Sopan Dev

Viṭṭhalpant came back to Āḷandī from Kāśī with his sannyās behind him and four children ahead of him, and the town gave the children nothing: no thread ceremony, no teacher, no place at any table (see Jñāndev, Four children and a verdict). Sopān was the third. The Bhaktavijaya names him in that order every time it names any of them, after Nivṛtti and Jñāndev and before Muktābāī, and when the brahmins of Āḷandī told the family that the only penance for them was death, it was Nivṛtti who answered and the father who walked away.

On the tradition usually followed he was born in 1277, two years after Jñāndev and two before Muktābāī. On the tradition Janābāī gives, he was born in 1274. The two lists are usually set side by side without a choice being made between them, and no choice is made here.

Three sources say the same thing about who he was before he was born. The Bhaktavijaya opens the story on the Ocean of Milk with Hari proposing to Brahmadev and Śiva that the three of them come down as Nivṛtti, Sopān and Jñāndev, and it says later, plainly, that Sopān was the avatar of Brahmadev. The Bhaktalīlāmṛta, setting out the four births before they happen, says the avatar of Brahmadev is the one who will be called Sopān. In Nāmdev's Marathi, when Rukmiṇī asks at Āḷandī which of them was which, the answer comes back that Sopāndev is Brahmā, Nivṛtti is Śiva, and Jñāndev is Brahman itself. It is one of the very few statements in the record that is about Sopān rather than about the four of them together, and all three sources make it.

Because the four names can be read as four stages of a mystic's progress, people have read them that way. The answer has always been the same, and it is one sentence long: the four of them did things on earth and left four samādhis behind them in four places. A name that is only an allegory does not need a grave.

Their father took the children to the hill country above Nāsik and used to walk the circuit of Brahmagiri. A tiger came at them on the path and they scattered. Sopān got home with his father and Muktābāī. Nivṛtti did not, and what happened to Nivṛtti in the cave is his own story (see Nivṛttināth, The tiger and the cave at Tryambakeśvar).

The brahmins of Āḷandī told them to go to Paiṭhaṇ and come back with a certificate saying they were pure. Nivṛtti asked what they were supposed to say there, since they had no standing to say anything about their caste or their family at all. They were not vaiśyas, he said, not kṣatriyas, not brahmins. Then he turned to Jñāndev and asked him directly: if we go to Paiṭhaṇ, what do we tell them? Jñāndev answered out of the śāstras. A man who goes against what is prescribed is to blame, he said; even a man who has knowledge keeps the rules laid down for him, and sādhus should show others the road by walking on it themselves.

Then Sopān spoke. What is caste worth, he said, and what is family worth? Without bhakti, love given to God and lived out, nobody arrives at the feet of Hari. Then he began naming people. Durvās. Vasiṣṭha. Gautama. Vyās. Vālmīki. Agasti. The Pāṇḍavas. In which scripture, he asked, is the family of any one of those declared noble? A man may be born into the best house there is and may have been all the way through the Vedas, and if he has no bhakti it has gone for nothing, and the śāstras have no praise for him. And if a man puts his bhakti on God, what does he want with high caste? Those were the words Sopān addressed to Jñāndev. He was about ten years old, or about thirteen, depending on which birth tradition is followed.

That is the whole of it. It is the one sustained speech he has anywhere, the only place where he argues a case, and it is argued rather than asserted: a question, a list of names that answers it, a concession, and the question again. Nothing in Mahīpati's account suggests he had to be encouraged to say it. After the four of them had talked it over they gave the brahmins of Āḷandī their answer and set out for Paiṭhaṇ that same day, where his brother put his hand on a buffalo and the buffalo recited the Veda (see Jñāndev, Paiṭhaṇ). When the brahmins of Paiṭhaṇ eventually ruled that the family should worship every existing thing, bow to a hog and to an outcaste alike because God was in them, Mahīpati records that Sopān was as glad of it as his brothers were, and that they said the rule was the one already in their hearts.

At Paiṭhaṇ the brahmins asked them their names, and it was Sopān who answered. My eldest brother is Nivṛtti, he said, and the wise Jñāndev comes after him. I, Sopān, am their younger brother, and our sister Muktā is the youngest of all. It is the only place in the whole of the Bhaktavijaya where Sopān says I.

