Chapter 9. Bahinabai and the closure of the lineage

A life on the page she wrote herself

Bahinabai (बहिणाबाई, c. 1628 to 1700) is the only major sant in the Varkari canon whose biography is, in the most literal sense, autobiographical. The other sants come down to us through Mahipati, through the Bhaktavijaya, through the abhangas read against the hagiographies. With Bahinabai the source is a manuscript she dictated to her son Vithoba: a verse autobiography in roughly four hundred and seventy-three abhangas (the count drifts between editions; Justin Abbott's 1929 Bahina Bai gives a continuous numbering, and later Marathi recensions vary within a small range), composed across her later years and surviving in a textual tradition stable enough that the modern reader can hold the same outline she gave herself. No other Varkari sant left such a record.

She was born into a Brahmin family at Devgaon (देवगाव) in the Verul region. The household married her, by long custom, very young; she gives her own age in the autobiography as five. Her husband Gangadhar Pathak (गंगाधर पाठक) was a widower of about thirty, learned in the orthodox sense, a Brahmin proud of his caste and of the privileges it secured. The marriage was not, by any reading of the abhangas she later wrote about it, a happy one. The autobiography is unflinching about that fact and the chapter cannot soften what she did not soften.

She moved with her natal family and then with her husband through several towns in the Deccan, Devgaon to Rahimatpur to Kolhapur and others the autobiography names. At Kolhapur she encountered the abhangas of Tukaram (तुकाराम) and was given, in vision and dream, the recognition that he was her sadguru. Tukaram in those years was still alive at Dehu, and whether Bahinabai met him in the body or only through his songs and dreams is a question modern scholarship reads variously. She kept her devotion to him through his disappearance on the vimana in 1650 (Wave 2 Chapter 8) and across the four further decades of her own life. She died around 1700, by tradition at Shirur (शिरूर) in Pune district, leaving the autobiography and a body of devotional abhangas the tradition received as the final voice of the great-sant period.

That is the biography in compressed form. The chapter's work is to read it.

The Atmanivedan as a literary act

The autobiography goes by the name Atmanivedan (आत्मनिवेदन), self-offering, the term Bhakti theology gives to the culminating limb of devotion in the Bhagavata Purana's ninefold scheme. Tradition titled the work after the act of giving the self away in love. Justin Abbott, the missionary translator whose 1929 Bahina Bai (vol. 5 of his Poet-Saints of Maharashtra series) remains the working English text, treats the autobiography as a single continuous composition and renders it accordingly. Anne Feldhaus's 1982 article in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, "Bahina Bai: Wife and Saint," reads the autobiography along the same continuity, with attention to how the saint-wife double-bind structures the narrative. R. D. Ranade gives Bahinabai a chapter near the end of Mysticism in Maharashtra precisely because what she wrote is what he could not say of any other sant: here the inward biography is on the page in the saint's own voice.

To compose four hundred and seventy-three abhangas about your own life, in a tradition that does not reward the autobiographical voice and in a poetic form whose entire weight is supposed to fall on Vitthal and not on the singer, is to commit a small heresy of attention. The grammar of the abhanga turns inward by turning out: the singer empties to make room for the named. Bahinabai's autobiography does the unusual thing of letting the singer keep her own outline while she empties. The "Tuka mhane" signature line of Tukaram's abhangas, in which the singer disappears into the saying of the name, has its mirror in Bahinabai's recurring "Bahini mhane," where the woman naming herself is herself the offering.

The husband, the sadguru, and what could not be reconciled

The marriage was the difficulty. The autobiography is direct about it. Gangadhar Pathak was a Brahmin orthodox in the older sense: his caste was his ground and his learning a function of his caste. His wife's attraction to the abhangas of Tukaram, a Shudra grain merchant whose authority she received as higher than her husband's, was a wound he never finished carrying. He resented the sant company. He resented the visions. He beat her at one point, by her own narrative; the autobiography places the episode and does not soften it.

