Chapter 12. The Theology

You have just walked the road. You have stood before the figure on the brick, sung the name with companions whose castes you did not need to learn, and let the body teach you what argument cannot. What follows is what you have already known. The chapter sets it down in prose because prose is one of the discharges of knowing, and because a reader two thousand miles from Pandharpur has the right to be told, in plain sentences, what the tradition claims.

The pilgrimage, the abhanga, the standing god on a brick, the bleeding feet on the road from Alandi to Pandharpur: all of this rests on a coherent view of God, of the self, of the world, and of how a human life is supposed to move. The Varkari sants did not produce a single systematic treatise. They produced something more demanding, a body of poetry across four centuries that stays internally consistent because it is rooted in a definite vision. This chapter draws out that spine.

A working summary, before the unfolding: the Varkari tradition holds that the formless absolute (Brahman, nirguna) and the loved form (Vitthal, saguna) are not two; that the divine name and the divine itself are not two; that the highest bhakti and the highest jnana converge in a love that has dissolved separation; that compassion for all beings is the visible test of inward attainment; and that ritual, scholarship, and caste pride without these are worse than useless. The path is bhakti-pradhāna, devotion-primary, but it is not dualist. It is closer to Shankara's Advaita than to Madhva's Dvaita, but it is not identical to either Shankara or to the bhakti-Vedantas of Ramanuja and Vallabha.

1. Saguna and nirguna held together

The Sanskrit categories saguna (with attributes, the personal God who can be loved and served) and nirguna (without attributes, the formless absolute) come down through Vedanta as two pictures that very often pull apart. Some traditions raise nirguna as the higher and saguna as the provisional concession; others raise saguna as the only concrete object of devotion and quietly let nirguna fade. The northern Sant tradition associated with Kabir and Nanak is mostly nirguna. The Pushti Marg of Vallabha is firmly saguna. The Varkari tradition is unusual in refusing both moves. Vitthal, the standing god of Pandharpur, is saguna. The Brahman of the Upanishads is nirguna. The sants insist these are not two gods. They are not two stages either, where one is climbed past on the way to the other.

Dnyaneshwar is the philosopher of this position. The Amritanubhav (अमृतानुभव), his short independent work after the Dnyaneshwari, is sometimes translated as "The Nectar of Mystical Experience." Its central concern is non-duality, but a non-duality that does not erase the lover and the loved. Dnyaneshwar's image of Shiva and Shakti as one being in two faces, neither prior, neither derivative, is doing exactly the work of holding form and formlessness in a single embrace. P. Y. Deshpande's commentary, and the translations by Ramachandra Keshav Bhagwat and by Dilip Chitre, all converge on this reading: for Dnyaneshwar the formless does not abolish the form; the form does not occlude the formless. Each is the other seen rightly. Ranade, in Mysticism in Maharashtra, ch. 3, makes the same point in more sober prose: Dnyaneshwar's Advaita holds saguna and nirguna together as a single non-duality, what Ranade describes as a non-duality holding saguna and nirguna together, which can be glossed as a saguna-Brahmavada position.

The story of Narahari Sonar, the Pandharpur goldsmith who finds the Shaiva form he has worshipped and the Vaishnava form he refuses to acknowledge collapsed in his own metalwork, illustrates the tradition's own use of the position. The goldsmith's hands, working ornament for what he insisted was not Vitthal, produce a piece that fits only Vitthal's body. The story is hagiographic; the theological point is austere. The form one will not see and the form one is sure one sees are the same form.

Tukaram, two centuries later and far less philosophically systematic, holds the same line by instinct. Tukaram in some abhangas addresses Vitthal as a particular person standing on a particular brick, and in others dissolves that person into the witness of all beings. Whether these registers are two stages, two faces, or two readings of one experience, is a question Varkari scholarship reads variously. Dilip Chitre, in Says Tuka, captures both registers without softening either side.

The doctrinal payoff is practical. A devotee who only had nirguna would have nothing to weep before, and a devotee who only had saguna would eventually mistake the brick for the god. The Varkari path keeps both.

