Chapter 4. Namdev: the bridge to the north

A tailor's son who walked further than the tailor's road

Namdev (नामदेव, c. 1270 to 1350) is the second great voice of the Varkari sampradaya after Dnyaneshwar, and the only one of the Maharashtrian sants whose hymns sit, today, inside the Sikh scripture at Amritsar, in a North Indian devotional language, sung in a Punjabi gurdwara on a Sunday morning. His life is the seam at which the Varkari movement stops being a Marathi phenomenon and becomes something the larger bhakti map of India has to account for. His samadhi at Ghuman (घुमान) in Punjab and his samadhi at Pandharpur in Maharashtra are both authentic to the tradition. The duplication is not a confusion. It is the form of his life. He belonged to two soils and the tradition records it by giving him two graves.

This chapter holds him as the tradition holds him: as the sant who carried Maharashtra to the north and who never stopped being from the south.

A compressed biography

Namdev was born, by the consensus dating, in 1270 in the village of Narsi Bahmani in present-day Hingoli district, Marathwada. His father Damashet was a shimpi (शिंपी, the tailor caste; in the four-varna scheme, a Shudra category, though the regional caste situation was always more textured than the nomenclature implies), his mother Gonai. The family relocated to Pandharpur, and Pandharpur is the soil of his life. The Bhima river ran past the courtyard of his house. The Vitthal temple was minutes away. He married Rajai (राजाई), and had children, and worked the cloth-and-needle trade his father had worked.

The hagiographies, principally Mahipati's Bhaktavijaya in the eighteenth century and the older oral cycle the abhangas themselves preserve, organize his life around a small set of episodes that recur in nearly every retelling. The most beloved is the milk-and-curd story, set in his childhood. His father is going on a journey and instructs the boy to make the daily food-offering to Vitthal in his absence. Namdev takes the bowl of milk and curd to the shrine and waits for the deity to eat. The deity, being stone, does not eat. The child does not understand that the offering is a gesture and not a transaction. He pleads. He weeps. He threatens, the tradition says, to beat his head on the stone. Vitthal, in the version every Maharashtrian household has heard, comes out of the form and drinks the milk and the curd in front of the child. The bowl is empty when the father returns. The story is theological in the precise way Varkari stories tend to be: it says that for the bhakta who does not yet know the difference, the deity is asked to come out and eat, and the deity does, and the household saint-tradition of Maharashtra is built around the kind of bhakti in which the question of whether the stone really moved is the wrong question to ask.

His marriage to Rajai is held by the tradition as the marriage of the saint to the householder's life. The Mahipati cycle preserves stories of friction with his mother Gonai over his absorption in bhakti at the expense of the trade, and does not soften them. Namdev was not a renunciate. He was a tailor in a household with a wife and children and a mother who had to balance the books, and his bhakti put pressure on the books. The household and the bhakti both stood, neither was abandoned, and the abhangas got written in the room where the cloth was cut.

His relation to Dnyaneshwar is the most consequential biographical relation he had. Dnyaneshwar's samadhi at Alandi came in 1296 when Namdev was in his mid-twenties; the tradition records a close fellowship and a long pilgrimage the two undertook together to Maharashtrian and northern sites before the samadhi. After Dnyaneshwar's samadhi, Namdev's voice carried the bhakti forward in his own register: less philosophically systematic, more domestic, more direct, the sant who sang at the door rather than the sant who wrote the commentary. Christian Novetzke, in Religion and Public Memory: A Cultural History of Saint Namdev in India (2008), takes Namdev as a central figure in the kirtan-performance complex by which the abhanga becomes a performed and travelling form; the broader scholarly consensus, with Novetzke as one of its careful articulators, places Namdev among the early sants on whom the kirtankar's vocation visibly settles.

Gora Kumbhar and the test of saints

The story that the Varkari sangha tells most often when it tells of Namdev is the story of the test of saints, in which Gora Kumbhar (गोरा कुंभार) the potter strikes the heads of the assembled sants with the iron rod he uses on his unfired pots, testing for ripeness. Wave 1 Chapter 5 told it from Gora's side; this chapter tells it from Namdev's, because the lesson is his.

