The Abhanga as Form

The lineage of great-sant voices has now closed in the chapter before this one. What survives them is how they wrote. The form is the next thing to ask after.

A tradition is carried by what it sings. The Varkari sangha did not transmit itself primarily through commentaries or treatises. It transmitted itself through abhangas, sung in procession, sung in courtyards, sung at the feet of Vitthal in Pandharpur. To ask what an abhanga is, then, is not a literary side question. It is a question about how this tradition decided that truth could travel.

What the word means

The Marathi term अभंग (abhaṅga) is built from the negative prefix a and the root bhang, "to break." Abhanga therefore means "unbroken," "uninterrupted," "without flaw." The name describes both a metrical form and a theological claim. The form is named for its property of seamless continuity. The God it praises is named, in the same gesture, as that which cannot be broken.

The tradition's own self-gloss, reproduced in many Varkari kirtans, ties the form's name to its content: an abhanga is the song whose subject is the unbreakable. Alongside this theological reading, a literary-historical etymology is also present in the tradition's self-description: the form is called abhanga because the stanza does not break across lines, each caraṇa end-stopped, complete in its own breath. The two readings are not in competition. The form's prosodic non-breaking and the God's metaphysical non-breaking are held together in a single name, and the kirtankars have always heard both.

R. D. Ranade, whose Pathway to God trilogy includes Mysticism in Maharashtra (the English-language volume on the Maharashtrian sants) and Pathway to God in Marathi Literature (a related but distinct companion volume on the Marathi devotional canon), treats the term as transparent. Anne Feldhaus and Eleanor Zelliot, writing later, retain the same etymology without dispute.

A specimen, before the analysis

The form is best heard before it is described. Here is a short Tukaram abhanga.

The stanza is short. The lines are end-stopped. The closing line carries the poet's name as mudrika. The doctrinal claim, that the singer has become hariratā, dyed in Hari, lands inside the form's compression rather than after a long argument.

Meter, with caution

Indian prosody is technical, and the abhanga's metrical rules are not as cleanly specifiable as a Sanskrit śloka's. Here I want to be careful.

The standard description, in handbooks of Marathi chhandaḥśāstra (छंदशास्त्र, prosody), is that the long abhanga or moṭhā abhaṅga (मोठा अभंग) is composed in four-line stanzas (caraṇa चरण). The first three lines are short and roughly equal; the fourth is shorter still, often a tag, a refrain, or a closing turn that names the poet's mudrika (मुद्रिका, signature). The shorter form, laghu abhaṅga (लघु अभंग), uses two-line stanzas. Marathi prosody scholars describe the line as governed by rhythm (mātrā, मात्रा) more than by a fixed syllable count, and the handbooks themselves give different numerical accounts. Marathi metrics sits between syllabic and moraic counting. A reader who wants the precise rules should consult a prosody handbook directly; the present chapter resists giving a single number with false confidence.

What is uncontested: the abhanga has short lines, not the long line of the śloka or the anuṣṭubh (अनुष्टुभ्); it is end-rhymed, with rhyme typically on the second and fourth lines, though three- and four-line patterns also occur; the final line tends to be shorter and frequently carries the poet's name; it is built to be sung, not declaimed.

The closely related meter is the ओवी (ovī), the meter of long narrative composition: of Dnyaneshwar's Dnyaneshwari (properly Bhāvārtha Dīpikā), of Eknath's Eknathi Bhagavata, and of household songs sung by women at the grindstone (jātyāvarcyā ovyā). The abhanga is built for kirtan and procession; the ovi for narrative continuity.

I am flagging this uncertainty deliberately. Anyone writing on Marathi prosody who reduces these forms to a single fixed syllable count is overstating what the tradition itself records. The handbooks describe families of patterns, not a single rule.

The Marathi vernacular as theological act

The decision to write devotional poetry in Marathi was not aesthetic. It was theological.

Sanskrit, in twelfth and thirteenth-century western India, was the language of priestly learning and of the temple's ritual interior. Marathi was the language of the household, the road, the field, the courtyard. To compose a commentary on the Bhagavad Gita in Marathi verse, as Dnyaneshwar did around 1290 in the Dnyaneshwari, was to make a claim. The claim was that the truth of the Gita does not require Sanskrit to reach a soul. It can travel in the language a woman uses to speak to her child.

