Chapter 7. Eknath: the householder scholar

The bridge between the centuries

The previous chapter closed in the Namdev household, with Janabai at the bottom of its social order, holding the Name through grindstone and dung-smoke. What follows is what happened across the two intervening centuries during which the canon she helped to carry was at risk of fragmenting in transmission.

Between Dnyaneshwar's sanjivana samadhi at Alandi in 1296 and Tukaram's appearance on the bank of the Indrayani in the early seventeenth century, the Varkari sangha lived through three difficult centuries. The political ground beneath Maharashtra changed several times. Manuscripts decayed and were copied imperfectly. The lineage produced, in this stretch, no figure of Dnyaneshwar's philosophical scale or Tukaram's vernacular fire. The corpus the tradition had inherited risked being broken in transmission.

Sant Eknath (एकनाथ, c. 1533 to 1599) of Paithan is the figure the tradition placed in this gap. He is the householder scholar of the Varkari lineage: married, a father, settled in his ancestral town on the Godavari, a Brahmin who used a Brahmin's training to do work no renunciant could have done. R. D. Ranade, in Mysticism in Maharashtra, calls Eknath the bridge between Dnyaneshwar and Tukaram; the metaphor has stayed because it is accurate.

This chapter places him. The full corpus is large and long studied; the work here is to name its shape, to mark the central claim about the Dnyaneshwari recension, to honour the bharud as the form the tradition has remembered him by, and to face honestly the caste actions hagiography has wrapped around his life.

The life, briefly

Eknath was born in Paithan (पैठण, also called Pratishthan, the ancient capital of the Satavahanas on the Godavari) around 1533, into a Deshastha Brahmin family. His paternal great-grandfather was Sant Bhanudas (भानुदास), named in the canonical genealogy as the saint who brought the Vitthal image back to Pandharpur from Vijayanagara during the fifteenth century; the historicity of the Bhanudas-Vijayanagara story itself is debated, but the lineage claim is firmly received. The saint-line was already in the family's bones. Eknath was orphaned young and raised by his grandfather Chakrapani. His brahminical education was thorough.

The decisive turn was his discipleship to Janardan Swami (जनार्दन स्वामी) at the fort of Devgad (देवगड, also written Daulatabad, the hill-fort north of Aurangabad), where Janardan served as an administrator at Devgad. Janardan was a Datta-tradition guru of Advaita pedigree. Datta-tradition Advaita in medieval Maharashtra is not classical Shankara Advaita; it is a syncretic stream that joins Vedantic non-dualism with Nath siddha vocabulary and tantric elements, transmitted through guru lineages that traced themselves to Dattatreya. The hagiographies, principally Mahipati's Bhaktalilamrita (which carries the most extensive Eknath material in the Marathi sant-biography corpus), turn this period into a series of testing-stories. The historical core is that Eknath received both Vedantic instruction and Varkari devotion at Devgad and then returned to Paithan to live the rest of his life as a householder.

He married Girijabai (गिरिजाबाई), and the household raised a daughter, Godavari, and a son, Hari Pandit (हरि पंडित), who became a learned scholar in his own right. Eknath ran his house, taught, wrote, gave kirtan, fed pilgrims at his door, and did not at any point renounce. The choice was theological. The householder's life, lived with the Name, was the place of realisation; one did not leave Paithan to find God somewhere else. He died at Paithan in 1599 by walking into the Godavari at the jala-samadhi his lineage records.

The works, in outline

Eknath's literary output is the largest of any Marathi sant before Tukaram. Five works carry the weight.

The Eknathi Bhagavat (एकनाथी भागवत), his Marathi commentary on the eleventh skandha of the Bhagavata Purana, is the largest of the five and the work of his late maturity. The eleventh skandha is the Krishna-Uddhava dialogue, the Uddhava Gita of the Bhagavata, in which Krishna teaches Vedanta directly in the voice of the friend who is leaving. Eknath unfolds it in the ovi meter that Dnyaneshwar had used for the Gita, consciously continuing the Dnyaneshwari gesture of bringing scripture into Marathi at length. The work was, on the tradition's account, completed at Kashi after Brahmin opposition to a Marathi commentary on the Bhagavata had to be answered there.

