Janardan, the Refuge of the Orphan

The refrain is where the abhanga places its weight. Jagannath is my mother. Jagannath is my father. For those who have no one, Janardan is the one. Read these three lines slowly. Do not rush to the consolation. Eknath names the deepest structures of human belonging, mother and father, and assigns them both to the Lord. And then, having done that, he turns to the word the whole verse is really about. Anath. The one who has no one. Not the person who feels briefly lonely on a Sunday afternoon. The person for whom the basic human structures of being held have not held. A parent gone early. A family that did not know how to love. A community that closed the door. The refrain does not dissolve the ache of that word. It sits with it. And only then does it say: for such a one, Janardan is the nath. The protector has arrived where no protector had been.

If you are reading this holding some private sense of being fundamentally alone in the world, the refrain is for you in particular. Eknath does not hand you a cheerful substitute for the mother you did not have. He names the absence first. He lets anath have its full weight. And then, inside that weight, he names the one whose whole nature is to be nath of the anath. Stay with the first half of the refrain long enough to feel it. The second half cannot do its work unless you do.

The Living Words

Maya jagannatha bapa jagannatha. Maya, mother, in the soft vocative of Marathi household speech; bapa, father, the word a child uses. Eknath does not reach for exalted Sanskrit vocabulary. He reaches for kitchen words. And to those kitchen words, he attaches the largest possible Name. Jagannatha. The Lord of the three worlds is the parent who holds you. The grammar itself is the theology.

Then the word that carries the whole abhanga. Anathanca natha janardana. Anatha, without a nath; natha, the one who holds; anathanca, of those who have no nath, in the genitive plural. And janardana, the name of Vishnu, which also happens to be the name of Eknath's own Guru, Janardan Swami of Daulatabad. The tradition has long carried a second reading here. In Eknath's mouth, Janardan sounds at once as the Lord and as the Guru. The line does not spell this out on the surface. It lets both faces of the Name say the same mercy.

Scripture References

The Heart of It

Before we can hear the second line of this refrain, we have to sit with the first. And before we can sit with the first, we have to sit with the word the second line is about.

Anath. The one without a nath. The one for whom the basic structures of being held have not held. This is the centerpiece of the abhanga. Do not pass over it quickly.

There are many kinds of loss, and Eknath is not talking about the mild versions. He is not talking about the person who feels a little lonely at the end of a long week. He is writing in a language and a culture in which family was not optional, in which caste and community and lineage were the load-bearing walls of human life. To be anath was to have those walls missing. The parent gone early. The kin who could not or would not hold. The village that did not claim you. Some of the anath were literal orphans. Some were widows pushed to the edge of the household. Some were untouchables barred from the temple where their neighbors worshipped. Some were children of circumstance whom no structure had been prepared to receive. Eknath, whose own parents died when he was small, wrote for all of them. He knew the word from inside his own life.

If you carry any version of this, and many readers will, do not rush to the consolation. Eknath does not. He names maya first. Jagannath is my mother. Mother, in Marathi household speech, is a word that carries the weight of everything an ideal mother is supposed to have been. The one who fed you when you could not yet ask. The one whose body was the first shelter. The one who made the world safe enough that you could begin to trust that the world was safe. Eknath gives that word to Jagannath. He does not apologize for the size of the claim. The Lord of the three worlds is the one whose lap you can climb into.

Then bapa, father. The one who names you. The one who makes a place for you in the world. The one who stands between you and the world's weather until you are strong enough to stand in it yourself. Jagannath is that too. Both functions, mother and father, the whole of parental holding, belong to the Lord of the world. And the devotee, whose earthly parents may have been anything at all, finds that the Lord has not vacated the office.

Only then does the refrain reach its centerpiece. Anathanca natha janardana. For those who have no one, Janardan is the one. Do you see what has happened? Eknath has not said that the anath is no longer anath. He has not erased the word. He has said that for those who are anath, there is a nath. The emptiness is acknowledged. And inside the emptiness, a name is placed.

And the name is Janardan. This is the deliberate deployment. In the first line, the Lord is Jagannath, the Lord of the world, the one who holds the whole of it and is therefore able to be mother and father to all. But in the second line, Eknath changes the Name. He uses Janardan. Janardan is a name of Vishnu, old and canonical, and in Eknath's mouth it is also something more. Janardan Swami of Daulatabad was his own Guru. The word Janardan in this refrain carries the face of the Lord and the face of the Guru at the same time. The tradition has long read the line this way. The nath of the anath is the Lord; the nath of the anath is also the Guru. The disciple's own lived experience of being taken in by Janardan Swami is the local, human instance of the cosmic mercy the line names.

