by this time. Nāmdev was married. His wife was Rājāī, and there were children in the house. When a son was born the Bhaktavijaya says the god came to the naming on the twelfth day and brought the gifts himself: he told Goṇāī to call the boy Nārāyaṇ, gave her a sari and jackets, gave the boy a little coat and a cap, and went home.

Janābāī was in the house as well. She was a servant in it, she had come to it as a child out of the crowd of pilgrims at Kārtik, and for the rest of her life she called herself Nāmā's maidservant and said she had no mother or father but him. She has a chapter of her own in this book and what she was belongs there rather than here.

The gāthā prints a family tree at the front of it, and it is the only place the whole household can be counted. Dāmāśeṭī and Goṇāī at the top. Nāmdev and Rājāī under them, and beside Nāmdev his sister Nāūbāī. Under those, four sons, Nārā, Mahādā, Gondā and Viṭhā, with their wives Lāḍāī, Goṇāī, Yesāī and Sākarāī, and a daughter, Nimbābāī. The generations after them run on down the page for four more rows, so the line did not end with him. The Bhaktavijaya, which had no sight of that table, names the same four boys at a meal: Govind, Viṭṭhal, Nārāyaṇ, and the fourth, Mahādev by name. They are the same four in their full forms, and the tree gives them as a household would have said them. Gondā is Govind, Viṭhā is Viṭṭhal, Nārā is Nārāyaṇ, Mahādā is Mahādev. Two sources that agree about nothing else in this chapter agree about the sons.

The same front matter tells why the count matters. It says the god went through the household and named them: you and your wife Rājāī, your father and your mother Goṇāī, your four sons and their four wives, your sister and your daughter, fourteen people; and besides these, in some small measure, your maidservant Jani. All of them together were to finish the hundred crore of verses. Giving them what they needed to do it, and writing the abhaṅgas down, he said, would fall to him. They began that day. Whatever is made of the arithmetic, the shape of it is worth noticing: the work was given to a house, not to a man, and the servant is named last and separately, and she is still named.

The hundred crore comes from a second place as well, and earlier in the life. In an abhaṅga of his own, Nāmdev says a brahmin called Baibaji cast his horoscope and read in it that he would compose a hundred crore of abhaṅgas. The gāthā's front matter has the same number given to the whole household as a command. The two accounts do not agree about who was told or when, and neither is set aside here.

Goṇāī put it to her son plainly. The two of them were old now. His thoughts were on the name and the form of the god night and day, she said, and he never spent a moment of either on himself. There were Vaiṣṇavas in plenty, she said, who carried on a household and a religious life at the same time, and his condition was not theirs. There were children in the house, and very little food, and few clothes. The ill-natured laughed at them. She asked him what she was supposed to do.

He took it to the temple, which was where he took everything. He went in, put himself flat on the ground, and asked the god why he had been put into a household at all and why he had been left in it. The god asked him what his home was like and told him not to be ashamed to say. Nāmdev answered in pairs. Your house is heaven and ours is a hut falling down. The eight siddhis are your servants and we have rats. You are dressed in your own robes and my children have nothing to put on. You lie on Śeṣa in the ocean of milk and we cannot get a mat of straw. Your plates are gold and we eat off leaves. You have gold and silver in your house, and what we have is your name.

Rājāī took it to her mother-in-law. Her clothes were torn and very old, she said, there was not enough to eat, and she had come into this house to be poor in it. The one she served was the one doing it to her, and she could not see any way the house was going to get better. The Bhaktavijaya says Viṭṭhal filled a bag with gold coins, told his eagle to take the shape of an ox, and went into the town as a merchant asking the way to Nāmdev's house. The people he asked laughed at the question. There was nothing to eat at that house, they told him, and they wondered aloud what sort of guest had turned up for it. Then they gave him the direction. The tuḷsī altar over there, with the small plants round it and the bright banners on it, that is the house.

