पार्श्वभूमी

To meet Janabai you have to know four things first: when she lived, where Pandharpur sits in the geography and theology of medieval Maharashtra, who Pundalik was, and what the Vārkarī tradition is. Each is a small piece of background; together they are the soil in which the maidservant-saint was rooted.

The century she lived in

Janabai was born sometime in the seventh or eighth decade of the thirteenth century, traditionally given as around 1270 CE, in the village of Gangakhed on the Godavari river, in what is today Parbhani district of Marathwada.1 She died in 1350.2 Her parents, Damā and Karund, were of the Matang community, one of the so-called untouchable jātis under the medieval caste system.3 Her mother died early; her father took her to Pandharpur and placed her, while still a child, in the household of Damasheti, a tailor of the Śimpī community who happened to be the father of the great bhakti poet-saint Namdev.4

Her century, the late thirteenth, was an unusual one for Maharashtra. The Yādava dynasty of Devagiri was at its political peak; Marathi was beginning to take literary form for the first time; and a wave of vernacular bhakti was breaking across the Deccan. Within a single generation, the Marathi-speaking world produced Jnaneshwar (whose Jñāneśvarī, the first major Marathi commentary on the Bhagavad Gītā, was completed around 1290 CE), Namdev, Muktābāī, Sopān, Niv­ṛtti, Gora the potter, Sāvatā the gardener, Chokhā the untouchable, and Janabai herself. They are the founding generation of what would later be called the Vārkarī sampradāya, the pilgrimage-tradition of Pandharpur. Janabai is one of them, both in her dates and in the eyes of the tradition that received her work.5

Pandharpur and Vitthal

The town of Pandharpur sits on the banks of the Bhīmā river (called the Chandrabhāgā at this stretch) in the southern part of present-day Maharashtra. At its center is the temple of Vithoba (also called Vitthal, Pāṇḍuraṅg, or Pandharināth), the deity who is the heart of the Vārkarī tradition. The temple's earliest documented sections are dated to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; an inscription from 1237 CE confirms that organized Vithoba-worship was already established by Janabai's time.6

Vithoba's iconography is unmistakable and theologically significant. He is a dark young figure, standing arms-akimbo (hands placed on the hips) upon a brick (viṭ in Marathi, from which his name is most often derived). The pose is unusual in Hindu temple sculpture; it is described, in Vārkarī literature, as the pose of a Krishna who is patiently waiting for his devotee to finish his other work.7

Modern scholarship has debated for over a century whether Vithoba originated as a Vaiṣṇava deity (a localised form of Krishna), a Śaiva pastoral god (later assimilated into Vaishnavism), or a still earlier hero-figure. The Pandharpur temple priests themselves resist definitive theological classification: in their phrasing, "Vithoba is Vithoba." The Vārkarī tradition itself reads him as an avatāra of Krishna, but with a Śiva-aspect his lineage cannot quite shake; certain scholars have called this a "Śaiva-Vaiṣṇava synthesis" rather than a pure Vaiṣṇavism.8 The synthesis matters for reading Janabai, because her own verses move freely between Vitthal-as-Krishna and Vitthal-as-Śiva-counterpart in the same line.

The Pundalik legend

The story the Vārkarī tradition tells about how Vithoba came to stand on his brick involves a single devotee, Pundalik (or Puṇḍarīka), whose service to his elderly parents was so absolute that when Krishna arrived at his door to bless him, Pundalik refused to interrupt his filial duty. He threw a brick outside for the god to stand on and asked him to wait. Krishna stood. He has been standing ever since.9

The legend is foundational for the Vārkarī tradition in two ways. First, it makes the bhakta (and not the deity) the originator of the Pandharpur shrine: Krishna comes only because Pundalik has earned the visit. Second, it makes the central act of bhakti not a ritual offering but a household duty (washing one's parents' feet) which the Lord himself respects by waiting. This is the seed-image from which the Vārkarī tradition's characteristic stance grows: bhakti is the labor of a household, not the work of a temple.10

Whether Pundalik was a historical figure has been disputed by scholars since at least the nineteenth century. Ramakrishna Gopal Bhandarkar accepted him as historical; later scholars including Ian Raeside and Charlotte Vaudeville have read him as a mythical figure, possibly derived from earlier Purāṇic narratives about a devotee named Puṇḍarīka.11 The historical question does not change his structural role in the tradition. For Janabai and every other Vārkarī saint, Pundalik is the bhakta who founded the shrine that founded their devotion.