2. The name and the named

The repetition of the divine name (नामस्मरण, namasmarana, or नामजप, namajapa) is the central practice of the tradition. The Varkari mantra is "Rama Krishna Hari." The Haripath is twenty-seven abhangas on the power of Hari's name.¹ This practice is not unique to the Varkaris; it is shared with the broader bhakti world and with the northern Sants. What is distinctive is the theological claim made about it.

The claim is that the name is not a memory aid pointing to an absent God. The name is the presence. To say "Vitthal" or "Rama Krishna Hari" with attention is not to think about the divine; it is to be in the divine's presence, because in the practice of namasmarana, the gap that ordinary language assumes between sign and signified is, the sants claim, traversed; the Name does what it names, when it is taken with bhāva and within the discipline of the path. Dnyaneshwar in the Haripath is explicit: the one who takes Hari's name is the one Hari has already taken. Tukaram puts it more aggressively. There are abhangas in the Gatha, rendered by Chitre and by Ranade, in which the name is described as the only thing that survives when everything else, including the practitioner's idea of God, has been burned away.

This is a real theological position, not a sentimental gesture. It assumes that the relation of word to reality, in the case of the divine name, is not the ordinary relation of sign to thing. The ordinary word "fire" does not burn. The divine name, the tradition claims, does what it names. This is congruent with much older Sanskrit reflection on the mantra and on śabda-brahman, the absolute as sound, found in the Mandukya Upanishad's meditation on Om and developed in the grammarian-philosopher Bhartṛhari. The Varkari sants do not work out the metaphysics in those terms. They simply act and write as if it were true, and they organize their lives accordingly. You can hear the claim being lived in the column on the road to Pandharpur: the cymbals strike on the off-beat, the harmonium drone holds underneath, and the syllable "Vit-thal" lands with the next foot on the dust before the mind has had time to consent to it. The doctrine that the name is the presence is, on the road, the experience that the body is praying before the head is.

A Christian reader will think of the name above every name of Philippians, or of the long Eastern Orthodox tradition of the Jesus Prayer. The illumination is real, and the comparison wants more care than the popular gloss allows. The popular gloss places the name on an incarnate person ontologically distinct from the creature praying, and contrasts this with a non-dualist Varkari. The popular gloss is not the only Christian metaphysics. The Father in classical Christian theology, in Aquinas and the Pseudo-Dionysian writings, in the Cappadocians, and in Augustine's si comprehendis, non est Deus register, is not a being among beings but, in Aquinas's formulation, ipsum esse subsistens, being itself; the apophatic tradition holds the Godhead beyond all creaturely distinction. Meister Eckhart's distinction between Gott and Gottheit (God and Godhead) presses the point as far as Christian language can go without leaving the Christian frame, though the Cologne condemnations of 1329 register the strain. The Eastern Orthodox tradition's own twentieth-century imiaslavtsy (name-glorifier) controversy asked precisely whether the divine name was identical with the divine reality, with Sergei Bulgakov and Pavel Florensky as its principal theological defenders.² Where the Varkari sants and the apophatic Christian writers meet on the question of what the name accomplishes, they meet inside Christianity as well as across the seam. Where they part lives elsewhere: in Christianity's specifically Christological apparatus, in the incarnation as the historical irruption of the eternal Word, in the trinitarian structure of the Godhead (which sat-cit-ānanda parallels do not finally render), and in an anthropology of the creature shaped by the doctrine of original sin. The traditions resemble each other in their seriousness about the name. They differ where their wider grammars of God, world, and self diverge. To make Christianity the simple foil of non-dualism flattens Christianity. To collapse the two would flatten both.

3. Bhakti and the dissolution of self

The Varkari path is bhakti-pradhāna. It privileges devotion. But its mature literature does not end where many bhakti traditions end, with the soul as eternal lover and the Lord as eternal beloved. It moves through devotion into something else, in which the duality of lover and beloved has thinned and, in the highest moments, dissolved.

