Sena Nhavi

He shaved men for a living, and on the one morning he would not come, the god came in his place.

Mahīpati gives him one chapter and opens it with a household. There was an image in Senā's house, dark of complexion, four-armed, in a yellow garment, and it is the first thing the Bhaktavijaya tells us about him after his name. He bathed early, did his worship, finished what he did every morning, and only then went out to his trade and to the ordinary business of the house. That order is the whole of the man as Mahīpati draws him: god first, razors after, and nothing in the world worth holding on to, since he took it all to be perishable.

Who he was and where he lived are not agreed. Mahīpati never names his town, and he sets the chapter in a run of stories that are all northern: the image that walked from Mathurā to Hardwar, Surdās at Mathurā before it, King Satvik at Jagannāth after it, and the tradition that carries Mahīpati's Senā knows him as a barber of Bāndhavgaḍ. The 1933 study of the Maharashtrian mystics says flatly that Senā served the king of Bidar, and dates him to about 1448. The 1919 collection that printed one of his poems in English footnotes him in a third direction again: a barber by caste, one of Rāmānanda's disciples, with some Marathi abhaṅgas attributed to him. That is the northern line rather than the Marathi one. Nobody here is quoting anybody else, and none of the three can be folded into the others.

The dates will not sit still either. The modern list of Nāmdev's contemporaries puts Senā eleventh, in the same run of paragraphs as Sāvatā Māḷī, who died in 1295, Narahari Sonār in 1313 and Cokhāmeḷā under the falling wall in 1338. Then it dates Senā himself to about 1448. That is a century and more after the others, inside a list built on the claim that they were contemporaries. Mahīpati gathers the whole company into one age without hesitation. The gap is there in the sources and there is no honest way to close it.

What is left of him, whichever century he belonged to, is small and very clear: a trade, an image in a house, one chapter, a gāthā of abhaṅgas under his name, and a poem about the debt he owed the saints. An abhaṅga is the short Marathi devotional verse the Vārkarī poets composed in, sung rather than read, and it is the form in which nearly all of these people's own words survive.

Before he tells the story, Mahīpati explains the barber. The occupation of a barber is low, he says, and lower than it is slavery; a goldsmith stands well below the town astrologer; the watchmen of the town and the scribes are above the outcastes; the town police punish the Mangs and the fishermen; butchers and sellers of cloth are merciless men. Each rung of the ladder comes with the same explanation attached, and it is not softened anywhere. God gave them those births, Mahīpati says, for their bad deeds in a former life. Senā was born a barber because of what Senā had done before.

Then he turns around inside the same passage. He tells his listeners not to take offence at the list, since the scriptures lay the blame on the doers of evil and not on the ones hearing about it, and that no one need repent of the caste he was born into. What a man does need to fear is being born into any of these castes and not worshipping, because then he is in the whirlpool of this world and will not get out. And he piles up his images for the way out: a little town stream that offers itself to the Ganges, iron touched by the touchstone and turning at once to gold, a heap of different sticks put into one fire and all taking the same colour. Born into any low caste at all, he says, the man who comes as a suppliant with a repentant heart is made by the saviour of the world into himself.

The English heading over the chapter puts it in five words: a mean calling does not hinder devotion. That is the argument, and the story that follows is offered as its proof. It is worth noticing that both halves are on the same page and that Mahīpati sees no difficulty in it. The birth is a punishment, and the god of that same theology will shortly pick up the punished man's bag of tools and carry it through a palace door on his own shoulder.

On a certain day Senā was sitting at his worship when the king's officer came to the house and called for him to come out at once. His wife went in to where he was sitting and told him the royal messenger was at the door.

Go and tell the officer I am not at home, Senā said, and went on with what he was doing. The call came four times. Four times his wife went out and said that Senā was not at home.

A neighbour had been watching. Mahīpati says only that he was evil-minded and that he saw his chance, and he went to the king himself with the true version: Senā is not away, he is sitting in his house worshipping his god. The king heard it and his temper went up. Mahīpati's contempt for this king is on the page and there is no point disguising it. He calls him an evil Muslim king, says that telling him such a thing was like giving liquor to a monkey and then adding a scorpion's sting, and remarks that an onion smells bad enough before you put garlic with it.

