समाजप्रबोधन

If Chapter VII showed Janabai as a deliberate Vārkarī sect-builder, this chapter shows her in a still less expected role: as a public moral teacher addressing the ordinary householder, with verses of upadeśa (instruction) on what to do, what to refuse, what to honor, what to recognise as fraud. The didactic verses are, by frequency and reach, the verses by which Janabai entered Marathi devotional culture beyond the saint-circle. The argument of the chapter is that this didactic vocation is one of her three central contributions to Marathi religious life, alongside the household-mystical verses (Chapter II's labor cluster) and the sectarian-canonical verses (Chapter VII).

The teaching position, and how she earned it

Didactic poetry, the verse-form in which a saint addresses ordinary people directly with practical and moral instruction, is one of the standard registers of Marathi sant-literature. Eknāth, Tukārām, and later Rāmadās would each produce extensive bodies of didactic verse. Janabai, three centuries before the most famous of them, produces the form in mature shape. The position from which she does so is unusual on its face: a Matang dāsī, formally at the bottom of the social order, telling Brahmin householders and Brahmin-trained sādhus what they are getting wrong. The position is earned by the Kakaḍ Ārati recognition (Chapter III): once Jñāneśvar has publicly named her a saint, she has the Vārkarī tradition's standing to speak as one. The didactic verses use that standing without apology.1

The Vārkarī tradition was, from its Yadava-era founding, structurally more open to such cross-caste teaching than mainstream Brahmanical Hinduism of the period was. The doctrine vaiṣṇava to ek ("the Vaiṣṇava is one") fixed the equality of saints inside the bhakta-circle regardless of caste, and the historical record bears this out: Chokhāmelā the untouchable, Gora the potter, Sāvatā the gardener, Janabai the Matang maidservant, and Niv­ṛtti the Brahmin all sat together in the Pandharpur saint-mandali and addressed each other as kin.2 Inside this circle, a Matang dāsī could legitimately instruct anyone. Outside the circle, the social order outside the temple gate did not change. Her didactic verses speak from inside the circle to inside the circle, and the readers who received them across centuries have understood the position implicitly.

Five lines of instruction

Across the didactic abhangas (the upadeśa cluster on the Abhangas page contains seven representative verses), Janabai's instruction runs along five consistent lines.

i. Hold bhāva in the mind, then walk to Pandhari

The simplest instruction, and the one she repeats most often. Abhanga 366 states it directly: speak to God with bhāva, go to Pandhari, meet the saints, hold bhāva in the mind. The instruction names no preliminary qualification. There is no Sanskrit-knowledge requirement, no caste requirement, no initiation requirement, no renunciate requirement. The sequence is: bhāva, journey, company. Anyone can do all three. The three together are the Vārkarī sādhanā in its irreducible form, and Janabai's didactic verses are organised around making that point inescapable.

ii. The saints are God; honor them like God

Three abhangas on the Abhangas page treat the doctrine that the saints and God are one. Abhanga 381 works through a chain of household analogies (sun and rays, lamp and flame, ear and hearing) to argue non-difference. Abhanga 382 takes a sharper line: whoever holds saint and God to be separate has heaped sin upon sin; he is impure even by the menstrual woman's measure (the standard low-water mark for impurity in the Brahmanical scheme); do not look at him at sunrise. Abhanga 383 repeats the chain of household analogies (water and cloud, earth and dust, sweetness and sugar) and closes "the saint is God, God is the saint."3

The doctrinal claim is conventional Vārkarī. The Janabai-distinctive thing is the rhetorical choice: she does not derive the claim from scripture or argue it philosophically; she runs it through six or seven kitchen-and-body images per verse. The didactic register is concrete because the audience is concrete. Whatever proof a Sanskrit-literate Brahmin would have demanded, Janabai's audience needs none. They have eyes, hearths, water-pots; they understand non-difference instantly when it is shown to them in the ear and the hearing.

