Going Home to Pandharpur

Dnyaneshwar opens the abhanga with a sentence that should be impossible. I will turn this whole samsara into joy. I will fill the three worlds with gladness. No qualification, no deferral, no please-God-if-I-am-worthy. A flat declarative promise from a voice that has already decided. And the voice, notice, is a woman's voice. The whole abhanga will be sung in the first person of a daughter walking home to her mother's house. This first couplet is her state of heart as she sets out.

If you have been taught that samsara is something to be escaped, this verse is a correction delivered in a single breath. Dnyaneshwar does not say I will run from the world. He says I will make the world sweet. The three worlds, the whole stratified cosmos of heaven and earth and the realm below, will be filled with ananda. Not by austerity. Not by renunciation. By going home.

Read this twice. The joy is not private. It is promised to samsara itself, to the three lokas, to the whole of what exists. She is not leaving the world behind on her way to Pandharpur. She is carrying the world with her, and the going is itself the sweetening. If you sing this verse and let the sentence stay in your mouth, you are being taught that the pilgrimage is how samsara turns. This is the Warkari answer to world-negation, sung in the first breath of the song.

The Living Words

Avaghaci sansara sukhaca karina. The whole of samsara, I will make sweet. Avaghaci is a Marathi intensifier. The whole, the entirety, with emphasis. Nothing is left out. Sansara is samsara, the churning round of becoming, the very thing renunciate traditions teach you to escape. Sukhaca karina is future, active, confident: I will make it of the nature of sukha, of joy, of sweetness. Not I will bear it. Not I will endure it. I will make it sweet.

Anande bharina tinhi loka. With joy I will fill the three worlds. Anande is the instrumental of ananda, with bliss, by means of bliss. Bharina is to fill, to pour into, to saturate. Tinhi loka, the three worlds, the classical Puranic cosmos: earth, the intermediate realm, and the heavens. The voice, a woman setting out for her mother's house, claims the three lokas as the vessel she will fill.

The verbs are first person singular future. This is critical. Dnyaneshwar is not reporting. He is promising. The voice has not yet arrived at Pandharpur; the refrain that follows still says I will go. The joy is already overflowing in the anticipation.

Scripture References

The Heart of It

Listen to the astonishing confidence of this verse. I will turn the whole of samsara into joy. I will fill the three worlds with gladness.

Who speaks like this? In the ordinary grammar of spiritual life, samsara is the problem. The three worlds are the arena of bondage. The seeker's task is to escape them, to rise above them, to see through them. And here is a woman, in Dnyaneshwar's voice, standing at the threshold of her pilgrimage and promising that she will sweeten the very thing the scriptures tell us to transcend.

This is the Warkari theology at full strength. Pandharpur is not an escape from the world. Pandharpur is the center from which the world is seen as already sweet. The pilgrimage is not subtraction. It is re-reading. The samsara that looked like prison yesterday is the samsara she is about to fill with ananda today. Nothing about the cosmos has changed. Something has changed in the one who is walking.

And what is the change? She is going home. That is the whole theology in three words. The voice of this abhanga is not a renunciate fleeing the world, and it is not a philosopher dissolving the world in knowledge. It is a daughter going to her maher. And here you must pause, because this is where the Warkari path speaks its own language and refuses translation.

Maher is a Marathi word that means a married woman's natal home. The house of her parents. The place she was before she was given in marriage into another household. In the social world of medieval Maharashtra, as in much of India still, a married woman's daily life is lived in her husband's home, under the watchful eyes of her mother-in-law and the demands of a new family. Her maher is where she is nothing but daughter. No performance. No evaluation. No account to settle. She walks in and she is held because she is theirs.

Dnyaneshwar, a male saint and a lifelong celibate renunciate, writes in a woman's voice because this image, and no other, can carry what he needs to say about Pandharpur. Pandharpur is the soul's maher. Not the soul's bridal chamber. Not the soul's ashram. The soul's mother's house. The place of unconditioned belonging. And when you realize you are going there, the three worlds look different. They look sweet. Not because you have sweetened them by effort. Because the direction of your life has turned toward the one place where you do not have to earn anything.

Notice that she does not say I will be happy. She says I will make samsara happy. The joy, once it starts, is not a private possession. It leaks. It saturates. Bharina tinhi loka. Fills the three worlds. The walker filled with ananda is a walking vessel that spills gladness into everything her feet touch. This is why the Warkari dindi, the pilgrim procession, is said to bless the villages it passes through. The pilgrims are not going to Pandharpur to receive something from Vitthal alone. They are already carrying the gladness of the going, and the road itself is lit by it.