Rājāī had already tried to get rid of him. She told him through the door that the master of the house was not at home and he had better go back, and she told the neighbours who had gathered that these guests would be the death of her: that sādhus came into the house with cymbals and lutes and danced there without a thought of who was watching or what caste anybody was, that her husband had told her to feed every saint who came, and that there was not a scrap of food in the place and he did not know it. Viṭṭhal was outside the door and heard the whole of it. He said his name was Keśav Śeṭ, that Nāmdev was a friend of his, and that he had heard there was no food in the house and had brought some gold. Rājāī came out then and went to find him a seat. He watched her do it. Before the money she had spoken to him one way and after it another, he said, and the lesson of that was that a man should never go anywhere empty-handed: not to a wedding, not to a king, not to his own daughter's house, not to a temple. He took the bag down off the ox, said to send for more when it was finished, and asked her to give Nāmdev his regards. She asked him to eat before he went. He said he would not eat without Nāmdev there, and went.

Rājāī carried a lapful of the coins to the market and told the grocer to send up what a household needs. The grocer could not account for it and decided that God must be helping them. Cloth and ornaments and melted butter and rice and sugar came to the house, and she started cooking. Nāmdev came home about noon, saw the new vessels and the new clothes, and asked where they had come from. Goṇāī said she did not know. Rājāī said nothing at all, having worked out that if she told him he would give it away. Jani told him. He heard the whole account of the merchant and the bag and the ox, and he wept. Then he called the brahmins of the town and gave them the money and the cloth and the ornaments, and went back to what he had been doing before.

There was a brahmin at Paṇḍharpūr called Parisā Bhāgavat. The Bhaktavijaya says he did austerities to Rukmiṇī, and that she came to him in a form he could see and asked what he wanted, and that when he had told her she put a touchstone into his hand and said never to let it out of his keeping: whatever iron he touched with it would be that much gold. He gave it to his wife Kamalajā, who fetched some pieces of iron and tried it. Then he told her to say nothing to anybody, because if the saints heard of it they would laugh at him. They kept the gold in the cellar, ate the best food in the house every day, and went about the town looking like people who wanted nothing. Mahīpati says the observant ones could tell. Kamalajā and Rājāī drew water from the Candrabhāgā at the same hour and were friends, and what Kamalajā thought of the tailor's household she said to Rājāī's face: a god who leaves a man with nothing to eat is not worth the worshipping, and you do not go on watering a tree that gives you no fruit.

Gorā Kumbhār was a potter, the eldest of the whole company, and they called him uncle. One day the saints were all sitting on mats in his house, and Jñāndev told him to sort the baked pots from the unbaked ones.

Gorā took up the paddle of his trade and went round the room rapping each of them on the head. Every one of them sat still under it until he came to Nāmdev, who shouted, and was told that this vessel was still raw. Then the room laughed. That scene is the potter's and is told in his chapter (see Gorā Kumbhār, Come and make my house clean). What follows is Nāmdev's.

He got up out of the assembly and walked out of the house and went to the temple at Paṇḍharpūr. He stood in front of the image with his throat closing and his eyes running and said he had been insulted and that his heart was full of anger. The god laughed as well, and embraced him, and asked who had done it. Nāmdev said a man tells other people the praise he is given and keeps the criticism to himself. Then he told it, the whole of it, down to the word Gorā had used about him and who had been laughing.

What the god said was that Gorā had been right about him. A man who has not gone to a teacher, he said, is called one who is not ripe. Nāmdev had come to have the hurt taken off him and had been handed the same verdict a second time by the one person he had counted on, and he said so: he had brought his complaint here because he thought his pain would be taken away, and now he had been dealt with exactly as they had dealt with him, and he knew of nowhere else to go. If the earth is in trouble, he asked, where are the trees to go. The god told him their two hearts were one thing and that he was not to call himself sad, and to go and put himself in a guru's hands and be done with thinking in twos. Until that afternoon there had been nothing whatever between Nāmdev and Viṭṭhal, no teacher, no initiation, nobody he had been handed down through, and it had never occurred to him that anything was missing.

