Jasuswami

Twice, then a third time, then a fourth, the same two men crept back along the field paths outside a village in Antarved to check on something that made no sense to them. They had stolen a yoke of white oxen from an old farmer known in those parts simply as Swamiji, driven the animals home under cover of night, and tied them safely in their own shed. Yet when they passed the swami's plot only a day or two later, there stood a pair of white oxen at his plough, indistinguishable from the ones now standing in their own yard. They hurried home to check. Their stolen oxen were exactly where they had left them, chewing quietly in the dark. They went back to the field. The oxen were there too, yoked and cutting furrows as if they had never left the ground. Back and forth the two men went, two or four times over, growing more footsore and more bewildered with each crossing, until, in the words the old chronicle uses for it, their chitta could not settle on any explanation at all.

The man at the center of their confusion was known across that stretch of country only as Jasuswami, a title more than a full introduction, and almost everything else about him has to be pieced together from the handful of verses that preserve his memory. He lived, the commentary says, in Antarved, the long tongue of land that the Ganga and the Yamuna enclose between them as they run down toward their meeting at Prayag, a tract farmers have always counted fortunate because the yearly flooding of both rivers leaves behind soil rich enough to carry more than one harvest a year. Most of the wandering ascetics remembered in the Bhaktamal gave up hearth and field entirely, taking to temple courtyards or the open road. Jasuswami did something quieter, and in its own way harder: he stayed on his land, took the plough into his own hands, and let his farming itself become his sadhana. What the field gave him he did not keep. Grain, milk, curd, whatever came from his few acres and his animals, went first to the sadhus and Vaishnavs passing his door, so that his small holding worked less like private property and more like a wayside kitchen for anyone walking the pilgrim roads of the doab.

One year, some men of the surrounding country, described in the old telling simply as thieves, made off with his pair of bullocks. Jasuswami did not chase them, did not go to anyone with a complaint, did not appear to register that anything of his had gone missing at all. When people came to tell him his oxen had been stolen, he gave an answer that has outlived every other word he is recorded to have spoken: "Bal to mere Ramji ke yahan sada bane hain, khet jotate hain," the oxen are always there at my Ramji's house, they are out ploughing the fields. It is worth sitting with how plainly that sentence is delivered. He is not being evasive, and he is not laying down a riddle for the thieves to work out later. He is simply reporting a fact as he understood it: the field had never been his to lose anything from, since the field, like the oxen, like the grain, like the very breath that let him speak, belonged to Ramji in the first place. Sure enough, when his neighbors looked, a new pair of white oxen, identical to the stolen ones, stood harnessed at his plough, drawing the same furrows as before. For the better part of a year, by the old account, this second pair worked his land as though nothing at all had happened.

It was at a haat, a village market day, that the thieves' unease finally caught up with them. Passing near Jasuswami's field on some other errand, they saw, yoked to his plough, the very oxen sleeping that same hour in their own shed at home, and they turned to each other with the obvious question: who brought our animals here? They went home to check. The stolen pair stood exactly where they had left them. They went back to the field. The pair was there too, quietly at work. This happened, the old text says, two or four times, until the men were worn thin with walking and thinner still with disbelief. Whatever shame or fear finally moved them, they gathered up the stolen oxen and led them back to Jasuswami's home to return what they had taken. The moment the animals arrived at his door, they vanished outright, leaving behind nothing but the original replacement pair, standing calm in the yard exactly as they had stood all year. There was, at that point, no theft left to confess and no property left to restore. What remained was only the fact the two men could no longer explain away: something far larger than an old farmer had been minding his fields the entire time.

Whatever hardness had let these men make a living out of other people's losses broke apart in front of Jasuswami's plough. They fell at his feet, the commentary says, speaking the most helpless and submissive words they had, describing not only what they had seen but what it had done to them; they had come looking for a pair of bullocks and had stumbled instead onto a grace they had no name for and no defense against. Jasuswami, whom the old verses call dayanidhi, an ocean of compassion, did not lecture them on what they had done. He did not demand restitution beyond what they had already tried to give, and he did not send them off to face the punishment their trade usually earned. He drew them into his shelter instead and gave them the bhagavad-mantra, initiation into the remembrance of God, treating their theft less as a crime to be settled than as a badly aimed hunger that had finally found its true object.

