God Himself Becomes the Guru

The camera shifts to the battlefield of an ordinary life. He stands behind and in front, watching over us. He turns aside the blows that come our way. The image is of a guardian who does not wait for the devotee to ask for protection. He stands, already positioned, on both sides, so that whatever comes from behind or in front is met by him first. The word magen pudhen means behind and in front, and in Marathi it carries the whole sweep of directions. The word ubha rahe is the simple posture of standing, but held, not passing through. The Lord is not visiting. He is stationed. And the word sambhalita is the ongoing watching, the active guarding. The one who is there is there on purpose, and is there with attention turned fully toward the one being guarded.

Then the specific act. Aliya aghata nivaraya. The blows that come, he turns aside. Aghata is the blow, the strike, the impact. Nivaraya is to ward off, to avert, to turn aside. The verse does not say the Lord prevents all difficulty. It says the blows that come are met by him first. Whatever reaches the devotee has already passed through the hands of the one standing in front. This is not a magical shield. It is something stranger and more intimate. The Lord takes the impact that was meant for you and deflects its full force, so that what arrives at your life has already been softened by having first passed through his hands.

The Living Words

Magen pudhen ubha rahe sambhalita. Behind and in front he stands, guarding. Magen is behind, pudhen is in front, and the two words together form a Marathi idiom for the whole circle of direction, the full sweep around the devotee. Ubha rahe is the simple present continuous of standing, holding the position. Not passing through, not visiting. Stationed. Sambhalita is the participle of sambhalne, to guard, to take care of, to keep watch. The word keeps the Lord active. He is not a decorative figure. He is on watch.

Aliya aghata nivaraya. The blows that come, he wards off. Aliya is the adjectival past participle of yene, to come. The blows that have come, that are coming, that will come. Aghata is the strike, the blow, the impact, with a root that suggests collision, the meeting of force with flesh. Nivaraya is the infinitive of nivarane, to avert, to turn aside, to ward off. The full phrase keeps both agents in motion. The blows are coming, actively. The Lord is warding them off, actively. The verse catches a contest already in progress, and tells you on whose side the winning is.

Scripture References

The Heart of It

Every spiritual life, if it goes on long enough, meets the question of why harm comes. The devotee sits down to chant, takes up the practice, turns the heart toward the Lord, and still the blows arrive. Sickness. Loss. Injustice. The unexpected pain. The tradition's answer to this question is not always comforting in the superficial sense, but it is always honest, and Tukaram's verse is one of the most honest.

Read the verse again. He stands behind and in front, watching over us. He turns aside the blows that come.

Notice what the verse does not say. It does not say that no blows come. It does not say that the devotee's life is shielded from all trouble. It says that the blows that do come are turned aside. The aghata is real. The force of the blow is real. And the Lord is standing between the blow and the devotee, absorbing the full force, letting only what can be borne reach the life it was aimed at.

This is the Warkari theology of suffering. It does not deny suffering. It does not promise a life free of impact. It promises that the impact has already been mediated. The blow you feel is not the full blow. It is the residue of a blow that has been largely taken by the one standing in front of you. What reaches you has first passed through his hands.

How is this possible? The Marathi verse keeps the answer simple and concrete. The Lord is stationed on both sides. Magen pudhen. Behind and in front. If the blow comes from behind, he is there. If it comes from in front, he is also there. The devotee is enclosed, on every side, by the one who loves him. Whatever is coming is coming toward the Lord before it reaches the devotee. In the Warkari reading this is the actual arrangement of a life in which the Name has been received and the refuge has been taken. The Lord has stationed himself around the devotee because the devotee is now a limb of the Lord's own body. What hits the devotee hits the Lord first.

And this explains something that otherwise makes little sense in devotional life. Why do the devotees sometimes seem to suffer more visibly than the ordinary person? Because the Lord is absorbing some of their blows, and the residue they feel is what the Lord has permitted to pass through for their own ripening. The ones without refuge take the full force of the blow and are often hardened by it. The ones with refuge take only what the Lord allows, and are often softened by it. The blow becomes, in this arrangement, a tool of grace rather than an instrument of damage.

The Bhagavata Purana has a remarkable line in Book Ten, chapter fourteen, where Brahma, praising the Lord, says that the devotee receives even the adversity that comes as the Lord's compassion, tat te anukampam. The Lord distributes what remains of suffering in measured doses. Tukaram's Marathi image of the Lord standing behind and in front and warding off the blows is the same theology, rendered in the direct speech of a Warkari chant.

And the Gita names the Lord as suhridam sarva-bhutanam, the friend of all beings, in chapter five verse twenty-nine. The word suhrid is stronger than friend. It means the one whose interior good will is already turned toward your welfare, regardless of whether you have earned it. The suhrid does not need to be asked to stand behind you. He is already behind you. He does not need to be asked to stand in front. He is already in front. The Warkari verse makes the suhrid concrete. The Lord's friendship expresses itself as the stationing, the watching, the warding off.