Read plainly, that is the whole of it. He was sorry, and finding that in the entire assembly of saints he was the one unbaked pot, he went to look for a teacher. The word did not stay on him for good. In Gorā's own abhaṅgas the potter was satisfied with him once he had come to know what he had not known that day, and told him that from then on there was no distinction left between the two of them. But that came later, and a good deal happened in between.

Nāmdev went back to the temple and asked the god who to go to. Visobā Kheçar, the god said, was asleep at that moment in the temple of Śiva, and there was nobody in the three worlds with more knowledge than he had or less interest in what the world could give him; go there now. Nāmdev took hold of his feet and wept and said he could not be without him for a single moment, and that if any proof of that were wanted he would swear to it by his name. The answer he got was not about him. Protect public custom, the god said; if you will not go to a guru, how are ordinary men to be saved. Nāmdev got up at once and went, and the Bhaktavijaya says he went sad, and that the whole way there he could not bear being apart from the one he was walking away from.

He came into the temple of Mallikārjun and looked about him for the man. Visobā was asleep on the floor with his shoes still on his feet and both feet up on the liṅga. So the first thing Nāmdev ever saw of his teacher was a fault, the way a fly turns up in the first mouthful of a meal. He went over to him and said that a man who calls himself a saint should not be doing this, that those were his feet on the emblem of Śiva, and that he now knew what the man's knowledge of Brahman was worth.

Visobā did not argue with him. He said he had made a great mistake. He said his body was weak and he had no strength left to get himself up, and that a servant of Viṣṇu had come to him as a friend and told him what was right, and would he take the feet himself and put them down somewhere Śiva was not. Nāmdev came closer and lifted them. Wherever he set them down there was a liṅga under them. He turned them another way and there was one there. The bell took that form and the drum took it, and the men and women who had come in to see the god, and then Visobā's own feet in his hands, and then he looked down at himself and he had taken it too. He put his head on the feet he was holding.

Visobā said he was uncomfortable and asked him to put the feet back on the ground. Nāmdev said that while he had been holding them everything had gone over into the form of Śiva and there was nowhere he could look that was empty of him. Visobā then told him what Śiva was, and he told that part in Kannada: the five faces, the three bright eyes, the ten hands, a head that goes up past heaven and feet that reach the floor of the seventh hell, the six śāstras ashamed of themselves for not managing to say it and the four Vedas out of their wits from trying. Then he put his palms together and said that he was Jñāndev's servant and belonged to Jñāndev's feet. He stood up and put his hand on Nāmdev's head.

Visobā left abhaṅgas of his own, and in one of them he gives this himself, so what the reader has here is his account and not somebody else's report of him. Land and water, stones and trees, every creature from the ant upward to the highest being: all of it full of God, and the whole world is God. He says he spoke that into Nāmdev's ear and put his hand on his head and took the duality off him and brought him to be one with himself, and that his own light had come to him from Jñāndev. He was mad with joy, the account says, as he told it.

The rest of what he told Nāmdev is short and it is hard. If a man boasts that he has seen God, Visobā said, what he has is false knowledge. Nobody meets God at all until his own egoism has come to an end. The bliss a man is after is already with him and is not sitting in any object outside him, and discrimination and dispassion, if he has those two, are enough to open the road.

Which temple it was is not settled. One account has Visobā living either at Auṇḍhā Nāgnāth or at Barsi and puts the meeting at one of those two. The Bhaktavijaya puts it in the temple of Mallikārjun. The two are not reconciled and this book does not reconcile them.

