Nabhadas

A boy of about five is sitting alone under a tree at the edge of a forest somewhere in drought-stricken country, and he cannot see the tree, or the forest, or the two travelers approaching him, because he has been sightless since the day he was born. His father is already dead. His mother, who dragged him this far while the whole countryside starved, has just done the hardest thing a mother can do: she has left him here, because she could not carry him another mile and feed herself too, and she has walked on toward wherever there might be grain. He does not know this yet as an abandonment. He only knows that he is alone in the dark, in a season when even the crows are thin.

Two wandering renunciates come up the path, both disciples of the same order, both students in their own time of the ascetic Krishnadas Payahari. The elder, Kilhadas, stops. "Child," he asks, "who are you, and why do you sit here alone? Is there no one with you? Where are your mother and father?" And the answer that comes back, from a starving, blind five-year-old with no one in the world, is not the answer of a frightened child. "Until this moment, Maharaj, I believed myself friendless," he says, "but your question itself has reminded me of who I am. It is true I have no mother, no father, no companion of my own. But the one who is mother, father, and companion to this whole world, he is my companion too, and he has not left me." Kilhadas and Agradas, both of them realized souls, are silent for a moment. Then Kilhadas tips his kamandalu, his water pot, and lets a few drops fall on the boy's closed eyes. And in that instant, sight comes. The first two faces this child has ever seen in his life are the faces of two old sadhus, radiant with the shock of what they have just witnessed, tears standing in their own eyes at the sight of his.

They carry him back with them to Galta, the cleft in the red hills east of Jaipur where the spring never runs dry and langurs move through a hermitage tradition already says was blessed in ages past by the sage Galava. There, on the order of Kilhadas, it is Agradas who takes the boy in hand, names him Narayandas, and gives him initiation into the Ram-mantra. But the name that history remembers him by comes later, and even its origin is told two ways, both of them offered by the tradition itself as things heard from the mouths of holy men rather than settled record. In one telling, he is a fragment of Brahma's own being, sent into this Kali age sightless as a consequence and a grace together, after Brahma once stole away Krishna's beloved calves and cowherd companions in Vrindavan out of a moment's delusion, was cursed for it, begged forgiveness, and was told that in recompense he would be born blind for five years in the age to come, after which both his outer and his inner eyes would open onto great glory. In the other telling, he is named from something stranger still: a bead of sweat that fell from Hanuman's own body while he sat in yogic discipline at the feet of Shiva after finishing his studies under Surya the sun, a drop that Shiva caught and kept, and which was, ages later, cast down from the sky, nabha, to the earth, bhu, becoming Nabhabhuj, Nabhaji. Whichever telling one favors, and the old commentators plainly loved having both, the point they insist on is the same: this was a soul born of no ordinary womb and claimed by no ordinary family line. In later years, when people tried to sort him into this lineage or that one, into one label or another, his own tradition pushed the question aside with something close to irritation, insisting that his body belonged to no clan of blood at all, only to the imperishable, and that whoever called it otherwise, in scorn, was speaking sin, not truth. One later strand of memory even places his infancy far to the south, in a village on the Godavari in the Deccan, though whether that detail is a precise inheritance or a story that grew up around a famous name, no one can now say with certainty.

At Galta, the boy who could not walk a mile with his mother was given a different kind of walking to do: up and down the rows of visiting sadhus, washing their feet, clearing away their used leaf-plates, eating what they left as prasad, drinking the water that had touched their feet as though it were nectar, because to him, in time, it was. This was the task Agradas set him, and he did not do it as a chore. Something in the boy who had once answered a stranger's question with theology instead of self-pity now poured itself into that basin of water and that half-eaten plate of someone else's food. Little by little his heart took on what the old tilak calls a rasa, a taste, unlike any other: the flavor of devotion itself, distilled and passed from the leftover meals of God's own lovers into the mouth of a child no family wanted. By the time he was grown, that taste had become his whole personality. Wonder, once it enters a person that way, does not stay contained. Whoever has seen the peculiar radiance of real bhakti, the old commentators say, finds that even the eyes of the wise and the world-weary go a little dazzled trying to look straight at it.