Sit with the pastoral implication. If you are reading this commentary in the middle of a hard season, the verse is not telling you that you have failed to receive protection. It is telling you that what you have received is protection. The blow you feel is the residue. The full blow was absorbed by the one standing in front of you. You may not have felt him there. You may have felt only the impact. And yet the impact was softened, and the softening was his work.

The Bhagavata Purana's teaching on fear underlies this whole verse. In Book Eleven, chapter two, verse thirty-seven, the sage Kavi says that fear arises from the sense of a second, bhayam dvitiyabhinivesatah syat. Fear is the experience of being alone against what comes. Tukaram's verse dismantles the loneliness. The devotee is not alone before the blow. The Lord is stationed behind and in front. There is no second; there is only the one who stands on both sides of the devotee, receiving what comes before the devotee does.

And the verse says the Lord is sambhalita, watching over, keeping care of. The watching is not passive surveillance. It is the concentrated attention of a guardian. The Lord is not half-attending, not glancing occasionally from other preoccupations. He is fully turned toward the one he is guarding. The infinite Lord is fully attentive to each devotee, as though each were the only one. The attention is not divided by multiplicity. The Lord, being infinite, can be fully present to each one without thinning himself. Tukaram's verse, in its plainness, is a doxology to this mystery.

The Saints Who Walked This Road

The Warkari biographies are thick with stories of this verse made concrete. The tradition remembers again and again how the Lord stood behind and in front of his devotees when the blows came.

Namdev's most famous such story involves a ragged robe. Tradition tells how a prince's retinue threatened him and his companions on the road, and how Vitthal appeared in the guise of a dark young man with a stick and scattered the attackers before they could strike. The image of the Lord taking the blow before the devotee does is made physical in this story. Namdev's abhangas return to this image. The Lord is the one who stands between his devotees and the force of the world.

Tukaram himself lived through a well-known incident with his manuscripts. Opponents, led by a Brahmin named Rameshwar Bhatt, told him that a shudra had no right to compose verses on Vedanta. They had his manuscripts thrown into the Indrayani river. Tradition holds that Tukaram sat on the riverbank for thirteen days fasting and chanting, and that the manuscripts rose, dry, to the surface. The blow was real. The destruction was real. And the Lord, standing behind and in front, turned the blow aside. Rameshwar himself, tradition says, became a devotee after witnessing this. The aghata was absorbed and returned as grace.

Eknath's biography holds a recurring pattern. As a devotee who welcomed outcastes to his home and broke the purity codes of the time, he drew sustained hostility from orthodoxy. Stories tell of threats, of social rejection, of moments when the pressure on his household was intense. And through all of it, tradition says, the Lord himself sometimes appeared in the form of a servant named Shrikhandya, who worked in his household for twelve years, quietly providing what was needed and quietly turning aside the harm that might otherwise have landed. At the end of the twelve years, Shrikhandya vanished, and Eknath realized that it had been the Lord himself. This is the verse in domestic form. The Lord standing behind and in front, sambhalita, keeping watch, warding off.

Janabai's biography is particularly tender on this point. As a low-caste woman servant, she was vulnerable in ways that the male saints were not. Tradition tells of moments when she was accused of theft, when she was slandered by the community, when the force of social suspicion gathered against her. And in each such story, Vitthal himself turned the blow aside. When she was accused of stealing a temple ornament, the ornament was found on the image of Vitthal himself, as though the Lord had taken the theft onto his own shoulders. The story reads as folk legend until you hear it inside Tukaram's verse. Then it becomes the concrete form of aliya aghata nivaraya. The blows came. He warded them off. He took them onto himself.

Chokhamela's abhangas record a different form of the same protection. As a Mahar saint barred from the temple, he lived in vulnerability that could not be fully turned aside by social rearrangement. And yet his abhangas sing of a Lord who stood behind and in front of him even at the closed gate. The blow of social exclusion was real. The hurt of being kept out was real. And still, in Chokhamela's own testimony, the Lord stood with him at the gate and absorbed the force of the exclusion by making the gate itself the place of encounter. The blow was real. The Lord made it porous.

And the later generations of Warkaris have experienced this verse in collective life as much as in individual biography. The vari itself, the annual pilgrimage to Pandharpur, is walked across hundreds of kilometers by pilgrims of every caste and every means. Over centuries, the tradition remembers the blows that the community has absorbed together, from plague to famine to political violence, and the way the Lord has been felt to stand behind and in front of the walking community as a whole. The verse names an individual protection and also a collective one. The Warkari body, like the individual devotee, is held in the same guardian posture. The same ubha rahe stretches across the single life and across the whole lineage.