When the brahmins of Paiṭhaṇ had finished arguing themselves round, they said that a penance could be of no use to such people, that these were teachers of the world, released while their bodies were still on them, and they wrote a letter saying so. They gave the letter into Sopān's hand. The Bhaktavijaya does not say why his hand and not another's, and it does not say anything about him in the same breath. It says whose hand it was and moves on to the buffalo.

He was still carrying it when they got back to Āḷandī. News of Paiṭhaṇ had run ahead of them and the town knew. Sopān brought out the letter and showed it to the brahmins there, and they read that the three brothers were avatars of the gods, and were astonished, and afterwards worshipped them. He carried a document from one town to another and produced it in front of the men who had refused his family. It is a small errand and it is his.

Those are the last two things Sopān does in the Bhaktavijaya. He is not gone from the book after that. He is named through the rest of it, and always in the same position, third after Nivṛtti and Jñāndev and before Muktābāī: in the crowd at Paṇḍharpūr, in the rolls of Viṣṇu's bhaktas, among the pilgrims. He is not in chapter X, XI or XII, and he is not in the long chapter XXII on Cāṅgdev where the rest of the family is busy. The Bhaktalīlāmṛta does the same, holding him among the four who came down as avatars and again in a roll of the saints that runs from Senā the barber through Dhaṅgo the shoemaker and Rakā the potter. So does the Nāmdev Gāthā, which has him third among those who came out to meet Nāmdev on his return and third among those who carried the invitations to his feast. The pattern is worth stating once. For most of the record, Sopān is a name in a series that somebody else is at the head of.

He stops acting but people go on speaking about him, and a few times the Bhaktavijaya stops on Sopān by himself rather than on all four together. At Paṇḍharpūr, when Viṭṭhal is showing Nāmdev the saints who have come, he goes along the row naming them: Nivṛtti is joy itself, here is Jñāndev who keeps company with all joy, and over there is Sopān, a ferry to carry people across to the far side; pay him your reverence. Two chapters on, God, counting over those who serve him, says that Nivṛtti and Sopān worship him in every creature and pay very little regard to their own bodies.

In another of those rolls he sorts the brothers by what each of them holds. Jñāndev is the ornament of knowledge worked out and knowledge lived. Nivṛtti is a mountain of vairāgya, the putting down of the world. And Sopān is a whole sea, he says, of the knowledge of the soul. Later in the same book, when Janābāī the servant girl is at the mill before dawn and begins to sing, the line she sings names Nivṛtti, Sopān and Jñāndev as her own relatives, and says it is by their favour that God is merciful to her.

One passage gives him work to do. The saints at Paṇḍharpūr appoint scribes, so that what comes out of each of their mouths gets written down by somebody. Sacchidānanda the brahmin is given Jñāndev's words. Jñāndev is given Muktābāī's. Visobā Kheçar is given Jogā Paramānand's. Sopān, named in that verse as the portion of Brahmadev, is given Nivṛtti's. If the Bhaktavijaya is right, the abhaṅgas of his eldest brother came through his hand. It says no more about it than that, and no other source in this dossier mentions it at all.

The Bhaktalīlāmṛta is the one source that puts him at the centre of anything. When Cāṅgdev's messengers got back to the Tāpī carrying Jñāndev's reply to the letter that had nothing written on it, which their master then could not read either (see Muktābāī, The letter with nothing written on it), they described the four children to him by age: Nivṛtti seven, Jñāndev just six, Sopān five and not aware of having a body at all, Muktābāī four and holding power without pride. Five years old is what the source says.

Cāṅgdev came himself, riding a tiger, and sent a disciple ahead. The disciple got down off the tiger and prostrated, and before he could get a word out Sopān said who his master was: this is a Marudgāmī, fourteen hundred years old, who has kept death off by his yoga, and he is on his way here. Then Nivṛtti said they should go and meet the guest properly, and Jñāndev told the wall to move (see Jñāndev, Āḷandī again). Sopān was sitting on it. The Bhaktavijaya's version of the Cāṅgdev meeting, at chapter XXII, does not mention him at all.

In the house afterwards Cāṅgdev showed off. He put a bundle of grain in a cloth on a hungry disciple's head and the grain popped as if over a fire. Jñāndev said to Nivṛtti and Sopān that the man was still in love with his own powers. Nivṛtti said Cāṅgdev believed they could not kindle the five fires of the body themselves, and that they had better show him something. So Jñāndev told Muktābāī they had a guest to feed. She asked for an earthen vessel to cook on and Jñāndev said Sopān would do for that. She rolled out her wheatcakes. There was no smoke at the fireplace, because there was no fire in it, and Cāṅgdev looked at the cold hearth and could not understand why he had just been told to go and bathe. When the guests had bathed and were sitting by their leaf plates, Sopān lit the five fires, and the flames came up out of his own mouth. His back went red like heated gold and Muktābāī laid her cakes on it and baked them while Cāṅgdev watched.

