Savata Mali

He was a gardener, and he did not go to Paṇḍharpūr, and that is the whole of what there is to understand about him.

Two books that both know him cannot quite agree on where he lived. Mahīpati calls the village Aranbhendi and puts it on the road God took when he left Paṇḍharpūr on foot. The modern account calls it Aranagaon, three miles from Modanimba station on the railway, under the jurisdiction of Miraj, and says the garden and the well are shown there to this day. Whether these are two spellings of one village, or two villages the tradition has run together, neither book says and neither seems to have asked. The sources are not settled on it and this chapter will not settle it either.

He was a māḷī, a gardener, which was his caste before it was his trade and his trade because it was his caste. That meant a plot of ground, a well, a leather bag on a rope to bring the water up, and a crop that had to be watered whether or not the man watering it felt anything while he did it. Garlic. Chillies. Onions. Not the flowers of a temple garden but the smallest and least exalted vegetables in the Deccan, the ones that a brahmin household would have kept out of the kitchen on principle. He had a household of his own, and in one of his abhaṅgas, the short unrhymed Marathi devotional verse this whole movement sang in, he asks God to relieve him of the round of household existence altogether, and asks that God should bereave him of all his progeny, which is harder than anything else Sāvatā is reported to have said.

Some three dozen of Sāvatā's abhaṅgas survive, and six of them carry what follows.

What he says is this. Garlic, chilly and onion are all my God. The water-bag, the rope and the well are all enveloped by my God. Sāvatā is cultivating a garden, and has placed his head at the feet of Viṭṭhal, the dark standing god of Paṇḍharpūr with his hands on his hips, whom the vārkarīs also call Pāṇḍuraṅg.

It would be easy, and wrong, to take that as a gardener's pretty way of saying that God is everywhere in general. He is not comparing the onion to God. He is naming the objects in front of him at midday and saying that the divine is in them, and he names them in the order a man would meet them at work: the crop first, then the bag, then the rope, then the well the rope goes down into. There is no ladder in it, no lower and higher, nothing that has to be got past. The garden is not a place from which he looked towards Paṇḍharpūr. It is the place where the god of Paṇḍharpūr was.

One line in that chapter is easy to miss, and it is careful about sequence: Sāvatā could see God in everything before Nāmdev could. That is a claim about who learned what from whom in a generation that mostly gets told the other way round, with Nāmdev at the centre. Nāmdev had to be taught the omnipresence of God, and he was taught it by Visobā Kheçar, who put his feet on a liṅga and asked Nāmdev to find him a spot where God was not. Sāvatā seems never to have needed the lesson. He had been drawing water over it for years.

The great act of a vārkarī is the vārī, the pilgrimage on foot to Paṇḍharpūr, and Mahīpati gives you the sight of it. The bands come in with drums and with banners carrying the eagle on them, shouting victory until the banks of the Bhīmā throw the sound back. They prostrate themselves at the great door. They embrace one another. Then they look up and see the image standing there with both hands on its hips in a yellow robe, and Mahīpati says they were like a young married girl in her mother-in-law's house who looks up and sees her own mother in the doorway. They bow to the two feet on the brick and lose track of themselves. That is what going meant, and going is the name of the community: a vārkarī is one who makes the vārī, and nothing else.

Sāvatā stayed in the garden. No source says in so many words that he refused to walk, and it would be dishonest to put the refusal in anyone's mouth. What they show is the traffic running the other way, and what he says himself is where God was in the meantime. There is one moment where you can hear him looking at the pilgrimage from outside it. Asking Nāmdev what he could possibly have done to earn God's affection, he runs through the list of the things devout people do: carried the eagle banner on your shoulder to Paṇḍharpūr, was it; took the dust of the saints' feet on your head; led a band of singers on the eleventh day of the month, taking Hari's name and playing at being a cowherd; went to a great bathing place; put your body to hardship. It is a list of journeys, made by a man who has not been on them.

