Deendas

Somewhere past the middle of Nabhadas's great register of devotees, after the kings who traded thrones for begging bowls and the poets whose verses could still storms, the flow of the Bhaktamal changes its rhythm. The individual portraits, each bhakta given his own chhappay stage on which to weep, dance, or work a miracle, give way for a moment to something quieter: a single six-line verse in which dozens of names are gathered and set down together, the way a temple sweeper at dusk gathers the day's scattered petals into one basket rather than carrying them in one by one. It is in this verse, the hundred and forty-seventh of the text, that the name Deendas appears, folded in among Uddhav, Ramrele, Parashuram, Ganga, Achyutkul Brahmdas, Vishram, Krishnadas, Kheme, Gopanand, Jaidev, Damodar, Mohan, Paramanand, Raghunathi, and a dozen more, a small nation of men who are named and then, in the very same breath, released back into the anonymity from which the poet drew them.

What Nabhadas actually says of them is not a story but a declaration, and it is worth sitting with, because it is stranger and more radical than it first appears. "Those who have turned away from the world," he writes, "they are all my patrons, my yajamans, and I am their glory-singing beggar." In the world Nabhadas and his readers knew, a yajaman was the one who commissioned a sacrifice, the householder of means who fed the priest, paid the reciter, funded the rite, so that the ritual specialist could go on singing and offering on his behalf. It was a relationship built on wealth flowing one direction and status flowing back the other. Nabhadas takes that entire arrangement and turns it upside down. His patrons, he says, are men who own nothing. They have left home, land, trade, family, the whole apparatus by which a person becomes somebody who can afford to hire a poet. And yet he calls them his employers. He is the one begging at their door, not for money but for the right to sing.

This single sentence is the whole of Deendas's recorded life, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. No independent chronicle has surfaced to say where he was born, who his guru was, what year he died, or what particular deed of his so struck Nabhadas that his name earned a place in the roll call. Even the tilak, the commentary tradition that in so many other cases blooms into pages of anecdote, arguments with sceptics, miracles worked on wandering tricksters, deathbed visions of Krishna arriving in human form, goes quiet here. Sitaramsharan Bhagwanprasad Rupkala, compiling his exhaustive commentary on the text, offers for this verse only the same plain paraphrase Nabhadas himself gave: these are the ones who left the world, and I sing their glory. Even Priyadas, writing more than a century earlier and rarely at a loss for a story to expand a bare name into a scene, is silent on Deendas specifically. What remains, honestly, is a name inside a list, and nothing invented should be allowed to dress it up as more than that.

And yet the name itself is not nothing. Deen means the lowly, the poor, the one brought low, the meek and the destitute; das means servant. To take Deendas as one's name, whether given by a guru or adopted as the signature so many bhakti poets folded into their own verses, was to announce, every time it was spoken or sung, a particular posture before God: I am nobody's master, I am the servant of the lowly, or perhaps more piercingly still, I count myself among the lowly and offer whatever service I can from that ground and no higher one. In the inner grammar of bhakti this stance has a name, dainya, the deliberately cultivated sense of one's own poverty and need before the Divine. It is not self-pity. It is considered one of the purest doors through which love can enter, because the heart that has stopped insisting it is somebody in particular is the heart most ready to be filled by somebody greater. So when Nabhadas calls Deendas and his companions his yajamans and himself their yachak, their beggar, he is not merely praising them from a distance. He is stepping down into the very same dainya that gives Deendas his name. Poet and subject meet on the same low ground.

Consider, too, what it actually meant to renounce the world, since that single fact, nivritti, the turning away, is the entire credential this whole company of names shares. It did not require a crown to give up, though a few in Nabhadas's garland did have thrones to leave behind. For most it meant something plainer and in its own way harder: walking away from the ordinary machinery of being somebody, the trade that fed you, the household that named you, the standing that told you and everyone around you who you were. It meant becoming, in the eyes of the world, unaccountable, unproductive, a man with no yajaman of his own because he had nothing left to offer one. Nabhadas's verse answers that erasure directly. You think you have become no one's patron, no one's employer, no one worth serving, he says to this scattered fellowship. I say you are mine. Your renunciation is itself the wealth with which you pay me, and what I owe you in return is not silence but song.

It is worth pausing, for a moment, over the company Deendas keeps in this one verse, since none of these men are remembered for what they did but only for what they let go of. Somewhere beside him stands a Krishnadas, somewhere a Damodar, a Mohan, a Paramanand, a Jaidev, names common enough among Vaishnava households of that century that no honest reader can say with certainty which bearer of each name is meant, and any attempt to attach them to more famous men who shared those names would be guesswork dressed up as history. What can be said truthfully is that Nabhadas knew of a whole scattered brotherhood of such men, quite possibly known to one another in life, perhaps walking the same roads between Braj and the river towns, perhaps never meeting at all, united by nothing but the fact of having stepped outside the world's ledger of who counts. He refused to let that entire company disappear for want of individual tales. He built them one shared room in his garland rather than turning any of them away at the door for lack of a longer story to tell.

There is a reason the text Nabhadas wrote is called a mala, a garland, and not a gallery or a hall of portraits. A garland is strung from whatever flowers are at hand, the rare bloom beside the small wild one that has no name in any market, and the thread does not ask each flower to justify its place by size or fragrance. It only asks that the flower be real, that it once opened toward the light. Deendas is one of those small flowers. We cannot say today what village he woke in, what he owned before he owned nothing, or what finally sent him walking away from the world's account books. We can say that a poet who had already sung of emperors and miracle-workers thought it worth his own dignity to kneel, in effect, at this man's door and call himself a beggar for the chance to say his name. That the record stops there is not the tragedy of an incomplete biography. It may be closer to the point: that a life spent in nivritti needs no further ornament to be complete, and that being remembered at all, even in a single line shared with twenty others, is itself a kind of grace that outlasts every throne and every miracle story in the book.

There is an invitation folded into all of this for anyone tired enough, tonight, to still be listening. Deendas asked for nothing, built nothing, left behind no monument that survived, and is remembered anyway, by name, inside the greatest devotional roll call his language ever produced, because he had emptied his hands. The tradition that shaped his name also gave one of Krishna's own titles as dinabandhu, friend of the lowly, the one who is drawn, before all others, toward whoever has stopped pretending to be anything but poor and in need. A reader who feels, at the end of a long day, entirely too ordinary to belong in any garland of saints is, if this small verse is to be trusted, exactly the kind of flower this particular thread was strung to hold. Nothing more than that dainya, that honest poverty of spirit, was ever asked of Deendas. It is not much more than what is asked of anyone who wants, tonight, simply to pray.