Kheçar was not a name he chose. Muktābāī and Jñāndev called him that in contempt, because to begin with he would not believe in them; afterwards he came to know what they were and became their disciple, and the insult is the name he is remembered by. He went with Jñāndev and Nāmdev on the long pilgrimage, and he died at Barsi on Śrāvaṇa Śuddha Ekādaśī, 1309, thirteen years after Jñāndev and forty-one before the man he taught. Whose disciple Visobā was himself is disputed: the Bhaktavijaya makes him Jñāndev's and the modern reckoning makes him Sopān's (see Nivṛttināth, The line that runs through him).

On the usual dating Nāmdev was born in 1270 and Jñāndev a few years after him. Jñāndev was dead in 1296, at about twenty-one. Nāmdev lived until 1350, and by another account was eighty when he went. So the two of them were young men in the same few years, in the same small country, and only one of them stayed young. Everything they did together was done inside that narrow window, and Nāmdev had fifty-four years afterwards in which to remember it.

Not everybody allows them the same lifetime. One line of argument moves Nāmdev a hundred years down, and the reason is the language. The Marathi of Nāmdev's abhaṅgas is plainly more modern than the Marathi of the Jñāneśvarī, and on the face of it that looks like the distance between two centuries. The answer to it is blunt. No original of a Nāmdev abhaṅga survives. They were sung, learned by ear and handed along from mouth to mouth for generations, and a text carried that way has its language renewed by everyone who carries it; and two men writing in the same year write differently from one another anyway. The other piece of evidence turns round the same way. Nāmdev's verses mention the Muslim invasions and the Jñāneśvarī does not, but Alāuddīn Khiljī came into the Deccan in 1294, two years before Jñāndev died, and Nāmdev lived on through half a century of what came after. The silence of one man and the speech of the other are what you would expect of two men born together when one of them dies early.

Against that, the case for keeping them together is too well grounded to be shaken by doubts. They were contemporaries, they went on pilgrimage together out of Paṇḍharpūr, and they belonged to one line of devotion. The evidence is not only the travels. Nāmdev names Jñāndev in his verses and Jñāndev names Nāmdev in his, and in one place Jñāndev calls him the light of the world. The account of the travels is the Tīrthāvaḷī, which is Nāmdev's own telling of them, and nobody has yet dared to call it mythical. One thing more is said of the pair of them, and it is the thing to carry through this section: they are the intellectual and the emotional sides of the same life.

They went north. Nobody keeps a proper itinerary, but the names come through. They worked up the country by way of the bathing places, and at each one Nāmdev made verses, and he made them in the language of the place he was standing in rather than in his own. They came at last to Kāśī, bathed in the Bhāgīrathī, and stayed four months on the bank before turning back. Coming down they took Gayā and Prayāg, then Ayodhyā, then Mathurā and Gokul quickly, and then Dvārakā. Further stretches took them to Badrīnāth in the snow, to Jagannāth in the east, to Ujjain and Somnāth, to Nāsik and Tryambakeśvar where they bathed in the Kuśāvart pond, and down the whole length of the country to Rāmeśvar. The company round them changed as they went. Gorā the potter is put on that pilgrimage, and Visobā Kheçar, and Sāvatā Māḷī the gardener, and Cokhāmeḷā, who was not allowed inside the temple they had all set out from.

At Kāśī Nāmdev heard what people were saying about Kabīr and told Jñāndev, and the two of them went to the house. The walls were wattle and broken and there was no grain in it. Kabīr came out and went down at their feet, then stood up and put his arms round them, and laid a mat of straw down for them to sit on. Jñāndev told Nāmdev in front of him what the two of them were: that Nāmdev was Uddhav and Kabīr was Śuka, that both had come down into this world shut in shells, and that they had come because the way of devotion had been let go and people were sunk in their own affairs. Then he told Kabīr about the town in the south where the god came to see Puṇḍalīk and has been standing on a brick ever since, and said he should come and look at it with his own eyes. Kabīr said he would come on the eleventh day of the bright half of Kārtik. That was his promise, and the two of them took their leave and went.

