Chapter 5. The Sants of the Margins
This is the chapter the tradition cannot read comfortably, and the chapter that, if it is left out, makes everything else dishonest. The Varkari sangha gathered into its canon men and women from castes that the wider Hindu social order had ranked at the bottom or near the bottom: a Mahar (an untouchable caste in the older Maharashtrian schema), a barber, a gardener, a potter, a goldsmith. The poems of these saints are sung in the kirtans today. Their names are spoken in the same breath as Dnyaneshwar's and Tukaram's. And yet one of them, Chokhamela, was kept outside the Vitthal temple at Pandharpur in his lifetime, and his samadhi sits today on the steps of that temple's outer wall, on the side of the road, exactly where an untouchable was permitted to come and not one foot further. Neither fact cancels the other.
The Two Truths
The bhakti turn in Maharashtra was, by the standards of its time and place, radical. The claim that the divine Name (नाम, nama) is available to anyone who utters it, that the Name is not the property of the twice-born, that lineage and birth do not condition the soul's relation to Vitthal: this claim is preached by Dnyaneshwar in the thirteenth century, repeated by Namdev in the fourteenth, embodied in the sangha that absorbed Chokhamela and Sena and Savata and Gora, and carried forward by Eknath and Tukaram. The lower-caste sants were not tolerated tokens. Their abhangas were preserved, copied, sung. Chokhamela's family produced four poet-saints in two generations: Chokhamela himself, his wife Soyrabai (सोयराबाई), his son Karmamela (कर्ममेळा), his sister Nirmala (निर्मळा), and his brother-in-law Banka (बंका). All of them have abhangas in the corpus. Soyrabai's voice in particular, a Mahar woman in fourteenth-century Maharashtra writing devotional poetry that was preserved and transmitted, is something the global history of religion has very few parallels for.
Chokhamela could not enter the Pandharpur temple. The tradition records that he stood outside, sang to Vitthal across the threshold, and accepted the prohibition.
And none of this dismantled the caste order. After his death Chokhamela was buried at the temple's outer step. His descendants, including Karmamela, inherited the same exclusion in life and the same proximity-but-not-entry in their poetry. The dignity of the Name was offered. The right to enter the temple was not. B. R. Ambedkar, born into a Mahar family and the most consequential modern critic of Hindu social structure, drew exactly this line: the bhakti movements offered an interior equality that did not translate into a social one, and a tradition that revered Chokhamela while continuing to exclude Mahars from temples had, at minimum, a contradiction at its center. To take Ambedkar's critique seriously is not to reject Varkari bhakti. It is to refuse to read its history with one eye closed.
These are the frame for everything that follows.
Chokhamela the Mahar
Chokhamela is dated to the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century, contemporary with Namdev and slightly after Dnyaneshwar. He was born into a Mahar family in or near Mangalvedha, in the region southeast of Pandharpur. The Mahars in medieval Maharashtra were an untouchable caste with hereditary village duties: removing dead cattle, watching the village boundary, tanning hides, providing labor that the upper castes considered polluting. Chokhamela was born to that life and remained in it.
The hagiographies, principally Mahipati's eighteenth-century Bhaktavijaya and the older oral cycle preserved in the abhangas themselves, place him as a disciple of Namdev. The story most often retold is that Chokhamela came to Pandharpur, was barred from the temple, stood outside calling to Vitthal, and that Vitthal himself came out to him. There are several variants. In one, Vitthal dines at Chokhamela's house and the priests later find traces of leftover food on the deity's lips and beat Chokhamela for the sacrilege of feeding the god. In another, Chokhamela is killed in an accident at a wall-construction site at Mangalvedha; Namdev recovers the bones, recognizes them by the syllables "Vitthal Vitthal" still sounding from them, and brings them to Pandharpur for burial at the temple's outer step. The wall-collapse death is stable across versions; the bone-recognition miracle varies. Eleanor Zelliot, who worked on Chokhamela for decades, treats the broad arc as the received tradition while marking the more dramatic miracles as hagiographic accretion. The miracle does theological work: the bones go on saying the Name. Ch. 12 section 2 unfolds this position.
What survives that we can call directly his are the abhangas. Mokashi-Punekar's On the Threshold: Songs of Chokhamela (Altamira / Book Review Literary Trust, 2005), the standard English edition of the corpus, treats the Chokhamela family as a tightly connected group of voices in which Chokhamela's own surviving abhangas form the largest body, with the usual caveat that the medieval attribution layer is unsettled and a number of poems in his name are likely later. The poems do something Sanskrit theology rarely allows itself: they speak from inside the polluted body. Chokhamela addresses Vitthal as a fellow whose company he cannot share at table, and asks why the body he was given should be the obstacle. He uses the language of impurity not to deny it, but to press it on the deity: if all is Vitthal, where is the impurity. The poems are theologically pointed and personally raw. They are not protest poetry in a modern political sense. They are bhakti poems whose ground note is the unresolved question: you are mine and I am yours, but your priests will not let me in.