Three further works sit alongside the Eknathi Bhagavat in the canon. The Bhavartha Ramayana (भावार्थ रामायण) is Eknath's Marathi Ramayana, a long ovi rendering of the Rama story; he completed the Bala, Ayodhya, Aranya, and Kishkindha kandas, with portions of the Sundara and the early Yuddha, and the work was finished after him by his disciple Gavba and by his grandson Mukteshwar. The Rukmini Swayamvar (रुक्मिणी स्वयंवर) is his narrative poem on Krishna's marriage to Rukmini, drawn from the tenth skandha of the Bhagavata, which has lived most popularly of his works in domestic recitation. The Eknath Gatha (एकनाथ गाथा) is the collected abhanga corpus, gathered after his death from the singing tradition his household and disciples had transmitted; the standard Sakal Sant Gatha edition under Government of Maharashtra auspices carries it.

The bharud (भारुड), treated in its own section below, is the form by which the village remembers him.

The corpus passed to a learned house. His son Hari Pandit (हरि पंडित) studied the Eknathi Bhagavat with rigour and transmitted it. His great-grandson Mukteshwar (मुक्तेश्वर) completed the unfinished Bhavartha Ramayana and added independent compositions of his own to the corpus. The tradition's memory of the family runs from Bhanudas in the fifteenth century through Eknath in the sixteenth and into Mukteshwar in the seventeenth: a Brahmin saint-line that did its work as householders across four generations, with Eknath's literary acts continued by hands trained in his own house.

The Dnyaneshwari recension

The single most consequential thing Eknath did for the Varkari tradition is not in the list above. It is the work he did not sign as composition, because it was not composition. It was textual stewardship.

By the late sixteenth century, the Dnyaneshwari had been in manuscript circulation for nearly three hundred years. Copyists had introduced errors; glosses had crept into the running text; regional recensions had drifted apart; stanzas had been added by later hands. The text Dnyaneshwar had spoken was at risk of being lost inside the text the manuscripts had become. Eknath, in or around 1584 by the date his colophon records, undertook a critical recension: collating the manuscripts available to him, restoring what he judged to be the original ovis, removing the interpolations, and fixing a text. The recension he produced is the Dnyaneshwari the Varkari tradition has used since. Modern critical editions, including the major twentieth-century editions, work largely from Eknath's text and depart from it only where the manuscript evidence justifies departure.

This is not a small claim. The Dnyaneshwari is the tradition's foundational scripture. Without a stable text the Varkari sangha would have transmitted, by the early seventeenth century, a dispersed and uncertain corpus. The Haripath would have lacked the long doctrinal scaffolding behind it. Tukaram, born within a generation of the recension's completion, would have inherited a Dnyaneshwari that no longer carried Dnyaneshwar reliably. Eknath made sure that what Tukaram inherited was Dnyaneshwar.

The image to keep is concrete. A Brahmin householder in Paithan, sitting with manuscripts that have accumulated three centuries of copying error, choosing line by line what Dnyaneshwar had written. The Varkari foundation rests on those decisions.

The bharud

If the Eknathi Bhagavat is what Eknath's training built, the bharud is what his ear built. The bharud is a form of Marathi devotional poetry composed in the voice of a street-type, a folk character, a marginal figure of the village. It is written in a voice, not about one. The cycle includes bharuds spoken in the persona of the kolhāṭiṇ (the courtesan), the Mahār (the village watchman of the same caste-position Chokhamela had occupied), the jōgaḍā (the wandering mendicant), the vāghyā and muraḷī (the temple-attendants of Khandoba), and many more. Eleanor Zelliot's bharud essays in From Untouchable to Dalit (Manohar, 1992) and in the Untouchable Saints volume (Manohar, 2005) remain the most careful English scholarship on the form, and the chapter's reading of the bharud is in conversation with hers.

The bharud is performed, not just read. It is sung in kirtan with the bodily posture and tonal play of the character it speaks for: the kirtankar plays the courtesan when the courtesan's bharud is sung, the sweeper when the sweeper's bharud is sung. Inside the persona, the bharud teaches Vedanta. The courtesan's complaint about her clients becomes the bhakta's complaint about the senses; the sweeper's work of clearing the village courtyard becomes the work of clearing the heart; the watchman who guards the village boundary becomes the discrimination that watches the boundary of the self. The doctrinal payload is Advaita and bhakti folded together, and it is delivered in the diction of the unschooled.