The order the king gave his officer was to bind Senā, bring him, tie him into a bundle and throw him in the river. It is not the only life in this circle that turns on a king's summons that the person summoned could not obey (see Kānhopātrā, The king's summons).

Knowing what the king intended, the Bhaktavijaya says, Hari took the form of Senā and went to the palace door. Mahīpati names him by every name he has, the first being, the one who lies on the serpent and dwells on the sea of milk, the one the yogis on their beds of spikes hold in their minds, and then says what he did with them: he took off his crown, took out his earrings, laid aside the Kaustubha jewel, put a barber's bag on his shoulder and hurried off. This is the same god the Vārkarīs know as Viṭṭhal in the temple at Paṇḍharpūr, called Pāṇḍuraṅg when they sing to him, the husband of Rukmiṇī.

He came in and made his obeisance to the king. Mahīpati records that the moment the king laid eyes on the barber standing in front of him his anger was gone, and does not explain it.

He sat the king down and shaved him, and then rubbed his head. The king was delighted with the work. Stay here with me, he said; of all the barbers I have had, I think you are the cleverest. The barber gave him an answer that had nothing to do with employment. There is nowhere I am not, he said, down to the last atom of the world. Going and coming are not things I can do, nor staying, nor acting; I act and am not the doer; I fill everything and stand apart from all of it. For one errand, for one devotee, I have put on a shape with qualities for a while, and even now I have not stopped being what has no shape at all. The king, who had asked for a servant and been handed the structure of existence, took it cheerfully and sent for scented oil to be rubbed into him.

They brought a square seat of sandalwood and he sat on it, and Senā rubbed the oil into him. The oil stood in a cup set with jewels, and in the oil there was a reflection. It was not a barber. It was the four-armed one, crown shining, yellow robe, the complexion of a dark rain cloud. The king looked up and saw the man rubbing his shoulders, and looked down and saw Kṛṣṇa in the cup, and could not get his eyes away. He forgot to say that the rubbing could stop. His senses and his mind went still. The courtiers standing about the hall laughed at their king and said he was possessed, and his servants had to tell him that it was midday now and he must get up and go to his bath.

Sit beside me a while, the king said. If you go home now, I will not live. The barber told him he would come back quickly and asked him not to shut him up inside his heart. Then the king fetched a handful of gold coins and put them into the fold of the barber's cloth, the way you pay a barber.

He walked to Senā's house, hung the bag of instruments on its peg, dropped the gold coins into the bag, and was not there any more.

The king came back from his bath and gave his servants an order that no one in the hall had heard from him before. I do not want garments, he said, or ornaments, or anything to dress myself in. I do not want fine food or scented powder or flowers. Go and bring me Senā the barber. If he does not come at once I shall lose my life; the moment I see him I am free of being born and dying again. His servants were frightened of the state he was in and went.

At his own door Senā heard them out and said the obvious thing. The king is angry with me. Then he put the bag of instruments on his shoulder and went to the palace anyway.

The king saw him come in and stood up to greet him. Every man in the assembly laughed, because kings do not stand for barbers. Then the king said: you were here this morning and you showed yourself in your own form, four-armed. Show me that form again. And he took hold of Senā's feet and held them.

Senā had no idea what he was talking about. The king brought the cup of oil over and made him look into it, and there was nothing in it, and Senā stood there looking at a cup of oil. Then it broke out of the king all at once. Brother of the lowly, he said, the one who makes sinners clean, husband of Rukmiṇī, and for my sake you have been doing this low work. The Vedas describe your deeds and do not know the limit of your power; Brahmā and Indra and Śiva do not know your limits; and today, for my sake, you put a bag of barber's tools on your shoulder. Then he wept, and went on weeping, and ran at Senā and caught hold of his feet.