Going home they had to cross the Mārvāḍ desert, and they ran out of water. They found a well and could not see the bottom of it and could not think how to get at it. Jñāndev said there was a way that was open to him. He made himself small by his yoga, went down, drank, and came up again. Nāmdev was still standing there thirsty. Jñāndev offered to go down and bring water up in his hands, and told him not to refuse it, and not to hold on to the idea that the two of them were separate men. Nāmdev said that if Viṭṭhal is the soul in every heart then Viṭṭhal could see to this, and asked him to wait a moment. He shut his eyes. He said he had been handed into Jñāndev's care for this journey and asked why he was being left, and said that if nothing came, men would laugh at him. The Bhaktavijaya says the well filled with a rumbling noise and ran over the top of itself. Jñāndev said he could not understand how Nāmdev had made God his debtor. Then he lifted him up off the ground and held him, and told him that he had watched yogis sitting in meditation all his life and had never got a moment's peace out of the sight of them, and that he got it from him.

They reached Auṇḍhā Nāgnāth on the fourteenth night of the dark half of Māgh, which is Śivarātri and the one night of the year that temple is full. They bathed, went in, laid their hands on the god's head and came out. Then Nāmdev took the cymbals and the vīṇā, stood at the great door and began a kīrtan, and the crowd that came to listen filled the ground in front of the temple. The brahmins came up from their own bathing with their clothes still wet and their hands full of the things for the worship, found they could not get through, and told the people to keep back and not touch them. Then two of them pushed into the middle of the singing and told Nāmdev to take it round to the back of the temple, where he could sing as shamelessly as he liked without standing in the way of other people's rites. He bowed to them and said he would. He went round the back, and every one of the listeners got up and went round with him. It was the dark half of the moon and there was no light on that side. The Bhaktavijaya says banners came down out of the sky like lightning and stood upright round the singing, and that the temple then turned on itself, east to west, and put its face towards him. In the morning the brahmins came out to make their offering to the sun and stood arguing about whether the sun had risen in the wrong quarter or they had lost their sense of direction. Then they came and told Nāmdev they had been proud of their own work and had troubled him for nothing.

The pilgrimage ended where it had started. They saw the dome of Paṇḍharpūr from a long way off and went down on the ground where they stood, and then they took up the cymbals and the vīṇā and came into the town singing. At the great door Nāmdev went down like a dropped stick. Jñāndev picked him up, waited until he could stand, took his hand and walked him in. The Bhaktavijaya says the god came off his seat and out to meet them, and that Nāmdev put his head on his feet and said only that he was very tired. There was still a rite to finish. A pilgrimage is not closed until the brahmins of the town have been fed, and Nāmdev had no money and no trade left to raise any, so Rukmiṇī said that the one who had taken the man's whole life had better do the feeding himself. The Bhaktavijaya says he went round the town giving out the invitations in person, told the brahmins his name was Ananta and that he lodged at the temple and that Nāmdev was his dearest friend, and that they looked straight at him and did not know him. At the feast he washed their feet and waited on them, and at the end of it he ate what Nāmdev had left on his plate, and the brahmins looked at the ground and agreed among themselves to say nothing about any of it to anybody. The two of them had gone out of Paṇḍharpūr together and they came back into it together, and that was the end of the travelling.

In 1296 Jñāndev took sañjīvan samādhi at Āḷandī, which Nāmdev's verses call Alaṅkāpurī. The day itself belongs to Jñāndev's life and is told there. What belongs here is what the day did to Nāmdev, and for that there is something better than any narrator. Nāmdev wrote it down himself. The abhaṅgas stand in his gāthā under a heading that names Jñāndev's samādhi, and they begin at number 353. They are the earliest account of that day anyone has. What follows is his voice, not a later teller's and not this book's.