She did not leave. She did not condemn him. The abhangas about the marriage do something more difficult than either of those moves. They hold the husband as her dharmic obligation, her pati in the sense the older Marathi household culture used the word, and they hold Tukaram as her sadguru in the sense the Varkari tradition used it. Both are real, both binding, neither permitted to dissolve into the other. The interior of the abhangas is the cost of holding both.

This is the women's bhakti at the hardest edge. Mirabai's solution to a comparable situation was to leave; Akka Mahadevi's was to leave. The Marathi tradition has, in Bahinabai, a different shape. The wife who recognised her sadguru did not leave the husband. She wrote down the conflict instead. The autobiography does not tell the modern reader what to think about either choice. It tells the reader what was carried. Whether the staying was the religious act, or the staying-and-writing was the religious act, is a question the autobiography does not answer and the chapter should not answer for it.

Tharu and Lalita's Women Writing in India, vol. 1 anthologises selections from the Atmanivedan with this exact texture in mind, framing Bahinabai as the case where the constraint of upper-caste marriage and the witness against it are most visibly held together. Eleanor Zelliot's essays push the reading further: the autobiography is not only literature, it is a testament in the older sense, a witness brought against the assumption that the household's outward order is the same as the soul's inward order.

The absent sadguru

Bahinabai's relation to Tukaram is the chief Varkari instance of a sadguru received without the ordinary apparatus of meeting, and Wave 1 Chapter 12 named her at this position in advance. The doctrinal weight of the position is set there. The autobiography supplies the lived material.

The autobiography records that she encountered Tukaram first through his abhangas, brought into the household by a Vaishnava acquaintance. The abhangas affected her as no Sanskrit she had been raised with had affected her, and she identified the voice in them, before she had any biographical detail, as the voice of her teacher. The visions and dreams followed: Tukaram appearing to her, instructing her, naming the practice, refusing to release her even when the husband's resistance turned to violence. She narrates a journey to Dehu and a darshan of Tukaram in his lifetime; modern scholarship reads this episode variously, some readers taking the meeting as historical, others as the autobiography's narrative consolidation of dream-encounters across years. The pertinent question is not whether the meeting was bodily but what the relationship was.

The relationship, by Bahinabai's own description, was a sadguru relationship in the strong sense. The autobiography records that Tukaram gave her the path, named her the recipient, took responsibility for her movement toward what the name carries. He did this without the formal initiation apparatus other lineages require. He did it as the Varkari sadguru does it: through the abhangas, through the company of sants, through the interior availability of a teacher who has himself disappeared into what he taught. After the vimana, the autobiography says, his presence to her did not decrease. The Tukaram who could not be found at Dehu was the Tukaram available within her own discipline. Wave 1 Chapter 12 named the doctrine: the credentialed pandit is not the sadguru; the sadguru is the one whose presence does the work of bringing the practitioner toward what the name carries, and that presence is not held inside any institutional apparatus.

A specimen

The abhanga below is a sadguru-recognition piece from the early section of the Atmanivedan, in which Bahinabai names the inward instruction Tukaram gave her against the outward resistance of the household. The English is from Justin Abbott's 1929 translation. The Marathi running text is not reproduced here pending source confirmation against a critical Marathi edition (Sant Bahinabai Maharaj Sansthan recension or Sakal Sant Gatha apparatus); the Abbott volume is principally English with editorial notes and is not itself a Marathi critical edition.

English (after Abbott, 1929). Tuka is my sadguru, Tuka is my kin. Tuka is the certainty I rest in. Tuka came to me in a dream and gave me the teaching, cutting away the cord of household-existence. Bahini says: Tuka is my god. There is no second devotion in me toward any other.

Attribution. Sant Bahinabai, Atmanivedan, abhanga in the sadguru-recognition cluster following the Kolhapur encounter; English from Justin E. Abbott, trans., Bahina Bai: A Translation of Her Autobiography and Verses (Pune: Scottish Mission, 1929; Motilal Banarsidass reprints). Marathi running text not reproduced here pending source confirmation.