By keeping your company I have seen Kṛṣṇa, he said. How can anyone describe what it is to keep company with the saints? The fisherman wrote the Rāmāyaṇa because Nārada crossed his path. Sañjaya heard the Bhagavadgītā because Vyāsa favoured him. Through you I have seen Kṛṣṇa. Senā, going to his bag, found the gold coins lying in it, and gave them away, in front of everybody, to the brahmins. The king repented of what he had been and took up the worship of Hari. The last thing Mahīpati says about Senā in the whole chapter is that he was pleased because Hari was pleased, and not for any other reason.

The abhaṅga that matters most is the eleventh, where Senā takes his trade into his religion and keeps it there. We are greatly skilled in the art of shaving, he says. We hold up the mirror of discrimination. We use pinches of dispassion. We apply the water of tranquillity to the head and screw out the hair of egotism. We take away the nails of passion.

And then the last line of it: we are a support to all the four castes. It is a barber's sentence, and every word of it is literally true of his shop, where men of every rank sit down and put their heads under his hand. Set beside the ladder of births that Mahīpati laid out at the start of the chapter, with the barber low on it and slavery below him, it is a man answering back in the only vocabulary he has, which is soap and water and a blade.

One more line survives from the same body of verse, which is that Senā could say he was able to show God to others as in a mirror. It sits very close to the mirror of discrimination in the shaving poem, and closer still to a king staring into a cup of oil.

On the Name he is as plain as any of them. You do not need to inhale smoke, Senā says, and you do not need to sit in the middle of five fires. You need to make your mind calm and sing the praises of God with your attention gathered. There is no other remedy but that one. God will come and relieve his devotee; he makes no consideration of caste or of quality; he runs at once to the cause of anyone who loves him.

You do not need the forest either. Go off into the forest, Senā says, and you may only be deceived there, the way Vibhandaka was deceived by a woman sent to him. Knowing this, he stayed where he was and sent his submission from there. From a man who had a house, a trade and a bag on a peg, that is not a small remark.

He is not gentle about everything. On evil-doers he wants no compromise at all: dishonour the wicked, he says, deal them kicks, drive them off, because the man who lives in their company lives in perdition. On himself he is harder still. I have harboured passion and anger, he says; I have not cared for the company of good men; I have not meditated on God; I have run down the people who believed in him; I have wanted money. Senā is a statue of sin incarnate, and bends before God. Out of the same set of verses comes the opposite note and the better one: today is a day of gold, says Senā, because I have seen the saints.

One of his poems survives in a full English translation, not a summary, and it is the one place in this chapter where the reader hears Senā's own composition rather than a report of it. It was printed in English in 1919 under the title "Saints great of heart". It is a poem about a debt, and the creditors are not God but the saints.

Saints great of heart and kind are ye,

Fathers and mothers unto me.

So great the blessings you bestow,

How can I praise you, I so low?

For you have saved us, you have showed

To us, dull men, the proper road.

My debt, I, Sena barber, say,

Ah, never, never can I pay.

He signs it with his caste. Not with a title, not with a place, not with a teacher's name: "I, Sena barber." And the thing he thanks the saints for, that they showed dull men the road, is almost word for word what the king in Mahīpati's chapter says about them three centuries later in another language, that such a man is merciful and the saviour of the dull and the ignorant. Whether Mahīpati knew this poem or not, the two texts are saying the same thing from the two ends of it: the king thanking the barber, and the barber thanking the saints.

In two of his abhaṅgas Senā set down his own departure from this life: midday, on the twelfth day of the dark half of Śrāvaṇa. He does not say how he knew. Among these lives, where dates are guessed at, contradicted and argued over a century at a time, one man wrote down the hour.

Three hundred years afterwards Tukārām made a list of the people who had crossed over by devotion, and read it out in an abhaṅga: Gorā the potter, Rohidās the shoemaker, Kabīr the Muslim, Senā the barber, Kānhopātrā, Cokhāmeḷā the outcaste, Janābāī the maid. Inquire into the various works, he said, and you will find that unholy men become holy by devotion; castes do not matter, it is God's Name that matters. He put Senā fourth on that list without a note about where the man had lived or which century he had lived in, and it clearly did not occur to him that anyone would ask. In Maharashtra that is what became of the barber: not a biography, but a name that belongs on the list.