This is the literary echo of what Wave 1 Chapter 5 named as the tradition-of-margins, and what Chapter 10 named as vernacular-as-theological-act. Eknath did not write bhakti poetry that the marginal could understand. He wrote bhakti poetry in the voice of the marginal. The choice was deliberate. A Brahmin householder of Paithan, schooled to compose Sanskrit stotra if he had wanted to, instead composed in the voice of the Mahar watchman and the courtesan.

The form's politics has been argued over. Zelliot reads the bharud as a literary opening that took marginal voices into the centre of devotional performance and treated them as theologically authoritative. Jon Keune, in Shared Devotion, Shared Food, presses the question harder. The bharud is a Brahmin householder speaking as a Mahar, and that speaking is not the same act as a Mahar speaking. A Brahmin author selects which marginal voices to perform; the marginal subject does not author the performance, does not control its circulation, and does not gain the standing the performance accrues. The dignity is real on the page; that the dignity passes through Brahmin authorship is equally real. To call the bharud a literary opening is true; to call it social levelling overreaches what a sixteenth-century Paithan Brahmin in his own courtyard could have effected. The reading the chapter holds is that both descriptions are simultaneously accurate, on the same model Wave 1 Chapter 5 used for Chokhamela's reception, and that the bharud's worth is not diminished by the candour of the second.

The most-cited bharud in the Eknath corpus is the Vinchu Chavla (विंचू चावला, "the scorpion has bitten"), still sung in kirtan across Maharashtra. The bharud opens by inviting the audience to inspect the welt of a scorpion sting on a villager's body: the chant is the village healer's chant, the scene is village exorcism, the dramaturgy is one any audience would have recognised. By the time the chant has worked through its second and third turns the scorpion has been read as tama and krodha, the senses and the ego, and the cure has arrived as the Name and the satsang of the saints. The bharud ends in nirguna terrain. The form's home is the kirtan repertoire of Maharashtra, where Vinchu Chavla and the bharuds in the courtesan, the watchman, and the sweeper personae have been carried for four centuries; the standard reference texts are the Eknath Maharajanchi Gatha and the Sakal Sant Gatha.

A single bharud carries doctrine, dramaturgy, and the rhythm of the kirtan into a four- or five-minute performance. The form is Eknath's distinctive contribution.

The closing image to keep is concrete. The courtesan complains about her clients and complains as the bhakta complains about the senses. The watchman keeps the village boundary and keeps it as discrimination keeps the boundary of the self. The sweeper clears the courtyard and clears it as the seeker clears the heart. Each persona is named, the scene is staged, the equivalence does not need stating. The kirtankar plays the part. The audience hears the Name through the courtesan, the watchman, and the sweeper before hearing it as itself.

The caste actions

The hagiographies attach to Eknath a cycle of stories about caste behaviour the Varkari tradition has continued to tell. The most-repeated are three. Eknath, returning home from a ritual bath in the Godavari, finds a Mahar family at his door and feeds them, taking their meal as priority over the shraddha he had been preparing for his ancestors. Eknath, walking through Paithan, sees an untouchable child unable to cross the hot sand to its mother and carries it across the square on his shoulder. Eknath, in Paithan, allows Mahar singers into his courtyard for kirtan, against the local Brahmin order's prohibition.

These are hagiographic in form. The principal source is Mahipati's Bhaktalilamrita of the eighteenth century, reaching the stories nearly two centuries after Eknath's death. Tulpule, Zelliot, and Keune all note that the Bhaktalilamrita attaches similar caste-transgression cycles to several saints and that the traffic of motifs between hagiographies is heavy. For these specific stories, contemporaneous evidence is not available.

What the stories do in the tradition is the question that matters. They are the material out of which the Varkari sangha has built its image of what a Brahmin householder is permitted to be, and what the Name is supposed to do to caste. They are recited at festivals and printed in popular hagiography volumes. The instructional claim is that bhakti reorders the caste reflex.