The honest qualification is that he did leave. He is placed on the pilgrimage that Jñāndev and Nāmdev made together, and Mahīpati ends the garden episode with four people walking off down the road, Jñāndev, Nāmdev, Sāvatā and the Lord of Paṇḍharpūr, on their way to see a man called Kurmadās. He is in the room at Ter, too, seated with the rest and sitting still while Gorā the potter went round the company with his paddle finding out which of them were properly fired (see Gorā Kumbhār, Come and make my house clean). So the claim the sources support is narrower and harder than never leaving home. It is that he never left the garden in order to worship, because there was nothing in Paṇḍharpūr that was not already in the well.

The tradition found its own way of putting this, and it put it as a joke. Later in the same book Viṭṭhal comes home tired and asks Rukmiṇī, his consort in the temple at Paṇḍharpūr, to rub his shoulders, and she laughs at him and asks what exactly he has been doing. Have you been weeding Sāvatā's garden, she says. Have you been at Kabīr's loom, or thatching Nāmdev's roof, or dragging dead cattle for Cokhāmeḷā? Ekanāth turned the same joke into a list, two centuries later, and the garden is on it (see the opening chapter). Nobody in these lists is described as going anywhere. The work stays where it is and God comes out to it.

The road that brought him there began with a man who could not travel. Pilgrims arriving at Paṇḍharpūr delivered a message to the image: Kurmadās, at Lahul, has neither hands nor feet and cannot come quickly, and is waiting. Mahīpati says God started at once, took Nāmdev and Jñāndev by the hand, and set off walking. He then spends three verses on nothing but the walking, because the point he wants is that the one who lies on the serpent in the sea of milk, whose feet the sages want the dust of, whose form the yogis on their iron spikes cannot hold in the mind, went on foot down an ordinary road.

Partway along, God noticed the village of Aranbhendi and wanted very much to see the gardener. He said to Nāmdev that he was extremely thirsty, and that he would step in for water and be out again directly, and he left the two of them standing at the edge. Inside, Sāvatā was sitting with his eyes shut, holding the form of Viṭṭhal in his heart and saying the names aloud, and not aware that he had a body at all. God put a hand on his head to steady him, woke him, and took hold of him. When Sāvatā saw who it was he went down and held the feet, and could not hold in what he felt. Blessed is this day, he said; I have seen my mother and my father with my own eyes, and you have come here walking. Then he put his head down again and said that the Lord of Paṇḍharpūr had worn himself out looking after his lowly ones, and that he should sit down now and rest while Sāvatā worshipped him.

God said no, and said it with the face of a frightened man. There are two thieves on the road behind me. They will be here at any moment. That is why I came in, to hide, and I find it very strange that you should be talking about worship at a time like this. He argued it out. An eclipsed sun has no use for offerings. A king whose city is under siege takes no pleasure in sitting on his throne. A man with something on his mind cannot enjoy himself. When the sage Agasti stood near the sea, the tide would not come in. You talk about worshipping me, but my mind is not easy. Save my life for me somehow, chief of my devotees.

Sāvatā answered him with philosophy, which was the wrong answer. Search the three worlds, he said, and there is no place in any of them big enough to hold you. You cannot cage air. You cannot put space in a jar. You cannot hide the sun inside darkness. Musk will not stay hidden in the ground, nor the sandalwood tree among ordinary trees, nor the lion among ordinary animals. Indra's horse cannot be passed off in a line of common horses, and a touchstone cannot be hidden in an iron box. All the worlds are inside you, and there is nowhere on the earth where you can be concealed. God heard him out and said that this was not the moment for knowledge of that kind. Hide me somewhere. Now.

The Bhaktavijaya tells what he did next in a single sentence and without preparing the reader for it. Sāvatā thought that if the dweller in heaven could live in his heart out of love, he could live there for this too. He picked up the sickle he cut with, opened his own stomach, and God went straight in and into the chamber of the heart. Then it occurred to him that the thieves might be able to see even through that, so he wrapped his blanket round his middle. From inside, God told him what he had been thinking: there is nothing in the whole universe I can find to repay you with.

