सांप्रदायिक काव्यकर्तृत्व

The Vārkarī sampradāya as it crystallised in the Yadava era had a small set of recurring literary themes that any saint claiming the canon was expected to take up: praise of Pundalik (the foundational devotee), Pandhari-mahatmya (the greatness of Pandharpur), descriptive vignettes of Vitthal himself, songs in praise of fellow saints, the doctrine of the one Vaiṣṇava across caste, and the central importance of the Name. Janabai is the only woman of her generation who took on all six themes, and the only Vārkarī woman saint of any era whose contribution to the sect's literary canon is on the same scale as her male contemporaries Namdev, Jñāneśvar, and Eknāth. The chapter argues that this body of work is what consolidates her canonical standing alongside her devotional and mystical verses.

What "sect-formation" means in the Vārkarī context

Christian Lee Novetzke's study of Namdev (Columbia University Press, 2008) frames the early Vārkarī sampradāya not as a top-down institutional founding by a charismatic teacher, but as a slow public-memory crystallisation around a cluster of saint-figures whose verses, performances, and biographies were transmitted orally across centuries before being written down.1 The Vārkarī sect, in this reading, did not have a founder in the strict sense; it had a generation of saint-poets at Pandharpur in the late thirteenth century whose collective work, retroactively, established what the sect was. To take on the house-themes of the sect was therefore not a passive act of conformity but an active act of sect-construction: the poet who wrote a Pundalika-mahatmya verse was helping to shape what the Vārkarī sampradāya was going to be.

By this measure, Janabai is a sect-builder in the same sense Namdev is. The two-hundred-eighty-or-so abhangas she composed are roughly comparable in number to the surviving body of any Yadava-era Vārkarī saint other than Jñāneśvar himself; her verses on the house-themes are formally and theologically as rich as the verses Namdev composed on the same themes; and her position in the gathas (the canonical collections), where her work was preserved alongside Namdev's, is the position of a co-builder rather than of a follower.2

Six themes she took on

Janabai's sectarian work covers six themes, treated below in the order that the Marathi tradition itself recognises them. The corresponding abhangas are on the Abhangas page; the chapter prose names what the verses do.

अ · पुंडलिकमाहात्म्यi. The praise of Pundalik

Pundalik is the foundational devotee of the Vārkarī tradition: the bhakta whose service to his elderly parents was so complete that when Krishna arrived at his door, Pundalik refused to interrupt his filial duty and threw a brick outside for the deity to stand on. The legend is reconstructed in detail in Chapter I; here the relevant point is that any Vārkarī poet was expected to write Pundalik-praise verses, and Janabai produced four of high quality.3

The four verses (in the Abhangas page's Pundalik & Pandhari cluster): 160 (Pundalik brought Vitho down to earth; the avatāras compressed onto a single brick), 161 (the seal of Pundalik's bhāva is upon the deity; Pundalik set the riddle Brahman waits at his door for), 162 (Pundalik as Chakravartī, universal sovereign of the bhakta-domain), and 304 (Pundalik as the parent of all bhaktas including the dāsī herself). The verses are formally compact, doctrinally exact, and emotionally intimate; they read like the work of a poet who has internalised the foundational story so thoroughly that she can write it from inside without strain.

आ · पंढरीमाहात्म्यii. The greatness of Pandhari

Pandharpur, the town that holds the Vitthal shrine, occupies a specific theological position in Vārkarī self-understanding: it is "Bhū-Vaikuṇṭha," the earthly Vaikuṇṭha, the one place where the deity who normally dwells in the heaven of Vishnu has come down to stand permanently on a brick.4 Vārkarī poets routinely write Pandhari-mahatmya verses that compare Pandharpur to other major Hindu pilgrimage sites and argue for its superiority. Janabai's contribution to this theme is unusual in two respects.

First, she takes the strongest possible Pandhari-supremacy position. In a long abhanga not currently in this edition she argues Pandharpur is greater than Vārāṇasī (Kāśī), the canonical Hindu mokṣa-city, on the grounds that the path to liberation at Vārāṇasī requires the suffering of multiple lives whereas at Pandhari liberation walks down to the bhakta's feet. Second, she inverts the standard puruṣārtha hierarchy. The classical Hindu scheme places mokṣa (liberation) as the highest of the four life-goals; Janabai's abhanga 296 refuses mokṣa and asks instead for repeated rebirth, in any form (bird, pig, dog, beast, cat), provided the rebirth places her at Nāmā's door at Pandhari. The verse is the classic statement of the Vārkarī tradition's wager: bhakti-in-the-bhakta-community is higher than mokṣa.

Anchored verses: 177 (mukti as the beggar at the saint's house) and 296 (rebirth at Nāmā's door, in any form, refused mokṣa).