The Bhaktalīlāmṛta gives no account of how. Muktābāī went on serving until everybody had eaten, and when the hands had been washed it was Sopān who went round giving each guest a tulsi leaf. Later, when Cāṅgdev had given up and asked to be taught, the three brothers motioned to their sister to do the teaching, and at the end of it Cāṅgdev went down on the ground and called out the four names: Nivṛtti in whom Śiva had come down, Jñāndev the avatar of Viṣṇu, Sopāneśvar the incarnation of Prajāpati, Muktābāī the primal power. That is the longest scene Sopān is in anywhere, and even in it the cooking is Muktābāī's and the letter is Jñāndev's. What is his is the fire and the tulsi leaves.

Going through the abhaṅgas of the family one poet at a time, the modern survey gives Sopān four. They reach this book as summaries and not as translations, so what follows carries his images in somebody else's sentences. In the first, whoever holds the name of God in his mind will not come back again into the turmoil of life after life. In the second, the distinction people draw between what is sacred and what is not is foolishness: the only sacred thing in the world is God, and the only unsacred thing is the mind of the man who does not believe; and Sopān, having handed himself over to God without stopping, is himself an instance of the sacred. In the fourth, he forgot joy and sorrow alike in the name. In the fifth, the moment the sound of the devotees reached God, he came out to meet them.

The same passage does not leave it there. It says that the abhaṅgas of Sopān, Muktābāī and Cāṅgdev "approximate to the Abhangas of Jñānadeva neither in quality nor in quantity". That is one reader's judgement and this book does not adopt it, but it is not going to hide it either: the man who had read the whole corpus said the younger ones do not come near the brother. He adds in the next breath that the "mystical experience in them is entirely unmistakable".

Two other poets say something about him rather than about all four of them. Nāmdev, in an abhaṅga on the saints who had gone, works down the family one by one and comes to Sopān at the line about joy. A 1919 English rendering of it runs: "They talk of bliss of earth and bliss divine, / But only Sopandev can say, ''Tis mine.'" Cāṅgdev, in an abhaṅga that survives, said that Jñāndev drank his fill of the water of pearls, that Nivṛttināth caught the shade of the clouds in his hands, that Muktābāī fed on cooked diamonds, and that Sopān "decorated himself with the garland of fragrance"; the secret of all four, he said, had come into his own hands.

Apart from that one line, the 1919 book has nothing. That book set out to put these poets into English verse, and it names him twice, once in that couplet of Nāmdev's and once in a sentence saying that Jñāndev's two brothers and his sister are all said to have been saints and poets like himself. None of its hundred and eight hymns is his. A collection whose whole purpose was to find such poems found nothing of his to find.

For the last days at Āḷandī there is a better source than Mahīpati, because Nāmdev was there and wrote it down. The Marathi below is translated freshly here; the voice the reader is hearing is Nāmdev's, not Mahīpati's and not this book's. The Vaiṣṇavas had gathered in front of the Siddheśvar liṅga and were singing the name of Hari. Then Sopān arrived, brimming over. He got his arms round Viṭṭhal's feet, and Viṭhojī said: get up, get up, open your eyes, quickly, go and meet Jñāndev.

Sopān answered him. There is nothing left for me to do, he said. The remembrance of your name does not stop, and all our good has come out of it. You alone are father and mother. You alone in the three worlds. Looking at you we stand always in unmanī, past where the mind goes. The bed of the samādhi has been made ready for Jñān, night and day, and I heard it with my ears and with my life, and I came and took hold of your feet. Nāmdev finishes the abhaṅga by saying that Jñān and Sopān became one. It is Sopān's longest speech in any source in this dossier and it is almost entirely about somebody else.

Nivṛtti had been sitting seven days in unmanī. In the next abhaṅga he comes back to himself and looks at the face in front of him, and Jñānrāj takes Sopān in his arms. Nāmdev names the three of them in a line as he does it: Nivṛtti the hoard, Sopān the wealth itself, Jñāndev.