He begins with the asking, not with the going. Jñāndev says to Viṭṭhal that he is his rest, and then asks him for samādhi. He says he does not want enjoyment and does not want liberation. He says what he has is longing at those feet, and that it is great. Viṭṭhal answers him as an equal answers an equal. He calls him an ocean of knowledge who knows by his own experience and says that his words alone are a place to rest. Then he calls him an emperor of knowledge and the very image of knowledge, and says he has understood what the longing is asking for.

Jñāndev takes hold of his feet. Nāmdev says the two minds went into one knot, and that the seen and the unseen became a single seeing. Viṭṭhal lays his hand on him. He strokes him, and goes over him from head to foot, and tells him that the thing he has set his heart on will be granted. Then comes the line this section exists for. Nāmā is standing in front of them. Hearing this, great grief and sorrow. He puts himself in the third person, as he does at the end of every abhaṅga he signs, and then he says nothing more about himself. The last thing in the verse is that Jñāndev, in great happiness, is taking samādhi.

The next abhaṅga is the arrangements. Jñāndev is standing with his hands together and the devotees are all watching him. Viṭṭhal says he has understood what this man wants for himself, and that the samādhi is his and will not be broken, and tells him to set out and to keep remembering him. Then he gives out the days. The tenth is the day for setting out. The eleventh is a night of keeping awake. The twelfth is the feast. On the thirteenth, at Alaṅkāpurī, and be quick about it. Rukmiṇī serves the food onto the plate. Viṭṭhal tells Jñāndev to open his eyes, and says that the two of them meet always, and to come to Paṇḍharī. Nāmdev closes it in his own name: the knowledge has risen, and the hour at Alaṅkāpurī is ready.

Taken in order, these are the verses of a man standing in a room while other people fix a date. Nāmdev is not told about it afterwards. He is there for the asking and there for the answer, near enough to watch a hand laid on his friend's back and to see him gone over from head to foot, and nothing he wants has any part in the matter. Viṭṭhal promises Jñāndev that the two of them will go on meeting. Nobody promises Nāmdev anything. He writes the days down as they are handed out, and the last word he has for the god is that the hour is ready. In another abhaṅga, with the whole company on the road to Āḷandī, he says the rest of them look to be in a hurry and that to him one moment of it is going past like an age.

Jñāndev died in 1296 and Nāmdev in 1350. The gap is fifty-four years, and the flattest sentence written about it says only that the passing must have been a very severe blow to him. Everything else in this life sits on the far side of that day. The years of kīrtan at Paṇḍharpūr are after it. The building up of the Paṇḍharī following, which no other single saint did as he did, is after it. Janābāī in the house, Cokhāmeḷā outside the wall, the dancing in front of the image, the songs that travelled north and ended up in the book of the Sikhs, the eighty years he is given and the step at the great door where they laid him down: all of it is the work of a man who had once stood in front of two people while one of them asked for the end of his life and was told he could have it. He went on singing for fifty-four years. The two of them were the intellectual and the emotional sides of one life. After 1296 one side of it was left standing at Paṇḍharpūr with the cymbals in his hands, and it carried the whole thing for half a century.

Pilgrims came into Paṇḍharpūr from a long way out: from Gujarat, from Karnataka, from the Telugu and the Tamil districts, and from the Maratha country itself. A crowd like that has one plain difficulty about it. It has no common language. The kīrtan, the sung telling of God's doings with the crowd answering the line back, seems to have started there, as the way to get what these men held into the heads of people who had walked for weeks to stand in front of the god. Of the early men who performed it Nāmdev was very likely the best. He danced in front of the image. No other single saint did as much to build up the tradition of Paṇḍharī.