A representative abhanga in the corpus addresses Vitthal as one whose bhakta has been kept at the door, and asks the deity directly to recognize him there. Mokashi-Punekar's translations preserve the directness without softening the theological scandal. (Readers of these notes who want the texts should go to her edition rather than to second-hand quotations.)
Chokhamela's relation to the institutional tradition is double. He is inside the canon. He is outside the temple.
Soyrabai
Soyrabai is Chokhamela's wife and the most important Dalit woman poet of medieval Maharashtra. The corpus attributed to her in the printed Varkari editions is, on Mokashi-Punekar's accounting, a substantial body of abhangas, second within the family only to Chokhamela's, with the usual cautions about authentication. Her best-known lines turn the priestly logic of pollution back on itself: the body has its impurities, but the indweller is pure; if the deity is in the body, where in the body is impurity actually located. This is not abstract theology. It is a direct response to the daily reality of being a Mahar woman whose body is treated as polluting and whose child carries the same inherited stain. The reading of Soyrabai as a poet of inwardness, in which the impurity-and-indweller move is taken as a theological claim about the soul, is the line associated with Mokashi-Punekar's On the Threshold and Zelliot's "The Untouchable Saints of Maharashtra: A Study in Acceptance"; Anupama Rao's Dalit-feminist work pushes back on the inwardness reading, arguing that it tends to depoliticize a poetry whose force is its refusal of the social fact and not only its reframing of the metaphysical one.
Karmamela
Karmamela is Chokhamela's son. His surviving corpus is smaller than his father's and his mother's, and its tone is sharper. Where Chokhamela accepts and asks, Karmamela argues. Why was I born here. Why is this my inheritance. Why does the deity who claims all bhaktas as his own continue to permit my exclusion. The poems are still bhakti poems, addressed to Vitthal, but the complaint is unmistakable. To later editors this made Karmamela harder to canonize cleanly, and his corpus has been less translated and less anthologized than his father's. The relative under-anthologization is noted by Mokashi-Punekar in her introductory essay to On the Threshold. Zelliot draws particular attention to him as a witness against any reading of Varkari bhakti as having quietly resolved its caste contradiction in the next generation.
Nirmala and Banka
Chokhamela's sister Nirmala and her husband Banka are the fourth and fifth poet-saints of the family. Nirmala's surviving body is a small set of fragments; Banka's is somewhat larger but still modest beside Chokhamela's and Soyrabai's. Their poems extend the family's themes: the address to Vitthal from outside the door, the assertion of the deity's presence in the work of the Mahar household, the refusal to grant that pollution is metaphysically real. That an entire extended Mahar family produced five poet-saints in two generations and that all five are remembered by name in the Varkari tradition is itself remarkable. That the social order they were born into was not measurably altered by the fact is the matter of the Ambedkar critique.
Sena Nhavi the Barber
Sena Nhavi is dated traditionally to the late thirteenth or fourteenth century, a contemporary or near-contemporary of Namdev. He was a barber by caste and trade. Barbers in medieval Maharashtra occupied a low but not untouchable position; they were ritually marginal but not absolutely excluded. The most repeated story has the king of the region, traditionally Bidar, summon his barber for a shave; Sena is absorbed in his bhakti and does not come; Vitthal himself takes the form of Sena, goes to the king, performs the shave, and disappears, leaving the king with the certainty that he has touched the divine. Sena's Marathi abhangas are not numerous, and his footprint extends beyond the Marathi corpus: the Adi Granth, the Sikh scripture, contains one shabad under the name Sena Bhagat on the standard apparatus, with some apparatuses counting two, widely identified with the same figure, with the standard caveat that the attribution of the northern Sena to the Maharashtrian barber-saint is traditional rather than independently documented and is held with varying confidence by modern scholars. Christian Novetzke's work on the Namdev tradition treats the cross-pollination between Maharashtrian and northern bhakti as significant for why a Marathi barber-saint's verses end up in a Punjabi scripture.