And this is the whole Guru Parampara theology compressed into a single line. The Guru is not a decoration on the spiritual life. The Guru is the face the Lord wears to take in the unheld. When the grandfather had carried the small boy as far as he could, Janardan Swami was waiting. When the family ruptures that the world inflicts on people have done their work, the Guru arrives as the human, local, present form of Janardan the Lord. The line holds both meanings in one breath.

There is a further reading of the refrain that the tradition has kept in its mouth. The line can be heard as a lullaby, sung to oneself in the dark. It works in that register because it is addressed to the oldest ache the human organism knows, the ache of being unheld. If you have been unheld, the line will come to meet you where you are. If you have been adequately parented, the line will open a deeper register underneath that adequacy. Because even adequately parented children discover, eventually, that no human mother and no human father can hold them at the level their soul needs to be held. The refrain is for both. The literal anath and the metaphysical anath, which is every soul, are both addressed.

The Bhagavata Purana holds the same recognition. When Kunti stands before Krishna at the end of the war, she does not ask for comfort. She asks for adversity, because in adversity his face appeared. The logic is the refrain's logic. The one who is unheld by the world turns out to be the one most likely to feel the hand of the Lord. Eknath is singing a close relative of that verse. The anath is not cursed. The anath is the one for whom Janardan's particular mercy was prepared.

Sit in the first half of the refrain. Then let the second half do what it does. The ache is real. The one who meets the ache is also real. Eknath does not ask you to choose between them.

The Saints Who Walked This Road

Eknath of Paithan lived the refrain in his own body. He was not writing doctrine. He was reporting on how he had been held.

His parents, the tradition records, died when he was young. He was raised by his paternal grandfather Chakradhara, who is remembered in the hagiographies as a devout man who carried the boy to his own practice of the Names. The small Eknath grew up inside the structure of a grandfather rather than a father, a first lesson in the fact that the usual shapes of family can shift and still hold. While still young, he heard of Janardan Swami of Devgiri and set out to find him. The tradition says he arrived at Janardan Swami's house and was taken in. That taking in, by a Guru in whose Name Janardan the Lord and Janardan the teacher converge, is the origin of the refrain the reader is now chanting. Eknath, who had been anath in the most literal sense, found his nath at Daulatabad, and he signed his abhangas with that name forever after.

Janardan Swami himself lived at a complicated crossing. Tradition holds that he served as an administrator at the fort of Daulatabad under the Sultanate, a devout Hindu Dattatreya devotee holding office under a Muslim regime. The biographers report that this did not unsettle his inner life. He meditated at regular hours. He is said to have been visited, in vision, by Dattatreya himself. When he sat in meditation, Eknath guarded the hours and kept the work moving. Inner devotion and outer administration were not in conflict. They were two sides of a single wide life.

There is a beloved story, preserved with varying details, about Eknath's meeting with a Muslim fakir in Paithan. The fakir sat on the doorstep of Eknath's house for days. Some retellings say the fakir was thirsty and asked for water in a way that ritually polluted a household. Some say Eknath carried him on his back into the house to shelter him. What is stable across the retellings is the saint's response. The fakir was not a problem to be managed. The fakir was Hari. The Brahmin orthodoxy of Paithan complained about Eknath eating with untouchables, welcoming Muslims, breaking the purity codes that the caste order had spent centuries building. Eknath did not argue doctrine. He lived the refrain. If the Lord is the nath of the unheld, the disciple cannot rebuild a social world that refuses to hold them.

The great labor of his life, the Eknathi Bhagavat, is itself a long meditation on the refrain. The eleventh skandha of the Bhagavata Purana is the Uddhava Gita, Krishna's final teaching to his dearest devotee. Eknath rendered it into Marathi, verse by verse, in the vernacular of farmers and merchants, against considerable orthodox resistance, because he believed the Bhagavata's teaching of refuge belonged to everyone and especially to those whom the priestly world had already excluded.

And his recovery of the Dnyaneshwari is a parallel act. Centuries after Dnyaneshwar's original composition, the manuscripts had drifted and the text had become unstable. Eknath collated what he could and produced a reliable reading, holding the lineage steady for the anath readers to come, who would otherwise receive a corrupted text and not know what Dnyaneshwar had actually said.

Tukaram, three generations later, would inherit this refrain. His abhangas return again and again to the image of Vitthal as mother and father to those who have no one. Janabai before him, a servant girl in Namdev's household, had sung the same mercy from the millstone. Chokhamela, the Mahar saint barred from the temple, had lived the anath position in the sharpest possible form and had found, in Vitthal, the nath. Eknath's refrain gathers all of them into a single line.