The setting in the canonical Mahipati version is a gathering of the sants. Gora is the elder potter from Ter (तेर), whose hands have spent a lifetime distinguishing the pot that has cured fully from the pot that still has a soft note in its baking. The assembled sants ask him to test them. The instrument is the iron rod with which he taps his pots. He goes from sant to sant, tapping the head, listening. The verdicts are stable across most retellings: most of the sants are pronounced ripe. Namdev's head is pronounced not yet ripe.

The detail of the rebuke matters. By this point Namdev has composed abhangas, sung kirtans, been taken into the close fellowship of Dnyaneshwar; he is, in his own self-understanding, a sant. Gora's verdict says: not yet. The tradition is unanimous about what happens next. Namdev does not protest. He receives the verdict. He is sent, by Dnyaneshwar or by the elder sants depending on the recension, to take initiation from a guru, traditionally identified as Visoba Khechar (विसोबा खेचर). The historical relation between Namdev and Visoba is debated by modern scholars; Novetzke is careful to mark it as part of the tradition's self-narration rather than a documented biographical fact. The hagiographic story, however the historical layer settles, is theologically precise.

Namdev, on going to Visoba, finds the elder asleep in a temple with his feet stretched out, by some accounts, toward the linga. Namdev objects. Visoba answers: move my feet to wherever you can find a place that is not the deity. Namdev moves the feet, and wherever he places them, the linga reappears, until he understands that there is no place that is not Vitthal, and that the offense he had taken on the deity's behalf was the last residue of his own ego. The pot was unripe because it still rang with the sound of I am the one who venerates. After this, the tradition says, Namdev's voice changes. The abhangas after the Visoba episode have a different note. The I is gone, or going.

This is what the Varkari sangha hears in the test-of-saints story. The lesson is not about Namdev's failure. It is about what bhakti is asked to give up at the threshold past which it can be sung as a sant's bhakti and not as a devotee's earnest noise. The story is told on Namdev because Namdev was great enough already that the lesson lands.

The Punjab years

The biographical detail that defines Namdev for the larger Indian tradition is his long sojourn in the north. The Marathi hagiographies hold that he travelled extensively after Dnyaneshwar's samadhi and spent years in the Punjab at Ghuman (घुमान), in present-day Gurdaspur district. The local Punjabi tradition records his presence concretely: a dera and a samadhi at Ghuman maintained for centuries, an annual fair, and a lineage of singers who keep his pads in their mouths in a Punjabi-inflected register. The Punjabi tradition holds that he died at Ghuman; the Maharashtrian tradition holds that he died on the steps of the Vitthal temple at Pandharpur. Both samadhis exist; both are pilgrimage sites; the Varkari sangha has lived with the duplication for seven centuries without resolving it. Novetzke treats the doubled samadhi as evidence of doubled reception: a single sant whose memory is held by two regional public memories, each authentic.

The years in the Punjab were long enough for the linguistic shift to land. Namdev did not preach in Marathi to people who could not understand him. He sang in the Sant Bhasha of the northern bhakti circles, the lingua franca of the Sant tradition into which Kabir and Ravidas would later be born, a Punjabi-inflected Hindi. The hymns he composed in the Punjab were preserved by the people who heard them, not by the Maharashtrian household. This is why the corpus has two textual lives. The Marathi abhangas are preserved in the Sakal Sant Gatha and the regional compendia. The northern hymns, in Sant Bhasha, are preserved in the Adi Granth, the scripture compiled by Guru Arjan in 1604. The bifurcation is not as clean as the two-corpora picture suggests; some compositions have parallel transmission in both registers, and in a portion of the textual layering what looks like distinct authorship is the layering of parallel reception in two singing communities rather than two separate compositional acts.