What happened to those two men afterward is, in its own way, a more startling wonder than the vanishing oxen. They gave up chori, the old life of theft, completely. Their understanding, the tika says, grew utterly clear; they took up a new way of living and walked the same road the sadhus walked. Men who had once slipped into other people's sheds after dark now carried grain, milk, and curd to the guru's dwelling and to the wandering Vaishnavs gathered there, giving with an open affection that no longer counted any cost. They stayed close in satsang, sang the praises of bhakti, of Bhagavan, and of their guru, and lived, the verses insist, steeped in unending sukh and paramananda, a joy with no further horizon left to reach for.

Nabhadas closes his account of Jasuswami with a doha that reads less like a summary of events than a verdict on the man himself: Harigunagram, nama rata, gata mamata mada moha; taakar sukh soha jaan, chidananda sandoha. Absorbed in the Name, given over entirely to singing the multitude of Hari's virtues, gone from him is mamata, the sense of my-ness, gone is mada, pride, and moha, the delusion of attachment; know his happiness to shine as nothing less than an ocean of chidananda, the bliss of pure consciousness itself. Readers of Braj Bhasha have long noticed that gram can mean either an abundance or, quite literally, a village; no one can say for certain whether Nabhadas meant to let that second sense hover over a man who spent his whole devotion inside one village field, but for a farmer whose entire practice took the shape of tilled earth, the echo is hard to miss. Nabhadas is not really telling us that Jasuswami could summon oxen out of nowhere. He is telling us that Jasuswami had already surrendered the very category of mine long before any thief arrived, so that when the theft came, it had nothing left in him to land on.

That may also be the real reason the story refuses to end in punishment. The men who wronged him are never named and never placed in any class the text wants us to look down on; they are simply people who had built a life on taking, and the tale's only interest in them is how completely that life came apart the moment it collided with someone who had stopped claiming anything as his own. Grace, in this telling, does not argue with karma or override it by force. It simply stands there, patient and unpunishing, doing the thieves' expected penance on their behalf in the form of one more furrow ploughed, one more pair of oxen quietly supplied, until the men themselves grew too worn out to keep believing in their own crime.

Beyond this single episode, very little can be said with confidence about Jasuswami, and it is worth saying so plainly rather than filling the silence with invented detail. Nabhadas names him in a couplet composed around 1585; Priyadas, writing his kavitt commentary a little over a century later, expands the story with the market scene and the thieves' conversion; and Sitaramsharan Bhagwanprasad, known as Rupkala, compiling his Bhaktisudhasvad tilak commentary in the early twentieth century for the Tejkumar Press edition still read today, retells it once more in plain Hindi prose. No independent chronicle from his own era, and no later hagiographical anthology outside this lineage of commentary, preserves his birth, his native village, his guru, or the year of his death; even the two men he took as disciples go unnamed. That silence is not a gap in the record so much as an honest description of the kind of saint he was. Jasuswami never traveled to any court to be honored and never founded a lineage that needed remembering. So far as the record shows, he did nothing more than farm a stretch of riverside land in Antarved and treat it, without exception, as belonging to someone else.

He is not alone, in the wider memory of the bhakti traditions, in having his ordinary labor quietly taken over by the very God he served. The Varkari saint-poets of Maharashtra tell something structurally similar of Sena, a barber, whom Vitthal is said to have covered for at the king's court while Sena lost himself in kirtan and forgot his duty. The two traditions are distinct and the details do not match, but the shape of the teaching repeats wherever it appears: a devotee steps so completely out of the way that the Lord is left with nowhere to stand except directly inside the devotee's own daily work. In Jasuswami's case, that work was the plainest one there is, a furrow cut into wet river soil, and the God who took it up left behind, when the story closes, not a temple or a shrine to the miracle but two changed men carrying pots of milk and curd toward a gathering of sadhus, still singing.