भाषेची सिद्धी

Janabai's literary accomplishment is hard to see at first because the language she wrote in is one we now take for granted as a developed literary medium. In her century it was not. Marathi as a vernacular literary language was, in c. 1300 CE, in its first generation. The poets writing in it were inventing what literary Marathi would become. Janabai is one of the inventors. The chapter argues that her command of the medium, her control of the abhanga form, her register-shifts between household, mystical, didactic, and allegorical, her syntactic freedom, is 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.

Marathi as a literary language, c. 1290 CE

The Yādava dynasty of Devagiri (1189–1320 CE) made Marathi the court language and patronised Marathi learning during the period that overlaps with Janabai's adult life.1 The dynastic patronage created the institutional space within which Marathi could be used for serious literary work for the first time. The most consequential single text of that period, and the foundational work of Marathi literature in the strict sense, is the Jñāneśvarī (also called Bhāvārtha-dīpikā), Sant Jñāneśvar's commentary on the Bhagavad Gītā, completed around 1290 CE in Marathi rather than Sanskrit.2

The choice was deliberate and politically charged. Sanskrit had been, for the previous millennium, the exclusive medium of serious religious and philosophical writing in India. Brahmin orthodoxy in particular guarded Sanskrit's monopoly: the Bhagavad Gītā was readable only to those with formal Sanskrit education, which by structural exclusion meant only upper-caste male householders. Jñāneśvar's choice to write his commentary in the vernacular Marathi, what Christian Lee Novetzke calls "the quotidian revolution" of bringing scriptural philosophy into the everyday speech of villagers, was a deliberate breaking of that monopoly. The Jñāneśvarī made the Gītā readable, in the literal sense, to anyone who spoke Marathi; that is, to the entire population of Maharashtra rather than the small Sanskrit-literate elite.3

The Jñāneśvarī is the oldest surviving major literary work in the Marathi language. Its 9,000 verses (commenting on the Gītā's 700) established the Marathi ovī meter as a serious literary form, established the vocabulary and syntactic conventions later writers would inherit, and provided a working demonstration that complex theological argumentation could be conducted in the vernacular without loss of precision. Every Marathi-language religious writer who came after Jñāneśvar, Namdev, Eknāth, Tukārām, Rāmadās, built on that demonstration.4

Janabai inside the revolution

Janabai was writing in the very next generation. She was perhaps a few years older than Jñāneśvar; her active composition years overlap with his and continue for half a century after his samādhi. She is, in literal historical fact, one of the second generation of major Marathi-language writers.5 Three things follow from this dating, each of which matters for reading her literary accomplishment.

One. She is writing in a language whose literary conventions are still being formed. The abhanga meter, short four-line stanzas with refrain, suited for sung performance, was being used by her contemporaries Namdev, Jñāneśvar, and others in the same period; the form had not yet hardened into the standardised template later poets would inherit. Janabai's roughly three hundred surviving abhangas are part of the body of work that established the form. The conventions Tukārām, three centuries later, would treat as inviolable were, in 1300 CE, still being negotiated in real time. Janabai is one of the negotiators.6

Two. She is writing in a language whose vocabulary is still being expanded for theological work. Sanskrit had a millennium of theological vocabulary; Marathi did not. Each Marathi sant-poet writing in the Yadava era had to either borrow Sanskrit terms wholesale, transliterate them, or find Marathi-grounded equivalents that could carry the theological weight. Janabai's verses preserve all three strategies: Sanskrit-borrowed terms (brahma, jñāna, mokṣa, sākṣātkāra) sit alongside Sanskrit transliterations slightly modified for Marathi phonology (brahmaikya, brahmānanda) and alongside fully Marathi-vernacular phrases for theological work (the labor verses' direct vocabulary, the navala ("a wonder") opening of her allegorical verse). The mixture is itself a literary accomplishment: she is, verse by verse, expanding what Marathi can do.