Mahīpati stops here because he expects to be interrupted. His hearers will want to know how God can fit in a human heart. He answers with two things that are no easier. When Kṛṣṇa was a child and Yaśodā was churning, he got into the churn and ate the butter. A cowherd woman once said absent-mindedly, out of love, that she had some Kṛṣṇa for sale, and God went into her milk jar so that what she had said would be true. He saw the love in Sāvatā, Mahīpati says, and so made the heart able to hold him; my listeners should not sit there doubting. Then he goes back in, and God finishes the sentence he began. There is nothing I can give you, so become my own form, or become everything to me, because I can see nothing else. And Sāvatā said that from now on he would never let him be separate again. What follows is Mahīpati piling up pictures of two things that will not come apart: two rivers meeting, water going into milk, breath through a body, nectar stored in the moon, honey folded up inside a bud.

The two thieves were Nāmdev and Jñāndev, still standing at the edge of the garden where they had been told to wait, and by now Nāmdev was in a bad state. He is taking a very long time, he said. Where has my treasure got itself caught, that it has left me alone out here in the wilds? Mahīpati reaches for the usual comparisons, a man hunting water in a dry forest, a hungry child watching the road for its mother, a fawn that has lost the doe, a miser who has lost his money, and then drops them and lets Nāmdev beat his breast with both hands and throw himself on the ground. If you do not come out now I shall not survive it, he said. Do not go off and leave me here. It would not be right of you.

While he was saying this, Sāvatā came out, saying the names and plainly delighted about something. Nāmdev took hold of his feet and asked where God had gone, and said he was very much troubled. And then he looked at him properly. Sāvatā had gone out of himself again, absorbed, with nothing left in him to tell the difference between mine and not mine, and Nāmdev read the signs on his face the way you read a face you know. Mahīpati says he knew it the way one thief knows another across a room, and the way two lovers can hold a conversation in a crowd without saying anything, and the way a Yogi and nobody else can tell what another Yogi is up to. You have swallowed the treasure of a helpless man, Nāmdev said. My soul lives in that resting place. Show him to me once, just once, and I will hold the form in my heart and be quiet.

God, listening from inside, had a difficulty of his own. I have got myself caught in Sāvatā's heart, he thought, and I cannot get out of here in a hurry. It is like the insect that spins its own cocoon and then cannot break it, or the parrot that lands on the limed perch and cannot fly off. The bee goes into the lotus for love of it and stays there, and then the sun sets and the flower shuts on it. That is what has happened to me. And Nāmdev out there is like a fish out of water. So he asked Sāvatā to let him go and meet his dearest friend.

Before he did, Sāvatā turned on Nāmdev with the question that had been forming in him, and it is worth hearing from a gardener to the most famous devotee of the age. What heaps of good deeds have you done, that God should come running like this? It is that you have worshipped God in everything. By sheer force of bhakti, devotion given with the whole of a person, you have made the Lord of Paṇḍharpūr your debtor, and I am astonished, watching it. Was it the banner and the pilgrimage? The dust of the saints' feet? The singing on the eleventh day? The austerities, the bathing places, the years of good works? Only he understands what your good fortune is. Then Sāvatā, having said this, put himself face down at Nāmdev's feet.

After that he picked up the sickle and opened himself a second time. God stepped out and Nāmdev had hold of his feet before he was upright. God gathered him in, wiped his forehead with the hem of his yellow robe, and asked him, smiling, why he had gone and made his heart so miserable, and to tell him at once. You are my mother and my father, Nāmdev said; you will be my help for ever; and what it is that keeps you loving us, I do not understand at all. Then God turned to Jñāndev and said they should hurry, because Kurmadās was waiting and his heart would not settle until they had met. The four of them went off along the road together.

Now, whose voice have you been hearing. That whole scene is Mahīpati's, written some four and a half centuries after the event he is reporting. Sāvatā left his own account of the same afternoon, reported as his fifth abhaṅga. In it, Sāvatā says his eyes had been full-blown and his hands stretched out and his heart full of humility. Jñāndev and Nāmdev were passing by his garden. God came inside, put his hand on Sāvatā's head, brought him back to his senses, and embraced him with four hands. And Sāvatā asked him to sit down beside him so that he might worship him.

That is where his own telling stops. There is no thirst in it and no errand, no two thieves, no sickle, no blanket, no Nāmdev weeping in the road. It ends at the exact place where Mahīpati's version turns, on the request to sit down and be worshipped, which in Mahīpati is refused and in Sāvatā's own verse is simply made. It is not necessary to decide between them. It is worth noticing that the man himself remembered God arriving, and being held, and asking for nothing more than to keep him there. In the popular telling of this episode, Rukmiṇī comes out from Paṇḍharpūr looking for her missing husband and finds him in the garden. No source used here has her at Aranbhendi. In these books the one who searched was Nāmdev.