What this once-sightless orphan grew up to write is the reason two thousand years of Vaishnava devotion has a spine at all. Sometime around the turn of the seventeenth century, at Galta or in its memory, Nabhadas composed the Bhaktamal, a garland, in the literal sense of the word, strung bead by bead in the chhappay meter of Braj Bhasha, of the lives of some two hundred lovers of God, stretching from Dhruva and Prahlada in the mythic dawn of time down to men and women who were, for him, recent memory or living neighbors. No one before him had tried to hold that much devotion in one string. He opened it, tellingly, not with kings or scholars but with salutations to every incarnation of God he could name, fish to boar to dwarf to the Buddha, and then moved straight on to praise, without a flicker of hesitation, the beggars, hunters, and forest-dwellers whose company the proud of his day would not keep. He set them beside emperors and sages on the same string of verse and let the verse itself make the argument: that birth explains nothing, and love explains everything. Grace, wrote a commentator centuries later trying to capture what Nabhadas meant, is a strange and matchless thing, never once pausing to consult a person's station before it strikes, and wherever it lands like lightning, it frees that soul, then and there, from every quarrel this world or the next could throw at it. A man who had been left in a forest to die because he was one more mouth no one could feed had, by the end of his life, become the single authority the whole tradition turned to for the true measure of a soul's worth. It is hard to imagine he did not feel the irony of that, and harder still to imagine he did not intend it.

Among the entries in that garland is a small, six-line stanza that would end up mattering more than its length suggests: his praise of Tulsidas, a contemporary he almost certainly knew or at least knew of directly, whom he named, in essence, a fresh incarnation of Valmiki sent to redo in the Kali age what Valmiki had done at the world's beginning, pour the story of Ram into a form ordinary people could hold in their mouths and carry in their hearts. Later legend, gathering as it always does around two great souls who crossed paths, tells it that Nabhadas once came upon a wandering mendicant eating kheer that had been poured, of all places, into a worn-out sandal, because the man could not bear to eat from anything better than what a guru's foot had touched. When Nabhadas asked him why, the stranger's eyes filled with tears, and it was only afterward, turning the encounter over in his mind, that Nabhadas understood whom he had actually met. "I have found the very summit of my whole garland today," he is remembered to have said. Whether that particular afternoon happened exactly as later devotees loved to tell it, what is certain is this: Nabhadas's brief verse is among the very earliest outside witnesses we have that Tulsidas was already regarded, in his own lifetime, as something more than a skilled poet, a full century before Priyadas would expand that single verse into an entire chapter of miracles involving Hanuman and Ram himself.

Beyond the Bhaktamal, Nabhadas is also credited with the Ashtayam and the Ramashtayam, poems that lay out, watch by watch, how a devotee's love for Ram should fill each of the eight three-hour divisions of day and night, waking, resting, worshipping, remembering, so that no hour is ever truly empty of him. There is something almost too fitting in that. This was, after all, the boy once given the job of standing for the length of an entire discourse fanning the assembly so his guru's concentration would not break, a task the tilak remembers him performing with such intensified devotion, precisely at the moment Agradas's own mind wandered toward a disciple's ship in danger at sea, that his guru turned afterward and recognized in him something rare. The child who learned to mind every minute of someone else's meditation grew into the poet who taught an entire lineage how to mind every watch of its own.

What came after him only proved how deeply the garland he wove had taken root. A little over a century later, in 1712, Priyadas added his own verse commentary, the Bhaktirasabodhini, filling out story after story that Nabhadas's terse original chhappays had only gestured toward. Centuries after that, in the twentieth, Sitaramsharan Bhagwan Prasad, known by his title Rupkala, produced a further Hindi commentary, the Bhaktisudhaswad tilak, still printed and still read, still trying, page after page, to unfold everything compressed into Nabhadas's original lines. Even the plainest facts of his own life, ironically for a man who spent his life recording the facts of others, were never agreed upon. One devotional community, which today keeps a public holiday each spring in his honor as a guru of their own lineage, holds that he lived more than a hundred years, born in the early sixteenth century and passing from the world well into the seventeenth, and tells of him healing the sick and feeding multitudes in his old age, the kind of stories that gather naturally around any name that has outgrown the plain record anyone thought to keep of it. Scholars working from the language of the text itself are more cautious, content to say only that the Bhaktamal was composed somewhere around the year 1600, without committing to a birth year or a death year at all. That the tradition cannot agree on how long he lived says something rather beautiful about how large he had become in the memory of those who loved him.

What endures past all of that argument is a single image: a blind child, orphaned in a famine, told by no one that he mattered, who grew up to decide, more or less single-handedly, whose lives would be remembered as holy for the next four hundred years and counting. He gathered dukes of the spirit and unnamed nobodies onto the same string and made no apology for it, because he had lived the truth of it himself before he ever wrote a word of it down. If there is a prayer hidden inside his story, it is the one he already spoke, without knowing anyone would remember it, as a starving five-year-old alone in a forest: that whoever else stays or leaves, the one who is father and mother and friend to the whole world has already claimed you as his own, and there is nothing left to do but reach back.