रूपकात्मक कविता

The allegorical (rūpaka) verse is one of the most distinctive forms in Marathi sant-poetry. In its developed shape it became the bhāruḍ: a mock-domestic vignette, often a household quarrel or a village scene, in which the literal surface is comedic or even shocking and the underlying meaning is the seeker's lament for liberation. Eknāth, two and a half centuries after Janabai, established the bhāruḍ as a major form of Marathi devotional literature; many of his most-quoted compositions are in this register. What the form looks like in its earlier stages, before Eknāth gave it its mature shape, is preserved in part in Janabai's two famous allegorical verses. Together, abhanga 477 ("a wonder, a wonder") and abhanga 478 ("Khaṇḍerāya, kill them all") are among the earliest surviving Marathi rūpaka compositions, and they show the form already in working condition three hundred years before Eknāth's full development of it.

A short introduction to the rūpaka and bhāruḍ forms

Marathi devotional poetry of the medieval period operated in several distinct verse-forms (the abhanga, the ovī, the pada, the śloka) and across several distinct rhetorical registers. The rūpaka register is the allegorical: a verse in which the literal narrative content stands for an inner spiritual meaning, with the two layers held in deliberate tension. Sanskrit poetics had long identified rūpaka as a major rhetorical figure (the metaphor proper, in classical alaṅkāra-śāstra); the Marathi sant tradition received the formal device and gave it a populist inflection by setting the allegory in everyday village or household scenes.1

The bhāruḍ in its mature form is a specific genre of Marathi devotional literature attributed primarily to Eknāth (1533–1599). The word itself means a "song of riddles" or a "performance piece"; in practice the form is a short verse-drama, often comic, in which the singer takes on a worldly persona (a fortune-teller, a beggar, a snake-charmer, a household woman) and uses the persona's situation to make an allegorical point about liberation. Eknāth composed approximately three hundred bhāruḍas, and the form became one of the most distinctive performance traditions in Marathi devotional culture, sung at temple festivals and Vārkarī gatherings to this day.2

What Janabai's two anchor verses give us is a glimpse of where this form came from. Three hundred years before Eknāth, a Matang dāsī inside a Pandharpur tailor's household was already writing allegorical verse-vignettes in the same rhetorical register the bhāruḍ would later formalise. The Marathi devotional theater Eknāth crystallised did not appear out of nothing; it had at least one substantial Yadava-era source, and Janabai's verses are part of it.

The "wonder, a wonder" verse

Abhanga 477 is the inversion-puzzle that the awakened mind sees. It opens with the announcement of a series of impossibilities: the camphor burned out and left no soot behind; sugar was sown and sugarcane came up; the ear became an eye; the wife is hardened, the husband an infant, the father-in-law a simpleton; Gokul has been carried off, where then is dasi Jani? Read on the surface, the verse is a string of contradictions and reversals, a riddle without an answer. Read allegorically, the contradictions are the standard tropes of bhakti-realisation: the camphor burning without soot is the action that leaves no karmic trace, the ear-becoming-eye is the merging of the senses in laya, the household-relations inverting are the dissolution of the social ego, the disappearance of "dāsī Jani" is the dropping of the separate self.3

The verse names its register in the opening word: navala, "a wonder." The wonder is exactly what is happening when the bhakta awakens, what was solid is suddenly impossible, what was impossible is suddenly the only true thing. The form is allegorical in the strict sense (each surface-image points to an inner meaning), but the form is also performative in the way a riddle is. The hearer is being asked to solve the puzzle, and in solving it to recognise the realisation.

The "Khaṇḍerāya, kill them all" verse

Abhanga 478 is the more famous of Janabai's two allegorical verses, and it is also the one that most fully prefigures Eknāth's mature bhāruḍ form. Read literally, the verse is a vow made by a woman to Khaṇḍerāya (a folk Maharashtrian deity, the protector worshipped especially at Jejuri) that her mother-in-law die, her father-in-law die, her sister-in-law die, "all of them die", so that she can be free of her household and sit alone at the deity's feet. Surface-read it is shocking. The Marathi devotional tradition has always read it allegorically.4

In the allegorical reading, the in-laws are the bonds of saṃsāra: the mother-in-law is the ego (the centre of household authority and the source of the speaker's binding), the father-in-law is the worldly support-structure (the breadwinning, the property), the sister-in-law is the binding social tie (the relations that constrain). The vow to "Khaṇḍerāya" is the seeker's plea for liberation from these bonds. The closing line, janī mhaṇe khaṇḍe avaghe marū de, ekaṭī rahū de pāyāpāśī, "Jani says: Khaṇḍe, let them all die. Let me sit alone at your feet", is the bhakta's request for the dissolution of every attachment that stands between her and the deity. The shock-value of the literal reading is exactly what the form is using; the allegory works because the surface is jarring enough to demand the deeper interpretation.

The verse is also socially observant. It is told from the position of a married woman in a joint household, with the recognisable in-law-grievance vocabulary that any Marathi-speaking listener would recognise as a household type-scene. The persona is not Janabai herself (who was unmarried and lived in a non-marital household setting); it is a fictional householder-woman whose voice Janabai inhabits to make the spiritual point. This is exactly the move Eknāth's bhāruḍ would make routinely. The poet inhabits a worldly persona, performs the persona's situation to its end, and lets the spiritual meaning emerge through the inhabited voice.

The structural achievement

Two anchored allegorical verses are a small body of work, but they are enough to establish the structural achievement. Janabai is, by surviving evidence, one of the earliest Marathi sants to use the rūpaka register in this populist allegorical-domestic form. The form she is using is not the formal Sanskrit allegory of classical alaṅkāra-śāstra; it is the lived-Marathi allegory of household scenes that double as inner states. Eknāth would systematise the form three centuries later. Janabai is one of the precursors who made the systematisation possible.5

The verses also show, again, the range of registers Janabai's surviving corpus moves across. The dāsī of the labor-mystical verses (Chapter II), the brahmaikya-realiser (Chapter V), the Nāth-yoga articulator (Chapter VI), the sectarian sect-builder (Chapter VII), the public moral teacher (Chapter VIII), the autobiographical first-person voice (Chapter IX), and now the allegorical poet, all are the same Sant Janabai, writing across the entire span of medieval-Marathi devotional registers. The Marathi tradition has held all of them together as one body of work for seven centuries.

What this chapter sets up

Chapter XI turns from Janabai's range of registers to the underlying linguistic accomplishment that makes the range possible: her command of Marathi as a literary medium, in a century when Marathi was still in the early stages of becoming a vernacular literary language. The argument is that Janabai's verses are evidence of how rapidly Marathi developed in the Yadava era, and how completely a non-elite woman could possess the medium when the medium opened.