The Guru Granth Sahib presence

The Adi Granth, later the Guru Granth Sahib (श्री गुरु ग्रन्थ साहिब), preserves under the rubric Bhagat Naam Dev Ji a body of hymns that the standard count, used by Pashaura Singh in The Bhagats of the Guru Granth Sahib (Oxford University Press, 2003) and by Gurinder Singh Mann in The Making of Sikh Scripture (Oxford University Press, 2001), gives as sixty-one shabads across nineteen of the thirty-one ragas of the scripture. The hymns are in Sant Bhasha and Punjabi-inflected Hindi, not Marathi; Guru Arjan's editorial decision in arranging the Bhagat Bani was to receive these voices in the linguistic register the singer had used in the north, not to translate them. The hymns are sung in the gurdwara as part of the kirtan rotation. They sit at the level of the gurus' own bani, divided by raga, sung with the same musical and devotional gravity. The Punjabi reception of Namdev is itself a Sikh-tradition reception; he is read in the gurdwara as Bhagat Naam Dev Ji within the Bhagat Bani, and the relation between his Varkari identity and his Bhagat identity is a doctrinal question each tradition holds in its own register.

What makes Namdev unique among the early Varkari sants is the scale of this reception. Sena Nhavi is represented in the Adi Granth by one shabad on the standard apparatus, with some apparatuses counting two; the cross-attribution to the Maharashtrian barber-saint is traditional and is held with the standard caveat. Trilochan also appears, though the count is debated and the Maharashtrian regional identification of this Trilochan is itself contested in the scholarship. Namdev has sixty-one. He is the most-represented of the Maharashtrian voices in the Sikh scripture. Vitthal of Pandharpur appears in the hymns by name, in the northern register, alongside the more pan-Indian names of the divine. The provenance was not stripped.

The reception is theologically loaded. A Maharashtrian Shudra tailor's hymns, composed in the north in a Punjabi-inflected register, were absorbed into a scripture compiled in 1604 and given the same status as the gurus' own utterances. John Stratton Hawley, in A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement (Harvard University Press, 2015), reads this kind of cross-regional, cross-linguistic, cross-caste reception as evidence for a real north-south bhakti circulation; Namdev's place in the Adi Granth is one of the strongest concrete data points.

The caste fact

Namdev was a shimpi, a tailor, in the regional caste system of medieval Maharashtra. In the four-varna nomenclature this places him in the Shudra category. In the regional reality the tailor caste was artisanal, neither untouchable nor twice-born, occupying a middling position whose specifics varied by sub-region. Eleanor Zelliot, in her surveys of the Maharashtrian bhakti record, treats Namdev's caste position as the position from which the most consequential second-generation Varkari voice spoke: not from the ritually polluted bottom that Chokhamela's family inhabited, not from the Brahmin scholarship Dnyaneshwar inherited, but from the artisanal Shudra middle whose labor the upper castes used and whose voice the upper castes did not expect to be theologically authoritative.

Two registers run side by side here, and the chapter has to keep them in view at the same time. In the first register, Namdev's voice was received by the wider Indian tradition at the highest scriptural setting available: to sit inside the Sikh scripture at the level of the gurus' own bani is canonization in a register beyond hagiographical inclusion, and the Maharashtrian household for its part sang his abhangas alongside Dnyaneshwar's, walked his palkhi, kept his samadhi at Pandharpur. In the second register, the same societies that received Namdev as scripture went on, in the ordinary ritual order of their lives, maintaining the caste hierarchies that placed his community below the twice-born. The sangha sang his words; the temple establishment did not rearrange its priesthood. As Wave 1 Chapter 5 argued in its own idiom, the canonization does not retroactively dissolve the social fact, and the social fact does not retroactively reduce the canonization. The Varkari sangha lives with the contradiction, names it, and keeps singing.