His second abhaṅga runs like this. Very well it was that I was born in a low caste, and very well it is that I have not attained to greatness. Had I been born a brahmin, I would have given myself over to rituals and ceremonies. Placed as I am, I have neither ablutions to make nor sandhyā to perform. Born in a low caste, I can only ask for thy compassion.

Read it slowly, because it is not doing what it looks like it is doing. It is not resignation and it is not a protest. He is counting his advantages. A brahmin's day is full: the washings, the twilight prayers said at the joints of the day, the ceremonies that have to be done correctly and on time, a whole apparatus of things a man can do and can be seen to have done. Sāvatā has none of it and is not permitted any of it, and he says that this is why he still has something left to do, which is to ask. He has nothing to offer and no standing to offer it from, so the asking is all there is, and the asking is what works. The system that shut him out had, by his reckoning, saved him a great deal of time.

He is not alone in the reckoning and he is not the only one shut out. Cokhāmeḷā prayed from outside the temple wall at Paṇḍharpūr all his life and was never let in (see Cokhāmeḷā, The man at the great door). Janābāī, grinding at Nāmdev's house, sang a list of her family that has no blood in it anywhere: Nāmdev is my father, Rājābāī my mother, Gorā the potter is my uncle, and Kabīr and Sāvatā are my brothers. Mahīpati has God himself reciting a similar list to a room of brahmins, working down it name by name, and when he comes to the gardener he says only that this servant of mine, Sāvatā, has put his trust in worship and now in his love sees nothing but me in every creature. The brahmins in that scene are reported to have repented.

The fourth of the six abhaṅgas is about living where the weather changes. One day you ride an elephant or go by palanquin; another day you walk barefoot. One day there is no grain in the house at all; another day there is so much wealth that you cannot think where to keep it. One day the god of death arrives and you are carried to the burning ground; another day your teacher takes pity on you, and the father of Sāvatā shows himself. Behave the same way in all of it, he says.

What holds it together is that the last pair is built like the first two. The elephant and the bare feet, the empty house and the unmanageable wealth, death and the sight of God: they are set out in the same grammar, as things that arrive on a given day, not as a ladder climbing towards the good one at the end. It is the same habit of mind as the garlic and the chilli and the onion. Whatever turns up in front of him gets named plainly and gets no special voice.

The sixth is on the power of the Name, and on this he says what his whole generation said. By the power of God's name a person can say goodbye to fear, and land a blow on the head of death. By the power of God's name you can bring God down from heaven onto the earth and then sing and dance in front of him. So he asks everyone within reach to take the path of bhakti, because God is certainly got that way.

His death is put on Āṣāḍha Vadya Caturdaśī, 1295, which is Śake 1217. If those dates are right, he was the first of this whole company to go: Gorā the potter had been born in 1267 and Viṭṭhal's reluctant Śaiva goldsmith Narahari would live until 1313, Visobā died in 1309, and Cokhāmeḷā was still alive under the wall at Maṅgaḷveḍhe in 1338. Āṣāḍha is the month the roads fill. Tukārām, three centuries later, asks in an abhaṅga when the eleventh day of Āṣāḍha will dawn so that he can get to Paṇḍharpūr. Sāvatā died in the dark half of that same month, at Aranagaon, where he had been all along.

His samādhi, the tomb of a saint that is also a place of his continued presence, is there. A visitor in the 1930s thought it worth the journey and called it a well-built building, and then added the detail that matters most about it. Much of the cost of putting it up was met by the gardener community of Bombay and Poona. Not a king, not a temple trust, not the Chief of Miraj who kept his verses in a cupboard and eventually handed them over. Gardeners in two cities paid for the building over the gardener of Aranagaon. One brahmin devotee of his lies buried in front of him there, which is its own comment on the abhaṅga about caste.

The garden is still pointed out, and so is the well. He had said that the water-bag and the rope and the well were all enveloped by his God, and he had said it as a description, not a hope.