Savata Mali the Gardener
Savata Mali was a gardener-cultivator (mali, the cultivating caste of the Pune-Solapur region), dated to the thirteenth century, possibly slightly earlier than Namdev. He lived in the village of Aran, in present-day Solapur district, and the tradition holds that he never went to Pandharpur at all. The standard story is that Vitthal came to him in his garden, and that Savata's bhakti was so absorbed that he did not need to walk to the temple because the deity walked to him. His most-quoted line expresses the equivalence of cultivation and worship: the work of the field is itself the work of the Name, the gardener's tools the implements of bhakti. His surviving abhangas are few, and Zelliot among others has noted that his place in the tradition rests at least as much on the symbolism of the absorbed-cultivator as on a large textual corpus. The temple at Aran preserves his memory locally.
Gora Kumbhar the Potter
Gora Kumbhar, the potter-saint of Ter, is the senior figure among the lower-caste sants of this generation. He is placed slightly earlier than Namdev, and the hagiographies make him the convener of the famous "test of saints," in which the assembled Varkari sants gather and Gora is asked to test which of them is "fully baked," fully ripened in bhakti, by tapping each on the head with the iron rod he uses on his unfired pots. In the most repeated version, Namdev is among those declared not fully baked, and the rebuke sends him to receive initiation from a guru, traditionally identified as Visoba Khechar; the attribution is hagiographic and the historical relation between Namdev and Visoba is debated by modern scholars, who treat the guru-link as part of the tradition's self-narration rather than a documented biographical fact. The detail of the iron rod is stable; the verdicts shift.
The deeper legend about Gora himself is grimmer. In a state of bhakti-absorption while treading clay in his potter's pit, he is said to have trampled his own infant child, the child having crawled into the pit unseen. His wife's grief and his eventual continuation in bhakti are the test of his saint-nature. The story is preserved in Mahipati's Bhaktavijaya and in oral tradition; the tradition itself does not present it as straightforwardly edifying. It is told as the fact of what happened to Gora, not as a recommendation. His surviving abhangas are few and largely concern the equivalence of pot-making and god-making: the same hands that shape clay shape the heart that holds Vitthal.
Narahari Sonar the Goldsmith
Narahari Sonar (नरहरी सोनार) was a goldsmith in Pandharpur itself, traditionally dated to the thirteenth century. The canonical story has him a Shaiva who refuses to fashion ornaments for Vitthal, agrees to a commission only on the condition that he work blindfolded, and finds that whatever measurements he takes blindfolded yield an ornament that fits the form of Shiva when Vitthal is in front of him and the form of Vitthal when Shiva is in front of him. He realizes that the form he had refused to acknowledge and the form he had worshipped his whole life were not two.
Narahari's caste position was not low in the same sense as the others in this chapter; he was a goldsmith from a respectable artisanal caste. He is included briefly here for narrative continuity with the tradition's own grouping of these sants. His theological role, in the saguna-nirguna unity the smith's work enacts, is taken up in Chapter 12 section 1.
The Ambedkar Critique
B. R. Ambedkar (1891 to 1956) was born into a Mahar family in Mhow and became the principal architect of the Indian Constitution and the leader of a mass conversion of Dalits to Buddhism in 1956. His relation to the Varkari tradition was personal as well as historical: Chokhamela was the Mahar saint, Ambedkar was a Mahar reformer, and the question of what Chokhamela's example meant for Mahars in the twentieth century was unavoidable for him.
Ambedkar's published treatment of bhakti, scattered across his writings on Hindu social structure (notably Annihilation of Caste in its 1936 form and the unpublished but circulated Riddles in Hinduism) and his speeches, takes a hard line. The argument is broadly this. Bhakti movements, including the Varkari sangha, offered interior spiritual equality, the soul's equal access to the deity, but did not translate it into a structural challenge to the caste order. The lower-caste saint was venerated in his exception. His exception was used as evidence that the system was working: see, even an untouchable can become a saint. This functioned, Ambedkar argued, to absorb the moral pressure that an untouchable's claim to dignity should have placed on the social order, and to defer indefinitely the question of whether the caste order itself was just. Chokhamela's poetry, on this reading, was preserved precisely because it accepted the limit. Ambedkar's pointed treatment of Chokhamela sits in the temple-entry context of the late 1920s and early 1930s, the years of the Mahad and Kalaram (Nashik) satyagrahas, and is reproduced across the relevant volumes of the Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches multivolume edition published by the Government of Maharashtra. The position is consistent: he rejected Chokhamela as a model for Mahars in the modern period and chose Buddhism instead.