His place in the Varkari sangha

Namdev did not stop being a Varkari sant when he went north. The bridge to Punjab did not break the southern rootedness. The palkhi that walks from Pandharpur each Ashadha and Kartika carries his name; his abhangas are sung in the kirtan rotation of the Wari and in the household Haripath gathering on ekadashi evenings; the Sakal Sant Gatha preserves a corpus of his abhangas among the largest of the Varkari corpora, comparable in scale to Tukaram's and Eknath's though composed centuries earlier. The textual transmission has its standard problems. The medieval attribution layer is unsettled, a number of abhangas in his name are reasonably suspected by modern scholars to be later additions, and the line between Namdev's own voice and the Namdev-school voice is not always crisp. Novetzke marks this carefully. The structural point holds: the southern corpus and the northern corpus are not the same corpus, the languages are not the same language, and yet the sant is one sant, and the Varkari sangha holds him without anxiety.

A specimen of Namdev's Sant Bhasha voice is preserved in the Bhagat Naam Dev Ji hymns of the Guru Granth Sahib, distributed by raga across the Bhagat Bani sections; the bulk of the Asa-raga hymns sit in the four-hundreds of the standard Ang numbering of the modern printed Granth. A specimen verse is not lifted into this chapter because Sant Bhasha rendering is hard to do responsibly without the Punjabi original alongside, and the Marathi milk-and-curd abhanga preserved in the Sakal Sant Gatha, much-loved as it is, has a received text whose attribution layer has not been resolved to the satisfaction of modern editors. One specimen, honestly hedged, is preferred to two unverified ones. The reader who wants the hymns in their received form should turn, for the northern voice, to Pashaura Singh's The Bhagats of the Guru Granth Sahib (Oxford University Press, 2003), and for the Marathi voice, to the Sakal Sant Gatha and to the in-house liturgical use of the Vitthal temples, where the milk-and-curd abhanga is sung from memory.

Sources

• Novetzke, Christian Lee. Religion and Public Memory: A Cultural History of Saint Namdev in India. Columbia University Press, 2008. The standard modern study; central source for the cross-regional reception, the kirtan-performance frame, and the careful handling of the doubled samadhi and the Marathi-versus-Sant-Bhasha corpora.
• Mahipati. Bhaktavijaya (mid-eighteenth century, Marathi), trans. Justin E. Abbott and Narhar R. Godbole as Stories of Indian Saints (2 vols., Motilal Banarsidass reprint of the 1933 edition). Principal hagiographic source for the milk-and-curd story, the Visoba Khechar episode, and the Gora Kumbhar test-of-saints cycle.
• Singh, Pashaura. The Bhagats of the Guru Granth Sahib: Sikh Self-Definition and the Bhagat Bani. Oxford University Press, 2003. The standard treatment of the Bhagat Naam Dev Ji corpus in the Sikh scripture, including the count of sixty-one shabads across nineteen ragas and the textual layering.
• Mann, Gurinder Singh. The Making of Sikh Scripture. Oxford University Press, 2001. For the editorial history through which the Bhagat Bani entered the Adi Granth at Guru Arjan's compilation in 1604.
• Zelliot, Eleanor. From Untouchable to Dalit: Essays on the Ambedkar Movement. Manohar, 1992; and Eleanor Zelliot and Maxine Berntsen, eds., The Experience of Hinduism: Essays on Religion in Maharashtra. SUNY Press, 1988. Background on the Maharashtrian caste landscape and Namdev's position within it.
• Hawley, John Stratton. A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement. Harvard University Press, 2015. Frames Namdev's cross-regional reception within the larger historical question of north-south bhakti circulation.
• Sakal Sant Gatha. Standard Marathi compilation containing the abhangas of Namdev alongside Dnyaneshwar, Eknath, Tukaram, and the wider Varkari corpus.
• Sri Guru Granth Sahib. The Bhagat Bani sections containing the hymns of Bhagat Naam Dev Ji, organized by raga across the standard Ang numbering.
• Ranade, R. D. Mysticism in Maharashtra: Indian Mysticism. Motilal Banarsidass reprint of the 1933 edition. Older but still useful chapter on Namdev within the Pathway to God in Marathi Literature frame.