पंच भाव

The bhakti tradition has, for at least a millennium, organised the affective stances a devotee can take toward God into five primary registers, called bhāvas (or, in their fully developed form, rasas). They are śānta, dāsya, sakhya, vātsalya, and mādhurya. The Bhāgavata-Purāṇa names them obliquely; Rūpa Gosvāmī systematises them in the sixteenth century in the Bhakti-rasāmṛta-sindhu; and the Marathi sant tradition uses them, more fluidly than Rūpa would, as a working vocabulary for naming what kind of relationship a particular abhanga sustains with the deity.1 Janabai's roughly three hundred surviving verses move, sometimes within a single composition, across all five.

The five bhāvas, briefly

These five are not, in classical Vaiṣṇava theology, a developmental sequence. Rūpa Gosvāmī treats them as stable rasas of distinct devotees: a mādhurya-bhakta does not pass through a vātsalya-bhakta phase first; she is a mādhurya-bhakta because that is the temperament of her soul. In Marathi sant-poetry, however, the categories are used more fluidly, and a single saint's body of work often moves across the five as the devotee's interior life develops.3 Janabai is a strong example: her verses sit in three of the five primary bhāvas, often within a few lines of each other.

Where Janabai sits

Across her surviving corpus, Janabai's verses cluster heavily in three of the five bhāvas: dāsya (the dāsī's love, present as the closing signature of nearly every abhanga), vātsalya (her treatment of Vitthal as Namdev's infant son, in the household-vatsalya verses), and a Vārkarī-inflected sakhya (in which the friend-relation deepens into the role-reversal where the Lord becomes her working companion).9 Pure śānta is rare in her work; she is not a contemplative-from-distance. Pure mādhurya appears only in the legendized Vitthal-Janabai love verses of her later corpus and in some allegorical compositions, and it carries with it the Marathi sant-tradition's specific inflection: not the eroticism of Rādhā-Krishna conjugal love, but the household-intimacy of secret night-meetings recorded in the vatsalya-and-dasi cluster.

दास्य भावThe dāsī's love, as the constitutive bhāva

Dāsya is Janabai's home register. Every abhanga of hers, almost without exception, closes with a signature line that names her as someone's dāsī. Most often it is "nāmyāci janī", Nāmā's Jani, but in some it is "dāsī janī", dāsī Jani, and in still others both. The closing signature is not decoration; it is the theological core of her devotional life. To read her well, the dāsī-relation has to be received as the structural fact of her bhakti, not as the social fact of her household labor.4

The verses anchored at this register on the Abhangas page: 31 (the bridal-party verse: "I gained Vitthal because I am Nāmā's dāsī"), 359 (the dāsī's daily vow), and abhanga 67 (the protest against being kept at the door because she is Shudra). The third of these is significant for understanding the dāsya-register specifically: it shows the dāsī protesting not the dāsī-relation but the social ranking that disrespects it. She holds the dāsī-relation as honor and asks Vitthal to recognise it.

वात्सल्य भावVātsalya, in the household register

Janabai's vātsalya verses are unusual within the Vaiṣṇava tradition because she does not take Yaśodā's position toward an infant Krishna in Vraja; she takes a household-aunt's position toward an infant Vitthal in Damasheti's tailor's shop in Pandharpur. The transposition is theologically deliberate. Vitthal is welcomed as Namdev's own newborn son, dressed for his bārashī (the twelfth-day naming ceremony), bathed at home for Diwali. The Vraja iconography is folded into the household.5

Anchored verses: 137 (the bāraśī, where Vitthal arrives in tiny clothes for the naming day), 284 (the Diwali bath, where Gonāī prepares the bathing-paste and Damasheti bathes the infant), 79 (the cry to Vithābāī as mother). In each, what is performed is Vraja-vatsalya, but what is performed in is a Pandharpur household.

सख्य भावSakhya, deepened into role-reversal

Janabai's sakhya register is the most distinctive thing she does. The classical Vaiṣṇava sakhya is friendship's love, often the love of co-cowherds in Vraja. Janabai inherits the formal sakhya-stance and then bends it. The friend becomes the working companion, and the working companion becomes the dāsī's helper. In the abhangas of the daily-labor cluster, the role-reversal is total: Vitthal grinds flour, washes clothes with four hands, gathers cow-dung, fetches water. The hierarchy that classical sakhya assumes (the deity slightly higher than the friend, even as the bhakta calls him friend) is, in Janabai, inverted: the dāsī gives orders, the Lord obeys.6

This is not a flaw in her theology. It is a Vārkarī signature. The same role-reversal appears, with different inflections, in the verses of Tukārām and Eknāth a century or two later. What it documents is the Vārkarī tradition's central wager: the Lord serves the bhakta who has truly given themselves to him. Janabai's labor verses are the cluster's clearest statement, and they are the cluster Maharashtra has memorised most completely.7

Anchored verses (in the labor cluster): 226 (Pandhari-nath blistered at the mortar), 262 (the Lord scolded for showing up uninvited), 263 and 264 (the Lord with the dung-bundle), 268 (fetching water without getting his hands wet), 260 (washing clothes with four hands), 261 (Hari in nāri-rūpa).

माधुर्य भावMādhurya, in its Vārkarī inflection

The mādhurya-register in classical Vaiṣṇava theology is conjugal love between Rādhā and Krishna, often eroticised in Gauḍīya commentary. Janabai's verses in this register are sparser and quite different. The legendized love-story of Vitthal's secret night-visits to her house (the cluster around abhangas 285, 286, 287, etc.) is mādhurya, but its register is the household-secret, not the bridal-bower. The Lord arrives at midnight, lies on the bed of joy, oversleeps; the next morning has to flee in haste, leaving his ornaments behind, which are then mistaken for theft. The famous Pandharpur theft incident, in which Vitthal himself takes the impalement-wound that the Brahmins meant for Janabai, is the climax of this thread.8

Anchored verses: 335 (the Lord pining for Nāmā's return: an inversion of mādhurya where the deity is the longing one), and the night-visit verses already in the Abhangas page's vatsalya-and-dāsi cluster.

A note on Irlekar's eleven-stage scheme

Dr. Suhasini Irlekar's 2002 monograph organises Janabai's devotional life into an eleven-stage developmental sequence (worldly suffering → social protest → longing for Vitthal → puranic vatsalya → sakhya → daily-labor saguna → conception of saguna Īśvara → sakhya-into-mādhurya → highest peak → legendized love-story → comparison with Jnaneshwar). It is one valid organising principle; the classical five-bhāva taxonomy used here is another. The two are reconcilable: Irlekar's stages 4 and 7 sit inside vātsalya and dāsya respectively; her stages 5, 6, and 8 span sakhya and the labor-cluster's role-reversal; her stages 9 and 10 are mādhurya in the Vārkarī inflection. Different organising spines yield different readings of the same body of verse; both have value.

What this chapter sets up

The chapters that follow take three of Janabai's bhāva-registers further. Chapter III dramatises the moment Jnaneshwar publicly recognised the dāsī as a saint at a Kakaḍ Ārati at Pandharpur, the social event that completes Janabai's transition from "Nāmā's dāsī" to "Sant Janabai." Chapter IV addresses her sakhya-relation with Jnaneshwar himself (a sakhya outside the deity-relation, between two saints across caste and gender). Chapter V follows the trajectory by which Janabai's saguṇa-bhakti opens into brahmaikya, the Advaita threshold; Chapter VI follows her into the Nāth-yoga register that Muktābāī's company gave her access to.