Other scholars hold the picture more in tension. Zelliot's later "From Untouchable to Dalit" essays acknowledge Ambedkar's critique fully and also note that Chokhamela's voice did genuinely enter the tradition's canon and is genuinely sung today, including by Mahars and Dalits, and that this is not nothing. Gail Omvedt is more inclined to treat the bhakti record as failed radicalism rather than complicit accommodation. Jayant Lele's edited volume Tradition and Modernity in Bhakti Movements contains essays on both sides. None of these scholars dismiss Ambedkar. They hold his critique alongside the fact that the canon is what it is, that lower-caste voices are inside it, and that Dalit reception of the Varkari sants today is contested rather than monolithic.
The radical claim and the structural exclusion both stand; the contradiction was not resolved within the tradition's medieval frame, and the modern Dalit response to it ranges from continued devotional engagement to Ambedkar's principled departure.
Chokhamela's Samadhi
Outside the Vitthal temple at Pandharpur, on the steps that lead down toward the Chandrabhaga river, there is a small samadhi. It belongs to Chokhamela. Varkari pilgrims who walk to Pandharpur stop there. They bow. Many, before going further into the temple, stop here first. The position is not symbolic in any softened sense. It is the physical record of where, in his lifetime, Chokhamela was permitted to come and where he was not.
The most reverent thing the tradition can do with this fact is to look at it directly. The samadhi is outside. Pilgrims bow. The poems are sung. Both the exclusion and the inclusion happened, and the tradition lives in the unresolved space between them. The Varkari liturgy itself contains the formula that all bhaktas are equal at Vitthal's feet. The samadhi is what equal-at-the-feet looked like in practice in fourteenth-century Maharashtra. To say so is not to defame the tradition. It is to refuse the easier story in which the moral problem was already settled.
Chokhamela's samadhi sits a few feet outside the temple wall. He could not cross it then. His remains rest at it now. The question it asks of the tradition is still open.
The conversation about what Chokhamela means for Dalit communities today is alive in the present tense. Anupama Rao's work, and the wider literature on Mahar bhakti reception that she has helped name, lay out a range of positions: continued devotional participation in the Wari and the kirtan; selective engagement that takes Chokhamela's voice as a Dalit voice while refusing the institutional frame; Ambedkar's principled refusal carried forward into Buddhist conversion. The descendants of those who once excluded Chokhamela today sing his abhangas. The descendants of his community include both those who walk to Pandharpur and those who will not. Naming, not resolution.
Sources
- Mokashi-Punekar, Rohini. On the Threshold: Songs of Chokhamela. Altamira Press / Book Review Literary Trust, 2005. Standard English edition; central source for translations, for the comparative sizing of the family corpora, and for the introductory essay's note on Karmamela's under-anthologization.
- Zelliot, Eleanor. From Untouchable to Dalit: Essays on the Ambedkar Movement. Manohar, 1992. Especially "The Untouchable Saints of Maharashtra: A Study in Acceptance."
- Zelliot, Eleanor and Mokashi-Punekar, Rohini, editors. Untouchable Saints: An Indian Phenomenon. Manohar, 2005.
- Mahipati. Bhaktavijaya (mid-eighteenth century, Marathi). Principal hagiographic source for the standard narrative cycles around Chokhamela, Gora, Sena, Savata, and Narahari. Justin E. Abbott's English translation (Poona, 1933) remains the accessible reference.
- Feldhaus, Anne, editor. Images of Women in Maharashtrian Literature and Religion. SUNY Press, 1996.
- Rao, Anupama. The Caste Question: Dalits and the Politics of Modern India. University of California Press, 2009. Frames Mahar bhakti reception within Dalit political history and grounds the Dalit-feminist counter-reading of the inwardness frame applied to Soyrabai.
- Novetzke, Christian Lee. Religion and Public Memory: A Cultural History of Saint Namdev in India. Columbia University Press, 2008. Useful for the cross-regional reception of Sena.
- Lele, Jayant, editor. Tradition and Modernity in Bhakti Movements. E. J. Brill, 1981.
- Ambedkar, B. R. Annihilation of Caste (1936). Verso annotated edition, 2014, introduction by Arundhati Roy.
- Ambedkar, B. R. Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar: Writings and Speeches. Multivolume edition, Government of Maharashtra. Contains the speeches and essays from the temple-entry years (Mahad 1927, Kalaram / Nashik 1930 onward) and the unpublished Riddles in Hinduism.
- Omvedt, Gail. Seeking Begumpura: The Social Vision of Anticaste Intellectuals. Navayana, 2008.
- Dhere, R. C. Sri Vitthal: Ek Mahasamanvay. English translation by Anne Feldhaus, Rise of a Folk God: Vitthal of Pandharpur, Oxford University Press, 2011.