Christian Lee Novetzke, in The Quotidian Revolution (Columbia University Press, 2016), reads exactly this gesture as the constitutive move of the early Varkari literary culture. The use of Marathi by Dnyaneshwar, Namdev, and the early sants was not a folk shortcut around Sanskrit but the deliberate construction of a public in the vernacular: a religious public that included those Sanskrit had excluded. Sheldon Pollock's The Language of the Gods in the World of Men (University of California Press, 2006) describes the broader vernacularization of South Asian literary culture in the same period. The Varkari sants belong to that wave, but Pollock himself reads bhakti vernaculars as a complication of his thesis rather than a clean instance of it: their fusion of vernacular literary ambition with a doctrine of the Name available to all is closer to a counter-current within the cosmopolis than a tidy provincial substitution.

Anne Feldhaus, across her work on Maharashtrian religious life, makes the same point: the Marathi of the sants is a theology, not merely a medium. To write the Bhagavata Purana in Marathi ovi, as Eknath did in his Eknathi Bhagavata, was to translate not only the words but also the social location of scripture. Scripture moved from the priest's altar to the kirtankar's harmonium.

Eleanor Zelliot, whose essays on the Varkari sants and on Chokhamela are collected in From Untouchable to Dalit (Manohar, 1992), made the same argument from the side of caste. The vernacular abhanga was the form in which a barber, a tailor, a maidservant, a Mahar, and a Brahmin householder could all speak to Vitthal in the same meter. Sanskrit had no such opening.

The tradition's own contemporary teachers continue to make this point. Speaking of a Marathi-language session in his satsang, Ananta has said of the Marathi devotional voice: "most of us don't understand, even I don't understand Marathi, but I feel her love and I feel her devotion to God, and I just felt to just sit at her feet listening to her beautiful singing to God" (satsang jXuhj8NzVpk). The vernacular acts on the listener whose ears do not parse it; what travels is the bhāva the form was built to carry.

The kirtankar's craft

An abhanga is not, in the first instance, a written text. It is a sung performance.

The performer is the kirtankar, who stands before a gathering, often holding a cipaḷī (चिपळी, small finger cymbals), and leads the assembly through abhangas chosen for the occasion. The musical envelope is the kirtan, a genre of devotional performance native to Maharashtra in its Varkari form (sometimes called Naradiya kirtan in its more elaborated branch and Varkari kirtan in its sangha-rooted branch).

The instruments are simple and consistent: harmonium for the drone and melodic line, mṛdaṅga (मृदंग) or paḍhāvaja (पढावज) for rhythm, tāḷ (टाळ, hand cymbals) carried by the dindi singers themselves, and vīṇā (वीणा) in the hands of the lead. The chaal (चाल), the tune, is often traditional and shared across many abhangas. A single chaal can carry dozens of texts, so new abhangas can enter the repertoire and be sung from first hearing.

The tāla (ताल, rhythmic cycle) is most often a simple cycle compatible with walking and with collective hand-clapping, the Bhajani Theka (भजनी ठेका) being one of the most characteristic. The harmonium sits underneath as a single sustained drone, a held sa that does not move, and over it the cymbals strike in a steady patter that the foot finds before the mind does; under a walking foot the beat lands as a small forward shove, a push more than a pulse. (Authorial observation rather than ethnographic citation; what an ethnographer might record I have not seen written, but any pilgrim who has walked an hour with the dindi has felt it.) In the Varkari context, that is the body's first lesson in the form.

The structure of a kirtan in performance, recorded by Christian Novetzke in Religion and Public Memory: A Cultural History of Saint Namdev in India (Columbia University Press, 2008), typically alternates an opening abhanga, a doctrinal nirūpaṇa (निरूपण, exposition) interleaved with sung abhangas, sometimes a story from the lives of the sants, and a closing benediction. The audience sings the refrains, claps the tala, and at the high points calls out the divine names. Call and response is structural, not decorative.