The Bhaktavijaya says Viṭṭhal took him aside one day and told him to keep it fixed in his mind that he lived in every creature. Nāmdev said there was no need to tell him that. So the god went out among the pilgrims as a dog, and stayed in that shape for twelve days. He put his nose into people's flour and they raised their hands at him. He stood by the brahmins while they ate and not one of them threw him a crumb. Men fresh back from the great pilgrimage said he had defiled them by touching them, and then argued among themselves about whether a black dog defiles anybody. Farmers took their food back out of his mouth. Nobody fed him. Then he came at Nāmdev in one leap, took the bread out of his hand and made off with it. Nāmdev picked up the cup of melted butter and went after him, asking him why he should have to eat his bread dry, and caught him up and put a morsel in his mouth, and the dog sat down and ate. The people watching laughed and nudged each other and said Nāmā had gone soft in the head, that he could no longer tell one animal from another. Then the dog laughed and asked him how he had been recognised. Nāmdev said Visobā Kheçar had taught him the signs.

One account tells it in three sentences and leaves the disguise out. A dog came up while Nāmdev was eating a piece of bread and ran off with the piece, and Nāmdev went after it with a pot of curds, asking it to take the curds too. Curds, not butter. It is set down there as the point at which Nāmdev began to see God in every creature, and the account moves on. In the version the tradition tells, the brahmins of the pilgrimage spent twelve days driving the animal off as unclean, and the tailor ran after it with something to help the bread go down.

Of all the saints of this country Nāmdev pressed the Name hardest, and the way he put it is not moderate. If he let his mind off those feet for the length of a moment, he said, his breath would go out of him on the spot. If the Name ever stopped in his mouth his tongue would split a thousand ways, and if his eyes were kept from that form they would come out of their sockets by force. No hour of the day is wrong for it, he said, and no month of the year, and it makes no difference at all whether the mouth saying it is a high caste mouth or a low one, because the one who is an ocean of pity comes to the help of everybody alike. The Name of God is the form of God and the form of God is the Name, and anyone who says there is some other way to him is a fool. A god is able to conceal himself. He is not able to conceal his name, and from the moment it has been said out loud he can no longer get away from us.

He also used the abhaṅga to say what he thought of the worship going on around him, and on that subject he gave no ground at all. A stone god and an unreal devotee, he said, can never satisfy each other. Gods of that sort have been broken up by the Turks and thrown into the water, and they did not cry about it. He asked Viṭṭhal not to show him deities of iron. Then he set out what people do. They pull up a living tuḷsī plant and worship a stone that was never alive. They strip a bela tree of its leaves and heap them on a liṅga. They cut the throat of a living ram and call it a sacrifice. They smear a stone with red lead and the women and children go down flat in front of it. They keep a snake made of mud and take sticks to one that moves. All of it is waste, he said, and the only thing in it worth doing is saying the Name. In another abhaṅga he pushes the scriptures aside in one line: do not study the Vedas, scriptural instruction is not needed, say the praises of the Name.

He said all of that in a town he would not leave, in front of an image he had washed and dressed and argued with and danced before since he was a child, and he went on doing both until he died. Somebody reading the abhaṅgas straight through will see something in him move over the course of the life. Early on he is the bhakta and nothing else, all tears and calling out, and can hardly get himself away from the temple precinct. Later, Viṭṭhal is less the figure standing on the brick than the one thing that exists at all, with worlds in their thousands in every hair of him, and the squalls that used to go through the man have dropped. That is one reading of it, and a reader may hold it alongside the tailor still going up the steps every morning. It does not settle the difficulty. Nothing here is going to settle it.

About himself he was brief. He told God not to go looking for merit in him, because he was an ocean of sin incarnate and there was nothing from the top of his head to his feet that was not sin. With God he was not brief at all. Do you think I will get tired of standing here and go away, he asked, because you have decided not to come out? He would tie the rope of his own life to those feet and haul the god over whenever it suited him, and it would be better for everybody if he came of his own accord. He would spread the meshes of his love and take him alive. He would make his heart a prison and shut him inside it, and beat him there until he asked to be let out.

In the Bhaktavijaya the god put to him once the joy there is in being delivered from any further birth. Nāmdev said he did not agree with that. What he asked for instead was this love, in every birth still to come, and he asked for it as a favour. The god smiled. He turned to Rukmiṇī and said that Nāmā wanted to see him with his eyes, and that teaching him philosophy did not satisfy him. Then he drew him in and held him against his chest.