Three. She is writing as a non-elite, non-formally-educated woman in a language whose literary use was, until a generation before her, considered impossible by the educated. The structural argument the Marathi vernacular revolution made was that complex thought could be expressed in the everyday speech of villagers. Janabai is the strongest possible test case for that argument. A Matang dāsī with no Sanskrit training, no formal initiation, no household library, and no institutional position writes verses that the Vārkarī tradition has held for seven centuries as theologically and literarily on the same level as Jñāneśvar's and Namdev's. The fact that she could do this is a piece of evidence about what Marathi-as-literary-medium had become by 1300 CE: a vehicle a non-elite woman could possess fully when she possessed the bhakti the language served.7

The narrative-poem genre, in two anchor works

Beyond the abhanga form, Janabai also worked in a longer narrative-poem genre. Two of her surviving works are short narrative ākhyāna compositions on Purāṇic subjects: a Hariścandrākhyāna (the story of the king Hariścandra) and a Thālīpāka-ākhyāna (the story of the Pāṇḍavas' meal-vessel during their forest-exile). Both are based on episodes from the Mahābhārata; both are among the earliest surviving Marathi vernacular renderings of these well-known Purāṇic subjects.8

The ākhyāna form Janabai uses in these works was, like the abhanga form, in early development in 1300 CE. Marathi-language narrative-poem composition would later become a major genre, with Mukteśvara in the seventeenth century producing extensive Mahābhārata renderings, and Moropant in the eighteenth century writing Sanskrit-derived narrative cycles. Janabai's two short ākhyānas are precursors to that whole later tradition. They show, again, the second-generation work of establishing what Marathi could do as a literary medium across multiple genres, not only in the brief lyric form of the abhanga.

The Marathwada dialect, and what it meant for the language's reach

Janabai grew up in Gangakhed, in what is today Marathwada, the eastern, drier, traditionally more agrarian region of present-day Maharashtra. The Marathi spoken in Marathwada has always had its own dialectal character, distinct from the Pune-area Marathi that would later be canonised as the literary standard. Janabai's verses preserve some Marathwada dialectal features: vocabulary that is more agricultural and less courtly, verb-forms that survive into modern Marathwada speech but have receded from standard Marathi, occasional lexical items unfamiliar to Pune-Marathi readers.9

The Marathwada-dialect feature matters for understanding what Marathi-as-literary-medium became. The Yadava-era vernacular revolution did not establish a single dialect as the literary standard; it established Marathi-in-its-variants as a literary medium, with each saint-poet writing in their own regional inflection. Jñāneśvar's Marathi (Pune region) is different from Janabai's (Marathwada) and from Eknāth's (Paithan). The diversity is itself part of what made the medium robust enough to last seven centuries: literary Marathi was, from its founding generation, a multi-dialectal medium that absorbed regional variation without losing coherence. Janabai is, in this respect, a Marathwada-Marathi voice in a literary tradition that needed Marathwada-Marathi voices to be a complete tradition.

The accomplishment, named directly

What Janabai's literary accomplishment finally amounts to: she is, by surviving evidence, the first Matang woman writer in any Indian vernacular language whose body of work survived the medieval period intact. She is one of the founding generation of Marathi-as-literary-medium. She is one of the earliest poets working in the abhanga form that would become the dominant lyric form of Marathi devotional literature for the next seven centuries. She is one of the earliest Marathi narrative-poem composers. And she did all of this from outside every institutional structure that, in her century, was supposed to be the precondition for serious literary work, without Sanskrit, without formal education, without caste-standing, without the temple-Brahmin patronage that conventionally underwrote literary careers.

The Marathi tradition has always treated her literary standing as on the same level as Jñāneśvar's and Namdev's. The historical record we have access to today, read carefully, supports that judgment. Modern scholarship, from R. D. Ranade's Mysticism in India: The Poet-Saints of Maharashtra through Anne Feldhaus's work on women in Maharashtrian religion through Novetzke's recent Columbia-press monographs, has consistently confirmed the placement.10

What this chapter sets up

Chapter XII closes the book by drawing together the threads that have run through the previous eleven: Janabai's six distinct registers (household-mystical, sect-builder, public moral teacher, brahmaikya-realiser, Nāth-yoga articulator, allegorical-poet); her unique social position; her literary accomplishment; and the ongoing presence of her work in living Marathi devotional culture seven hundred years after her death.