The Gita says the same thing in a different register. Krishna tells Arjuna that the wise see the whole world in the Self and the Self in all beings, and to such a one there is no bewilderment, no sorrow. The seer does not leave the world. The seer sees differently, and the world turns sweet in the seeing. Dnyaneshwar, who wrote the Dnyaneshwari as a Marathi commentary on the Gita before he composed these abhangas, is singing the same fact in the voice of a village woman. The Gita's jnani and the abhanga's daughter going home are the same person, seen from two angles.

There is one more thing to hear in this verse before the refrain arrives. The verbs are future, not present. I will make. I will fill. She has not arrived. She is still on the road. And already the samsara is being sweetened by the promise. This is the deepest teaching of the opening couplet. You do not have to wait until the pilgrimage is complete for the joy to begin. The going is itself the joy. The direction of the heart toward Pandharpur is what fills the three worlds. The destination is already inside the orientation.

So when you sing this verse, do not sing it as a prayer for some future transformation. Sing it as a present-tense declaration of which way you are facing. If you are facing toward the maher, the samsara is already sweetening around you. The abhanga begins with the end of the journey already tasting in the mouth.

The Saints Who Walked This Road

Dnyaneshwar of Alandi, who composed this abhanga, was thirteen centuries of Vedanta condensed into a short and luminous life. Tradition places his years in the late thirteenth century. By sixteen he had dictated the Dnyaneshwari, the Marathi commentary on the Bhagavad Gita that made the Gita singable in the mother tongue. By twenty-one he had taken sanjeevan samadhi at Alandi, alive and seated, descending into the earth with the Name on his lips. Between the commentary and the samadhi he composed the abhangas of the Haripath and the songs that founded the Warkari path. He never married. The voice of a woman going to her maher is not his biography. It is his chosen literary body, borrowed from the common devotional speech of Marathi women, because that voice alone carries what he wants to say about belonging.

The feminine voice in the mouth of a male saint is a specific Marathi lineage, and it has its own history. Janabai, the low-caste maidservant of Namdev's household, wrote in her own woman's voice about Vitthal coming into her kitchen, grinding grain with her at the millstone, sweeping the floor beside her. She did not borrow the voice. She lived it. Her abhangas gave Dnyaneshwar's literary convention a lived shape in the generation after his samadhi. When a male saint later writes in a woman's voice, he is singing in the key that Janabai made legitimate through her own breath.

Kanhopatra, the courtesan's daughter of Mangalvedha, sang in the same register. Tradition remembers her as a woman of extraordinary beauty whose mother wished to place her in the service of the local ruler. Kanhopatra refused, sang of Vitthal as her only protector, and reached Pandharpur as her shelter. Her songs, preserved in the Warkari corpus, use the first person of a woman taking refuge. They sit on the same shelf as this abhanga of Dnyaneshwar's and speak the same language of Pandharpur-as-home.

Bahinabai, the seventeenth century Brahmin woman who counted Tukaram as her Guru across caste lines, wrote her autobiography in abhangas and sang her own spiritual life in her own voice. She did not need to borrow. The tradition had by then normalized the woman's first person as a legitimate bhakti voice. Dnyaneshwar, four centuries earlier, was one of the teachers who made that normalization possible, by writing in that voice himself and giving it canonical weight.

Muktabai, Dnyaneshwar's own younger sister, is the closest to this verse biographically. She is the one who, when Dnyaneshwar shut himself in the hut after the village rejected him, sang the taatiche abhang, the open-the-door abhangas, in the voice of a sister calling her brother out of his grief. She knew what the feminine voice could do in this tradition. She had used it against her own brother to bring him back to the work of singing for the world. It is not an accident that the man who heard those songs would later compose in the voice of a woman going to her mother's house. He had been brought out of his own darkness by exactly such a voice.

And Namdev, the tailor's son of Pandharpur who walked with Dnyaneshwar on the final pilgrimage, stood behind every verse of this abhanga as the one who had first named Pandharpur as home. Namdev's whole corpus insists that Vitthal is not far. Vitthal is the one on the brick. Pandharpur is the one place. The Warkari geography of belonging that Dnyaneshwar sings here was shared air between Namdev and Dnyaneshwar. When this verse promises to fill the three worlds with gladness by going to Pandharpur, it is singing in the cosmos the two of them walked together.