Sixty-one songs under Nāmdev's name stand in the Granth Sāhib of the Sikhs, and they are usually given to this Nāmdev, the tailor. The assignment is careful and a reader should be careful with it. There was a second Nāmdev, a brahmin who signed himself Viṣṇudās Nāmā and is dated to 1578, and the abhaṅgas of the two men are hopelessly mixed. No authentic collection of the tailor's has ever been made. The tests are that the later man almost always uses that signature, and after that the older vocabulary, the plainer style and the reach of the imagination. They were applied as well as they could be, by a man who said his own results were provisional. That is where the matter stands, and it is better to be handed this than a tidy list.

The usual dating puts his death in 1350, fifty-four years after Jñāndev went into sañjīvan samādhi at Āḷandī. The other gives no year at all and says only that he took samādhi at eighty, which on the dates of 1270 to 1350 comes to the same number of years lived, though that account would put the whole life a century further down. The two do not sit in one frame and there is no point pretending they do. What both of them mean is that he was an old man by then and had been at it a long time.

The company had been going for years by then. Sāvatā the gardener, who could see God in a vegetable plot before Nāmdev could see him anywhere, died at Araṇgāon in 1295. Jñāndev went the year after. Visobā Kheçar, who had put his hand on Nāmdev's head and told him the whole world was God, died at Barsi on Śrāvaṇa Śuddha Ekādaśī in 1309. Narahari the goldsmith died in 1313. Cokhāmeḷā was working on the parapet wall at Maṅgaḷveḍhe in 1338 when it came down on him, and it killed the other labourers with him. Nāmdev outlived nearly all of them. That is a good part of what the last years were: the one who was left, singing in front of the same image, with the names of the men he had walked to the north with going into the songs.

When the devotees at Paṇḍharpūr went to fetch Cokhāmeḷā's bones out of that ruin they found they could not tell which were his, and it was Nāmdev they came to and asked. He told them to pick up the bones from which the name of Viṭṭhal could be heard (see Cokhāmeḷā, The wall at Maṅgaḷveḍhe). Cokhāmeḷā had spent his whole life at the great door because he had no right to go through it, and it was a tailor who told the town how to find him.

He was buried at the great door of the temple of Viṭṭhal at Paṇḍharpūr. That sentence should be read slowly, because the door is the way in. Everybody who comes to Paṇḍharpūr comes to look at the face of the god, and to reach the face of the god they go through that door, and to go through that door they put their feet on the place where he lies. They have been doing it since the fourteenth century. The step is called Nāmdev's Pāyarī, Nāmdev's step, and it is taken to be his samādhi. In one of his own abhaṅgas he had asked God for a single favour, which was to be so much dust on the feet of the saints. He got the feet of everybody who ever came, for as long as anyone keeps coming, and he is laid where no one reaches Viṭṭhal without treading on him first.

Nāmdev and Cokhāmeḷā stand face to face in front of that door. Cokhāmeḷā's bones are in a samādhi directly opposite the place where Nāmdev's were laid. One of them is under the threshold of a building he could walk into whenever he liked. The other is across from him because he was never once let through it. They have been looking at each other over the entrance ever since, and every pilgrim who goes up the step goes up it between the two of them.

The priests of Viṭṭhal's temple say the bones at the front door are not the tailor's. They say they belong to the later Nāmdev, the brahmin who wrote as Viṣṇudās Nāmā. The claim is recorded and not accepted. Nothing establishes it, and the brahmin Nāmdev does not look like a saint large enough to have earned that place, whereas the tailor, who is among the greatest who ever lived, does. Whether the rest of Nāmdev's household were buried near the door as well, nobody will say. So the grave is argued over along the line everything else in this life was argued over, and it is argued by the men inside the temple about the man lying under their doorway.