Harināma Kīrtanam · Verse 21

The twenty-first verse names a small social pain that any sincere seeker eventually meets. Some will tease you and call you a fool. Some will call you a sinner. The verse, in plain Malayalam, prescribes the only useful response. Aavo namukku tiriyāy-ennu uṛaccu: with firm attitude, I do not understand this, and cholka tiru-nāmaṅgaḷ, keep reciting the divine names. The verse hands the seeker the simplest possible inner posture: not argument, not defense, not retreat, only I do not understand and the Name keeps going.

If you have come to this verse with a household, workplace, or community that has, even gently, mocked your practice, the verse is for you. The verse does not ask you to convince anyone. The verse asks you to keep the Name on your tongue while the mockery is happening.

The Living Words

Rhauba-hoshanennu chilar bhāṣikkilum. Some may say biggest fool. Bhāṣikka is to speak; the verse names the social act of teasing.

Chilar-kāl ee-pāpi ennu paṟayunnatu-ākilum. And some others may call this one sinner. The Krishna Priya gloss reads this as the egoistic/ignorant who think the practice itself is a confession of guilt.

Manasi āvo namukku tiriyāy ennu uṛaccu. In the mind, with firm conviction, I do not understand it. The Malayalam grammar makes the not-understanding a refuge, not a failure.

Cholka tiru-nāmaṅgaḷ Hari Nārāyaṇāya namaḥ. Recite the divine names; salutation to Hari Nārāyaṇa.

Scripture References

The Heart of It

The verse is wise about an experience the bhakti tradition has carried for two thousand years. The serious devotee, in any age, eventually encounters family members, friends, or strangers who do not understand the seriousness and convert their incomprehension into mockery. You are wasting your time. You are a fool. You are over-pious. You are obviously hiding something. Verse 21 names two of these specifically: the biggest fool and the sinner. The verse does not pretend the mockery does not hurt. It also does not ask the seeker to win the argument.

The verse's most useful word is aavo, I do not understand. The seeker is not asked to refute the mocker; the seeker is asked to refuse engagement. I do not understand what you are saying. Then the mind returns to the Name. The Sanskrit canon has called this posture upekṣā, equanimous indifference, the fourth of the four brahma-vihāras the Buddhist tradition shares. The bhakti version is shorter: keep going.

Caitanya Mahāprabhu, in his eight-verse Śikṣāṣṭakam, gave the canonical bhakti form of this posture. Tṛṇād api sunīcena taror api sahiṣṇunā; amāninā mānadena kīrtanīyaḥ sadā hariḥ. More humble than a blade of grass, more patient than a tree, claiming no honor for oneself, giving honor to others, one should always recite the Name of Hari. Verse 21's aavo is the Malayalam form of amāninā, claiming no honor, refusing to enter the social ranking the mocker is offering.

The Bhagavad Gītā, in its sixth chapter, names the practitioner who is settled in this posture. Yasmin sthito na duḥkhena guruṇāpi vicālyate: he who, established in this, is not shaken even by great suffering. The mocker's words are not great suffering; the verse-21 uṛaccu (with firm attitude) is asking for a smaller and earlier version of the same equanimity.

If you have come to this verse and felt that the mockery has thinned your practice, the verse offers one substitution. Stop trying to defend the practice. Stop trying to explain it. The practice does not need to be explained to anyone. It only needs to keep going. Cholka tiru-nāmaṅgaḷ, recite the divine names, while the mocker is still speaking, while the household is still teasing, while the colleague is still rolling his eyes. The mockery has, in this tradition, never stopped a real practice. It has only stopped a half-formed one. The verse is offering the seeker the half-formed practice's only protection: keep going, in silence, while the words come.

The verse holds out a small but durable promise. The mocker is, in time, often the next devotee. The bhakti tradition records this many times: the household that mocked Tulsīdās's recitation later sang it together; the in-laws who tried to poison Mīrā are remembered as the foil to her devotion; the Brahmins who refused Tukārām later carried his abhangas door to door. The seeker does not have to wait for that conversion. The seeker only has to keep the Name on the tongue while the long argument finishes itself, somewhere outside the seeker's control.

The Saints Who Walked This Road

Three saints who carried the verse-21 posture.

Bahinābāī, seventeenth-century Maharashtra, was a female abhanga-poet of the Vārkari tradition and a disciple of Tukārām (without ever meeting him; her devotion to him began in dreams). Born to a Brahmin family married off in childhood to a much older man, she was beaten by her husband for her devotion to a low-caste guru and for her own writing. She kept composing. The Bahinābāī-Gāthā preserves her abhangas, including stark ones in which she names her husband's beatings as the test of her practice. The body image is the woman writing on a folded leaf in the privacy of the house, hiding the abhangas the husband would have torn up if he had found them, the Name on her tongue while the household stayed loud.

Sundarar, eighth-ninth-century Tamil Nadu, was one of the mūvar (the three great Nāyaṉār Śaiva saints, with Appar and Sambandar). The legend records that, just as he was about to be married to the bride his family had chosen, an old Brahmin walked into the wedding pavilion claiming Sundarar as his slave by an old contract. The Brahmin produced the contract, the king's court accepted it, and Sundarar walked out of the wedding behind the old man. The Brahmin walked into a temple at Tiruvenneynallur and disappeared; the old man had been Śiva himself. The body image is the bridegroom in the wedding pavilion, the Brahmin showing the contract, the entire family thinking the bridegroom had been swindled, until the disappearance into the temple revealed the swindler.

Sant Mahipati, eighteenth-century Maharashtra, was a kulkarṇī (village accountant) who became a Vārkari biographer. He wrote the Bhakta-Vijaya and the Bhakta-Līlāmṛta, two long Marathi works that gathered the lives of the bhakti saints into a single connected corpus. The orthodox Brahmins of his town mocked his work; he composed it anyway, by hand, over decades. The body image is the village accountant at his ledger by day, the saint-stories arriving in his Marathi by lamplight at night, the orthodox neighbors asking why a tax-clerk was wasting time on the lives of dead Mahars and weavers.