The twelve births

The cycle is, first, a literary act inside a Marathi devotional convention. The purvajanma trace, by which a saint's present devotion is anchored in earlier lives across which the seed was preserved, is a recurring move in the regional hagiographies; Mahipati uses it of others, and the form it takes in the abhanga is not Bahinabai's invention. To open the autobiography with twelve previous lives is to take a known shape of devotional self-narration and put one's own name into it.

It is, second, Bahinabai's claim to a lineage no household could deny. The household that resented her devotion to a Shudra sant could be told that her husband owned her present birth; the twelve births said that no household owned her path. The marriage held her body, the lineage of births held her devotion, and the marriage could not reach into the lineage. The autobiography's argument against the household is partly carried by this claim about the prior shape of the soul.

It is, third, a doctrinal claim about rebirth that the Varkari tradition holds in the characteristic tension Wave 1 Chapter 12 set out. The saguna and the nirguna are one in this tradition; the named Vitthal who stands on the brick is not other than the formless on whom the name rests. A doctrine of purvajanma that traces a soul's devotional development across twelve births does not sit easily with a strict nirguna metaphysic in which the differentiated soul is itself a provisional appearance. The tradition holds the tension rather than dissolving it. Bahinabai's twelve births sit inside that tension and add nothing to its resolution.

The autobiography's account, against this reading frame, is straightforward. She names births in which she was a Brahmin woman, a cow, a tigress in a forest, a fish, and other forms across the standard Indic span of jati possibilities, with each birth marked by some seed of bhakti that ripened across lives. The twelfth birth is the one of the Atmanivedan; it is in this birth that she is given the recognition of the sadguru and the work of the autobiography. Abbott translates the cycle in full. Tharu and Lalita read it as the claim against the household. The readings are not in conflict. The twelve births do all of these things at once, in Marathi verse, by a woman writing inside a marriage that had refused her the ground from which she was writing.

The closure of the lineage

Bahinabai is conventionally counted as the last of the great sants of the Varkari tradition. The sampradaya itself does not stop with her: the Wari continued, the kirtan tradition continued, abhangas continued to be composed by smaller figures and sung by larger ones, and the tradition is alive today. What ends with Bahinabai is the period of foundational saint-poets whose voices the canon receives as canonical in the way Dnyaneshwar, Namdev, Eknath, Tukaram, and Janabai are canonical.

Why the period closes with her is held by the chapter as a question rather than a settled finding.

The political-historical reading observes that the Maratha empire under Shivaji and his successors consolidated power in western India in the second half of the seventeenth century, that the Peshwa period institutionalised aspects of Varkari practice (the palkhi processions in their modern form were formalised by Haibatraobaba Arphalkar in the early nineteenth century), and that an institutionalised tradition has different conditions for the production of saint-voices than a tradition still finding itself.

The literary reading, advanced by Tulpule in Classical Marathi Literature and in later Marathi-language criticism, observes that no comparable abhangic voice emerged after Bahinabai. The reading is descriptive: voices comparable to Tukaram's tonal range, Dnyaneshwar's philosophical scale, or Bahinabai's autobiographical witness are not in the Marathi devotional record after 1700.

The third reading, which the tradition itself sometimes makes, takes the closure as a Varkari teaching about the saintly age. The sants had given the canon its spine. The work that remained, and remains, is the walking of the road they had laid. The closure is not a closure of the tradition. It is the closure of the laying of the foundation.

The three readings are not finally in competition. Institutional consolidation, literary silence, and the tradition's self-understanding describe the same fact from different angles. After Bahinabai the great-sant voices stop arriving, and the road continues without them.

Caste and gender, held distinct

Bahinabai was a Brahmin woman. The marginality her abhangas witness is the marginality of gender inside an upper-caste household, not the marginality of caste under Brahmin authority that Chokhamela (Wave 1 Chapter 5) carried. The chapter has to hold this distinction or it falsifies both.