The Vārkarī tradition

The word vārkarī means "one who undertakes the vārī", the pilgrimage on foot to Pandharpur. The tradition is centered on twice-yearly mass pilgrimages (especially the great Āṣāḍhī Ekādaśī walk in monsoon, when several hundred thousand Vārkarīs converge on Pandharpur from across Maharashtra), on the singing of abhangas at communal kīrtanas, and on the simple repetition of the name "Vitthal" or "Hari" as the central spiritual practice.12

Two structural features of the Vārkarī tradition matter for Janabai. First, the tradition has been famously open to participants of every caste from its founding generation onward: Chokhāmelā the untouchable is a saint of the same standing as Jnaneshwar the Brahmin; Janabai the Matang maidservant is read in the same canon as Eknāth (a sixteenth-century Brahmin saint who would later defend her right to be there). The Vārkarī line is one of the few major Hindu devotional traditions in which the social order at the temple gate visibly inverts: Brahmin and Mahār are equally Vārkarī once they begin the walk to Pandharpur.13

Second, the tradition's primary literary form is the abhanga, a short, sung devotional verse in Marathi, typically in a four-line stanza, with a refrain. Janabai's roughly three hundred surviving compositions are all in this form. They are oral compositions in their origin; some of them survived as standalone verses, but the bulk of them survived because they were collected into the gathas (the saint's complete works) of either Janabai herself or Namdev, in whose household corpus many of her verses were absorbed.14

Namdev's household

Damasheti, the Śimpī tailor of Pandharpur in whose household Janabai was placed, was a Vitthal-devotee in the standard Vārkarī register. Into this household his son Namdev was born around 1270 CE, roughly contemporary with Janabai herself, perhaps a few years younger.15 Namdev would grow into one of the most influential Marathi bhakti poets of the medieval period, a figure whose verses are also preserved in the Sikh Guru Granth Sahib; he travelled across northern India and is credited with extending the Vārkarī tradition's pan-Indian reach.16

Janabai's position in this household is the central biographical fact of her life. She was, formally, a maidservant, a dāsī. The household was large, and her labor was hard: grinding flour, pounding rice, washing clothes at the river, gathering cow-dung, fetching water. But she was also, by every account that survives, treated as a member of the family rather than as hired help; the relationships her own verses record are with Damasheti as a father-figure, with Gonāī as a mother-figure, with Namdev as a younger brother or guru, and with the household's other women as sisters.17

This double position, formally a dasi, structurally a member of the family, is what gives Janabai's verses their characteristic edge. When she signs every abhanga "mhane Nāmyāci Janī" ("so says Jani who is Nāmā's"), the phrase carries both meanings at once. She belongs to Namdev (in the dasi-sense) and she belongs to Namdev (in the kinship-sense). The Vārkarī tradition received the dual-meaning intact, and her readers for seven centuries have heard both registers in every verse.

Reading her, today

Five abhangas of Janabai's are anchored in this Background chapter and live on the Abhangas page: 270 (the household roll-call, where she names herself the fifteenth of fifteen souls), 137 and 284 (the vatsalya verses where Vitthal is welcomed as Namdev's own newborn), 335 (the inversion-verse where the Lord pines for the absent devotee), and 31 (the bridal-party verse where the dasi gains Vitthal because she is Nāmā's). These five are the most-cited from Janabai's first stage of devotional life. They are also the five that establish the texture of the rest: domestic, intimate, theologically inverting the standard hierarchy without naming the inversion as a doctrine.

The chapters that follow take her further. Chapter II reads her devotional life as an ascending sequence of bhāva-registers; Chapter III dramatizes the moment Jnaneshwar publicly named her a saint at a Kakaḍ Ārati at Pandharpur; Chapter V follows her into brahmaikya, the Advaita threshold; Chapter VI follows her into Nāth-yoga's tenth gate. The verses that anchor each are on the Abhangas page. The historical context is here.