इ · जनाबाईकृत पांडुरंगवर्णनiii. Janabai's portraits of Pandurang

All Vārkarī poets write verbal portraits of the Vitthal-image, the murti as the saints see it. Janabai's portraits are distinctive in two respects. First, the murti is alive. She does not describe a stone; she describes a figure who happens to be standing very still on a brick, and who at any moment may step off and start grinding her flour. Second, her Vitthal is the family-man of the saint-circle, the one who carries the elder Niv­ṛtti on his shoulder, holds Sopān's hand, walks ahead of Jñāneśvar, and lifts younger Vaṅkā into his lap.5

Anchored verses: 168 (Brahman as foot-masseur to the bhakta) and 174 (the famous Lord-with-his-troupe-of-children verse, in which Janabai positions every Yadava-era Vārkarī saint relative to Vitthal in a small piece of historical accounting).

ई · संतमाहात्म्यiv. Songs in praise of fellow saints

Janabai composed individual praise-verses for every major saint of her circle: Jñāneśvar (treated in Chapter IV), Niv­ṛtti, Sopān, Muktābāī, Gorā Kumbhāra, Chokhāmelā, Sāvatā Mālī, Visobā Khechara, and others. The verses follow the Vārkarī formal convention, each saint named, his characteristic register identified, his blessing asked, but Janabai's variant of the form is consistently kin-inflected. Each saint is addressed not as authority but as kin: mother, father, friend, brother, dear one. Across the body of these verses the saint-circle becomes, in Janabai's hands, the family she belongs to by acclamation rather than by birth. (For an extended discussion of the Chokhāmelā verses specifically, see Eleanor Zelliot's essays on women and untouchable saints in The Experience of Hinduism, SUNY 1988.)6

उ · 'वैष्णव तो एक'v. "Vaiṣṇava is one", the egalitarian doctrine

The Vārkarī sampradāya carries, in its sectarian self-understanding, the claim that all Vaiṣṇavas (and by implication all true bhaktas) are one. The phrase vaiṣṇava to ek ("the Vaiṣṇava is one") is the bedrock of the tradition's anti-caste argument: the Brahmin and the Mahār are equal at the door of Vitthal because both are vaiṣṇava, and the social ranking outside the temple gate has no force inside the bhakta-circle. The doctrine is what makes possible the recognition-narrative that placed Janabai herself in the canon (Chapter III).7

Janabai's verses on this theme are short, declarative, and theologically sharp. The position prepares the ground for her social-awakening abhangas (the subject of Chapter VIII), which take the same logic into the public square and argue that the householder who hates the saints is impure even by the menstrual-woman's measure (the standard low-water mark for impurity in the Brahmanical scheme is here assigned to the anti-saint householder).

ऊ · नाममाहात्म्यvi. The glory of the Name

Vārkarī devotion centers on the simple repetition of "Vitthal" or "Hari" or the longer divya-nāma. The tradition argues, in its strongest form, that the Name itself is the deity, that there is no gap between the Name and the Named, and that the practice of nāma-smaraṇa (continuous recollection of the Name) is sufficient sādhanā for liberation. This is the Vārkarī wager Chapter V's discussion of brahmaikya rests on: the path of the Name, sustained over a lifetime, is a parā-vidyā in the Vedāntic sense, even without formal jñāna-yoga.8

Janabai's verses on the Name are conventional Vārkarī verse in subject but uncommonly direct in phrasing. The Name in her verses is something the dāsī can carry into her labor; it does not require ritual setting; it does not require Sanskrit; it works in the kitchen. Anchored verse: 298 ("Give me this, Hrishikeshī: your Name day and night. I want no other practice").

Why the chapter matters for the public reader

A reader who comes to Janabai expecting only a private mystic, the dāsī of the chakki and the dhune, will find the sectarian work surprising at first. It is not in that register at all. The sectarian verses are public, instructional, canonical; they are the work of a poet who is consciously building a religious community's literature. The same person did both. The mystical verses (Chapters V and VI) and the sectarian verses (this chapter) are the same person's work; the household-labor verses and the praise-of-Pundalik verses are the same person's work; the dāsī who entered the tenth door also helped build the Vārkarī sect's literary canon, and did so deliberately.

This is, finally, what is most striking about Janabai's body of work read whole: the range. A Matang dāsī of fifteenth-century Pandharpur whom her own hagiography calls "mad-and-foolish" is, in her surviving corpus, simultaneously a household-bhakta, a dāsya-mystic, a sakhya-poet, a brahmaikya-realiser, a Nāth-yoga-articulator, and a sect-builder. Each of these is a full vocation in itself. The Marathi sant tradition has held all six together as one Sant Janābāī for seven hundred years. The Vārkarī canon she helped build is what makes the holding possible.

What this chapter sets up

Chapter VIII turns to Janabai's didactic work, the verses of upadeśa, in which she becomes a public moral teacher addressing the ordinary householder rather than the renunciate. The instructions are direct, vernacular, and practical; the chapter argues that they prefigure the didactic verses Tukārām would write three centuries later.