Anupama Rao's framing, cited in Wave 1 Chapter 5 from The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India and her work on Dalit feminist thought, is that the two forms of marginality are not interchangeable and not additive in any simple way. Dalit bhakti and women's bhakti are both forms of marginal voice in the Varkari canon, with different conditions of possibility, different costs, and different relations to the institution. To collapse them into a single category called "marginal voice" is to lose what each of them is.

Bahinabai's marriage was inside the Brahmin caste order; her husband was the bearer of that order; her autobiography records the conflict that followed when she received as authoritative a voice the order placed below her own. Chokhamela's life was outside the temple wall; the wall was the institution's refusal of his caste; the autobiography he did not get to write is the absence Wave 1 Chapter 5 reads. Janabai's life was inside the Namdev household as a maidservant. These are three different shapes, and the Varkari record's honesty about itself depends on holding them as distinct.

What unifies the three, if anything does, is the abhanga form. The form gave each of these voices a vehicle that no other Indic literary tradition gave them so widely or so durably. Bahinabai's place in the answer is particular: she was a Brahmin woman who used the form to write her marriage onto the page and her sadguru into the canon, and the canon received both.

A closing note

She wrote her life down. The tradition received the writing as the last great sant-voice of the foundational period. After her, the Wari continued, the kirtan continued, the canon did not add another voice on her scale. The autobiography is what the marriage could not silence and what the canon, three centuries later, has not displaced. The sangha, in the centuries since, has continued to receive its sadguru not by the ordinary apparatus of formal initiation but by the abhangas-and-name discipline Bahinabai modeled on her page.

Sources

• Abbott, Justin E., trans. Bahina Bai: A Translation of Her Autobiography and Verses. Vol. 5 of the Poet-Saints of Maharashtra series. Pune: Scottish Mission, 1929; Motilal Banarsidass reprint. The standard English text of the Atmanivedan, including the twelve-births narrative; the working edition for this chapter.
• Feldhaus, Anne. "Bahina Bai: Wife and Saint." Journal of the American Academy of Religion 50, no. 4 (1982): 591 to 604. The chapter relies on this article for the saint-wife reading of the autobiography.
• Ranade, R. D. Mysticism in Maharashtra: Indian Mysticism. Originally published 1933; standard reprints by Motilal Banarsidass and Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan. The chapter on Bahinabai appears among the closing portraits of the great-sant period.
• Tharu, Susie, and K. Lalita, eds. Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Present, Vol. 1. Feminist Press / Oxford University Press, 1991. Selections from Bahinabai with the headnote situating her among women's bhakti voices across the subcontinent.
• Zelliot, Eleanor. Essays on women in the bhakti traditions, including pieces in The Experience of Hinduism: Essays on Religion in Maharashtra, ed. Eleanor Zelliot and Maxine Berntsen (SUNY Press, 1988), and in subsequent collected volumes.
• Tulpule, S. G. Classical Marathi Literature: From the Beginning to A.D. 1818. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1979. For the placement of Bahinabai in the closing arc of the great-sant period and for the literary reading of why no comparable voice emerged after her.
• Rao, Anupama. The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India. University of California Press, 2009. For the framing on caste and gender as distinct rather than additive forms of marginality, used here as in Wave 1 Chapter 5.
• Mahipati. Bhaktavijaya and Bhaktalilamrita, trans. Justin E. Abbott and N. R. Godbole as Stories of Indian Saints. 2 vols. Pune: Scottish Mission, 1933 to 1934; Motilal Banarsidass reprint. For the Varkari hagiographical context within which the autobiography sits.
• Novetzke, Christian Lee. Religion and Public Memory: A Cultural History of Saint Namdev in India. Columbia University Press, 2008. For the public formation of Varkari memory and the sangha's reception of saint-voices.
• The existing project assets at /teachers/tukaram and /scripture/tukaram-gatha, for the absent sadguru Bahinabai received without meeting.