iii. Refuse mokṣa; ask for repeated rebirth at Pandhari

Classical Hindu thought ranks the four puruṣārthas (life-goals) with mokṣa at the top. The Vārkarī tradition reorders them: bhakti-in-the-bhakta-community is higher than mokṣa. Janabai's abhanga 296 is the canonical statement of the inversion: devā deī garbha-vāsa, "Lord, give me a womb again." Bird, pig, dog, beast, cat, any rebirth is welcome, provided the rebirth places her at Nāmā's door at Pandhari. The verse refuses mokṣa for the company of the saints. Abhanga 367 takes the same position from a different angle: there is no need to grind, fall, or die for mukti; mukti walks down to the bhakta's feet. The Vārkarī wager, that bhakti at Pandhari is itself sufficient sādhanā for liberation in this very life, is what makes the inversion possible.4

iv. Reject the merchant-renunciates and false guides

Janabai is sharp on the question of fraudulent religious authority. A long abhanga (not in this edition yet) attacks the Gayā-vāḷa, the priestly intermediaries who exploited pilgrims at the cremation-ground rituals at Gayā in northern India, demanding heavy dakṣiṇā in return for promised mokṣa for the deceased. Mahipati's Bhaktavijaya records similar warnings against fake sādhus and exploitative renunciates throughout the Yadava-era saint corpus.5 The didactic position is consistent with the Vārkarī tradition's broader moral economy: the path is bhakti, the company is the saints, the destination is Pandhari, and anyone selling something else is selling a counterfeit.

v. Drop the body-pride; the seed must be roasted

The closing line of instruction is interior. Even bhakti, Janabai argues, will not bring the bhakta to God if the body-pride remains. Abhanga 392 states the principle directly: the things that cannot be obtained by force (the hero's weapon after his breath is gone, the miser's wealth after his breath is gone, the lion's claw and the chaste woman's breast after their breath is gone), these stand for what cannot be obtained while body-pride still holds. Vīrāḷyāvāṅcuna deha ahaṃbhāva, janī mhaṇe deva hātāṃ na ye: "without dropping body-pride, Jani says, God does not come to hand."

Abhanga 390 gives the instruction concrete form in the mango-stone parable. The mango is enjoyed and the rind discarded, but the seed remains and grows another tree. So with the bhakta. Strip the rind of māyā at the root; preserve the seed of aham; then roast the seed in the fire of devotion and offer the body whole at the saint's feet. After that, do not crave it back. The verse closes with the instruction's punch-line: āhe nāhīṁ deha dharī aisā bhāva, mhaṇe janī deva sahaja hosī, "hold the body as both there and not-there: Jani says, you are God already." The whole interior path of Vārkarī sādhanā is in those two lines.

Why this register matters for Marathi sant-literature

Janabai's didactic verses prefigure the entire later Marathi sant-didactic tradition. Eknāth in the sixteenth century, Tukārām in the seventeenth, and Rāmadās in the same period would all produce extensive bodies of upadeśa verse, each in their own inflection: Eknāth more narrative and theological, Tukārām more pungent and self-questioning, Rāmadās more programmatic. Each owes something to Janabai. Tukārām's most-quoted line, buḍatī he jana na dekhave ḍoḷā, yeto kaḷavaḷā mhaṇoniyā ("I cannot bear to see these people drowning; pity rises in me, that is why"), is a register Janabai had already used three centuries earlier in her bhāmbāvale jana dhāve āṭāāṭī verse on the bewildered who run from one false path to another.6 The lineage of Marathi didactic-bhakti runs through her, and the historical record will not let us read Marathi sant-literature whole without her.

Why this register matters for the contemporary reader

For a reader coming to Janabai today, through the Vārkarī tradition, through Marathi devotional culture, through Advaita Vedānta, or through the bhakti tradition more broadly, the didactic chapter is the most accessible thing she wrote. The instructions make no demands of yogic technique, no demands of formal initiation, no demands of caste-purity. They ask only that the reader hold bhāva in the mind and walk toward Pandhari, that they honor the saints as God, that they refuse to chase mokṣa, that they reject merchant-renunciates, that they drop body-pride. Five instructions; each one accessible without apparatus. The verses were addressed to the same fifteen-person tailor's household she lived in. They are home-instruction, not seminar-instruction.7

This is finally what makes Janabai's didactic register so durable. The instruction is not pitched to specialists; it is pitched to the people the saints actually live among. Seven hundred years later, the people the instructions are pitched to still exist, still walk to Pandharpur for the vārī every July, still sing her verses at kīrtanas, still read her in the Marathi gathas. The didactic abhangas are, by usage if not by status, her most active body of work in living Marathi devotional life.

What this chapter sets up

Chapter IX turns from Janabai's public-teaching voice to her autobiographical voice, the verses where she names herself, names the household, names the saints she lived among, and gives us, in her own first-person, the only contemporary witness we have to her life. Chapter X then takes up her allegorical and rūpaka verses, where the household becomes the seeker's lament in a register that prefigures the later bhāruḍ form Eknāth would establish in Marathi devotional literature.