The discipline the chapter keeps, on the same model Wave 1 Chapter 5 used for Chokhamela, is to read the gesture and the structure together rather than to choose. The hagiographic gesture is a real fact about the tradition's moral imagination; the structural change in caste relations in sixteenth-century Paithan, and in Maharashtra, was not. Jon Keune's Shared Devotion, Shared Food develops this carefully, treating the Eknath food-stories not as historical events to be vindicated or debunked but as sites of normative work the tradition has done across centuries through their retelling. The food-shared-across-caste-lines image is doing serious moral labour; the labour is not the same as a social transformation. To honour the gesture and to refuse the easier story in which the gesture sufficed is the chapter's posture.

The samadhi at Paithan

Eknath's bridging work, by the time of his death, was done. The Dnyaneshwari recension had been completed and was circulating. The Eknathi Bhagavat had extended the vernacular act to a second canonical Sanskrit scripture. The bharud had given the kirtan repertoire its most performable and most socially capacious form. A few years later, a child was born in Dehu, on the Indrayani, into a Kunbi grain-trading family. Tukaram would inherit a tradition with its texts intact. That is what Eknath did.

In 1599 Eknath performed his jala-samadhi by walking into the Godavari at Paithan. The hagiography frames it as a deliberate going, the saint choosing the river that had carried his Bhavartha Ramayana's ovis and his life. The spot is marked at Paithan and continues to receive pilgrims; the paduka of Eknath is kept there, and a Varkari festival is held annually on the date of his samadhi. The river is the Godavari, on the bank of the town in which he was born and in which he stayed; it is the river the Paithan kirtan tradition still gathers beside on the festival day. He walked in. The water closed.

Sources

• Mahipati. Bhaktalilamrita (mid-eighteenth century, Marathi). The principal hagiographic source for Eknath's life cycles, including the Devgad period under Janardan Swami, the food-with-the-untouchables story, and the cycles around the carrying of the Mahar child. Justin E. Abbott's English translation as The Life of Eknath: Sri Eknath Charita (Poona, 1927; Motilal Banarsidass reprints) is the accessible reference. Mahipati's earlier Bhaktavijaya contains a shorter Eknath cycle.
• Abbott, Justin E. The Life of Eknath: Sri Eknath Charita. Poona, 1927; Motilal Banarsidass reprints. The standard English translation of Mahipati's Eknath material.
• Ranade, R. D. Mysticism in Maharashtra: Indian Mysticism. 1933; Motilal Banarsidass reissue. The chapters on Eknath; the bridge-figure framing this chapter follows.
• Zelliot, Eleanor. From Untouchable to Dalit: Essays on the Ambedkar Movement. Manohar, 1992. Includes essays on the bharud as form and on Eknath's caste actions; the principal English-language scholarship on these topics.
• Zelliot, Eleanor and Mokashi-Punekar, Rohini, editors. Untouchable Saints: An Indian Phenomenon. Manohar, 2005. Further essays on the bharud and on Eknath's place within the Maharashtrian sant-line on caste.
• Keune, Jon. Shared Devotion, Shared Food: Equality and the Bhakti-Caste Question in Western India. Oxford University Press, 2021. The recent scholarly monograph on Eknath's food-stories and the normative work they have done across centuries; essential for the chapter's hagiography-and-structure framing.
• Novetzke, Christian Lee. Religion and Public Memory: A Cultural History of Saint Namdev in India. Columbia University Press, 2008. For the public-memory frame within which the Varkari sangha received and transmitted Eknath's bharud and Gatha alongside its other sant corpora.
• Novetzke, Christian Lee. The Quotidian Revolution: Vernacularization, Religion, and the Premodern Public Sphere in India. Columbia University Press, 2016. For the broader vernacular-as-theological-act argument within which the Eknathi Bhagavat and the bharud belong.
• Tulpule, S. G. Classical Marathi Literature: From the Beginning to A.D. 1818. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1979. For dating, attribution, the bibliography of Eknath's corpus, and the standard textual notes on the Dnyaneshwari recension.
• Eknath Maharajanchi Gatha and Sakal Sant Gatha, Government of Maharashtra editions. The reference Marathi corpus for Eknath's abhangas and bharuds, including the Vinchu Chavla.
• Standard published recensions of the Dnyaneshwari (Bhāvārtha Dīpikā); the major twentieth-century critical editions, including the Government of Maharashtra edition, work largely from Eknath's 1584 text.