Why the abhanga, not the shloka

The Sanskrit shloka was already there. It had been there for two millennia. It was the prestige meter of scriptural authority, carrying the Mahabharata, the Puranas, the smṛti literature. Why did the Varkari truth choose abhanga instead? The answer is composite: theological, sociological, formal.

Theologically, the Varkari sants taught that the Name is the path and that the Name has no caste qualification (the metaphysics of how the Name does this work is unfolded in Chapter 12, section 2). A meter that requires Sanskrit grammatical training, and therefore requires the social position that allows one to acquire that training, contradicts the doctrine. Marathi abhanga does not contradict it. The form is congruent with the content.

Sociologically, the audience the sants wanted was the audience that walked: farmers, artisans, householders, women who could not enter the inner sanctum of certain temples. The shloka, recited in Sanskrit by a priest, did not include these people as participants. The abhanga, sung in Marathi with a known chaal, did. Singing along is a different relationship to scripture than listening as an outsider. As Ananta observes in his own satsang practice, the abhanga "appeals to everyone... these devotional songs they sing such big things, and yet something resonates somewhere with us" (satsang RACyP8wuiWA).

Formally, the abhanga's compression matters. A four-line stanza, with a short closing line, forces the poet to compress. There is no room for ornamental metaphor that earns its keep slowly across forty syllables of an anuṣṭubh couplet. The abhanga has to land. A typical Tukaram abhanga, as we saw above, states a doctrinal claim, illustrates it with a single concrete image from village life, and closes with the mudrika "तुका म्हणे" (Tukā mhaṇe). The whole movement takes less than a minute to sing.

The form also aids memory. Rhyme on the second and fourth lines, the steady chaal, the short stanzas: these are mnemonic features. A villager who could not read could carry hundreds of abhangas in the body, brought up by walking, by rhythm, by the cymbals on the wrist. The form survives without manuscripts.

The form is itself a teaching

There is a deeper observation, made in different words by Ranade and by later Varkari kirtankars in their prastāvanās (introductions) to Gatha editions: the abhanga's form is itself a teaching.

The teaching runs roughly: truth lives where ordinary people live. It does not require an elite tongue. It does not require ornate length. It is best carried in compressed, rhythmic, memorable Marathi, sung in procession by people whose feet are tired. A philosophy that needed Sanskrit and a manuscript and a pandit would already, by its requirements, have foreclosed the doctrine the Varkaris wanted to teach.

To understand why this tradition chose this form is already to understand much of the tradition.

Sources

• R. D. Ranade. Mysticism in Maharashtra: Indian Mysticism (1933; Motilal Banarsidass reissue) and its Marathi-canon companion Pathway to God in Marathi Literature, the two related but distinct volumes within Ranade's Pathway to God trilogy.
• Christian Lee Novetzke. The Quotidian Revolution: Vernacularization, Religion, and the Premodern Public Sphere in India. Columbia University Press, 2016.
• Christian Lee Novetzke. Religion and Public Memory: A Cultural History of Saint Namdev in India. Columbia University Press, 2008.
• Sheldon Pollock. The Language of the Gods in the World of Men. University of California Press, 2006. (Pollock himself treats bhakti vernaculars as a complication of his vernacularization thesis.)
• Anne Feldhaus, ed. Images of Women in Maharashtrian Literature and Religion. SUNY Press, 1996; plus her broader Maharashtrian corpus.
• Eleanor Zelliot. From Untouchable to Dalit: Essays on the Ambedkar Movement. Manohar, 1992. With Maxine Berntsen, The Experience of Hinduism. SUNY Press, 1988.
• Dilip Chitre. Says Tuka: Selected Poems of Tukaram. Penguin India, 1991. The touchstone for the chapter's specimen.
• Tukaram Gatha, standard numbering, in the Government of Maharashtra Sakal Sant Gatha series; also the Marathi Wikisource public-domain recension on which the project's gatha.json draws.
• The critical edition of the Dnyaneshwari (Bhāvārtha Dīpikā).
• Standard handbooks of Marathi chhandaḥśāstra. Exact metrical specifications for abhanga and ovi vary across these handbooks; this chapter has flagged that uncertainty rather than asserted a single account.
• Satsang with Ananta, video references jXuhj8NzVpk and RACyP8wuiWA.