The samādhi itself belongs to Jñāndev's chapter (see Jñāndev, The sañjīvan samādhi at Āḷandī). What is Sopān's in it is two moments. When the Lord came down and spoke to Nivṛtti, Sopān threw himself down at full length on the ground; Muktābāī took hold of the feet; the saints stood praising Pāṇḍuraṅg. Then the Lord comforted them, and took Sopān by the hand, and laid his own hand on Nivṛtti's head. And at the parting, Jñāndev made his bow to Hari and Nivṛtti and Sopān bowed straight after him, and Muktābāī came up quickly and took her brother by the hand. Sopān is not only the one who threw himself down. He is named in the act of saying goodbye.

He went first of the four, and in Nāmdev's telling he asked to. When the Lord told Nivṛtti to go up to the peak of Tryambak and take his samādhi there beside the Ganges water, Sopān spoke. Svāmī, he said, you said it before: on the Karhā plateau, in the village of Saṃvatsar, you said you would give the samādhi. The Lord said to ask the saints, and that Jñāndev was there with them, and that his body too was of that kind and would come that far. Muktābāī asked to serve at the feet. Then Nivṛtti and Sopān together said: Hari, keep us always.

He got his answer. All the sacred waters have gathered, the abhaṅga goes on, and now we go to Saṃvatsar and seat Sopān in samādhi. And Sopān asked him for one thing more: lord of Vaikuṇṭha, be pleased to come; to the village of Saṃvatsar on the bank of the Karhā, come, and bring Vaikuṇṭha with you. It is the only request of his own that survives anywhere in the record.

Jñāndev, speaking after he had sat down, told Nivṛtti to go now to the peak of Tryambak, and said that daily at Hari's feet there would be Nivṛtti and themselves and Sopān. Nivṛtti answered him. We shall go, and go quickly, he said, when we have seated Sopān in his samādhi on the way. So Sopān dying first is not only a modern reconstruction from the dates. It is said out loud in the scene, in the earliest source there is, by the brother who was going to have to bury him.

The order and the places are agreed. Very soon after Jñāndev's samādhi Sopān passed away first, then Muktābāī, and last of all Nivṛttināth, and Sopān's samādhi is at Sasavaḍa. The year given is 1296, the same as his brother's, on the same tradition that has him born in 1277. A second modern table agrees and adds the river: Sāsvaḍ, on the banks of the Karhā. Nāmdev, who was there, does not use the name Sāsvaḍ. He calls the place the village of Saṃvatsar on the Karhā bank. The river is the same river in all three. The two names are left standing as the sources leave them.

Of the going itself there is one line. Nāmdev, counting off where each of them ended, wrote that Nāmā dances at Paṇḍharī, that Jñāndev is bright at Alaṅkāpurī, that Sopān goes in procession at Saṃvatsar, and that Nivṛtti is on the peak of Tryambak. No source in this dossier describes Sopān's death, or who was with him, or what he said. The record gives him the promise, the request, his brother's undertaking, and the place.

There is no speaking likeness of Sopān. Nothing describes his face, his build, his manner or his voice. Everything he does in the whole dossier fits on one line: he argues once at Āḷandī, he gives the brahmins of Paiṭhaṇ their four names, he carries a letter and shows it, he tells Cāṅgdev's messenger who his own master is, he kindles a fire, he speaks to Viṭṭhal on the day his brother sat down, and he asks to be buried on the Karhā. Nothing at all is recorded of the years between Paiṭhaṇ and his death, a stretch of about nine years on the usual dating: not where he lived, not what he did, not whether he went on the pilgrimage north with Nāmdev and Jñāndev. No disciple of his is named anywhere. The Bhaktavijaya says he wrote Nivṛtti's abhaṅgas down and then says nothing more about it, and no other source in this dossier confirms it. Not one word of his own about his brother or his sister survives outside Nāmdev's account of the samādhi, and the four of his abhaṅgas given here are about God and say nothing about his family. Even those reach this book at second hand, in summary and not in Marathi, and the 1919 English collection translated none of them. After chapter IX of the Bhaktavijaya he is a name that other people say things about. Whoever he was, the sources that kept his brother's every sentence did not keep his.

One gap has already been filled in by somebody. A modern account of 1941 says that after the parents drowned the elder Nivṛttināth went out with the begging bowl while the younger Sopān looked after their sister. It is the most human sentence anyone has written about him, and it is in none of the old sources. It stands here as a modern writer's and not as the record's, because the temptation to keep a sentence like that is exactly the temptation this chapter has to refuse.