The classic Tukaram instance is the cluster of abhangas Dilip Chitre groups under what he renders as "I have become" or "Now I have become." (See Chitre, Says Tuka, the section on identity and dissolution; Ranade, Mysticism in Maharashtra, also discusses these as Tukaram's "supreme identity" abhangas.) In them Tukaram says, in effect, that he has become what he sought, that there is no longer a him to seek, that what speaks is no longer the grain merchant of Dehu. The grammar of devotion remains; the metaphysical claim has shifted, in a direction Varkari scholarship reads variously.

Dnyaneshwar, in the Amritanubhav and in stretches of the Dnyaneshwari, argues this position philosophically. His commentary on the Bhagavad Gita's twelfth chapter, on bhakti, treats devotion not as a lower path that some travelers prefer but as a discipline that, when carried far enough, opens into non-dual recognition. Dnyaneshwar argues that devotion, carried far enough, opens into non-dual recognition; whether what is recognized is the absolute identity of lover and beloved, or a residual lover-beloved distinction so thinned that it is unspeakable from inside the experience, is read variously by Varkari scholarship and by living kirtankars.

Janabai's voice arrives at the same recognition by a different door. In the much-quoted abhanga whose Marathi opening Tharu and Lalita render as "विठ्ठल जात्यापाशी" (Vithobā at the grindstone), the divine joins the maidservant in domestic labor. Vitthal grinds with her, sweeps with her, fetches water with her, sleeps near her. The intimacy is so total that the boundary between worshipper and worshipped becomes structurally invisible. Eleanor Zelliot's essays on Janabai and the translations in Women Writing in India (Tharu and Lalita, vol. 1) bring this out. The mature Varkari sant is not absorbed into a featureless absolute. The mature Varkari sant remains a particular human being, doing particular work, while the gap that the early bhakta felt has closed.

This is why the Varkari tradition can be called bhakti-Advaita. It uses the language of devotion all the way through. It refuses the metaphysical conclusion that devotion implies eternal duality.

4. Compassion as the sign of true bhakti

The sants insist that love of God which does not become love of all beings is false. The Marathi terms are daya (दया) and karuna (करुणा); the English "compassion" carries both. This is not an ethical add-on to a primarily metaphysical project. It is a doctrinal test. If the realization is real, daya follows. If it does not, the realization is not what it claimed to be.

Tukaram is the fiercest voice on this point. The Gatha contains repeated condemnations of those who chant the name and remain hard-hearted, who keep ritual purity and are cruel to the poor, who claim Vitthal and despise their neighbors. Chitre's selections include several of these; Ranade discusses them at length under "the ethics of bhakti" in Mysticism in Maharashtra. The standard formula in the Marathi tradition, "जे का रंजले गांजले" (he who has been crushed and oppressed), names Tukaram's claim that the saint is to be recognized by his treatment of the wounded. Christian Novetzke, in Religion and Public Memory: A Cultural History of Saint Namdev, traces how this ethical insistence shaped how the tradition itself remembered and authorized the sants. Karuna was not how the sants happened to behave. It was the criterion by which the public, over generations, decided who counted as a sant at all.

This is why the radical inclusiveness of the tradition, the welcoming into kirtan of Chokhamela the Mahar and Sena Nhavi the barber and Janabai the maidservant, is not a sociological accident but a doctrinal commitment. The sant whose love of Vitthal stopped at the temple wall failed the test. The chapter on the sants of the margins (Chapter 5) describes the gap between this teaching and what the institution practiced. The teaching itself is unambiguous.

5. Critique of ritual without bhakti, scholarship without surrender

The Varkari sants attack three forms of religious self-deception with great precision: ritual without devotion, scholarship as status, and the social claim of caste superiority over inward attainment.

The attack on ritualism is not anti-ritual. The tradition keeps ekadashi, the tulsi mala, the wari, the kirtan, the dhyana shloka. It is opposed to ritual when ritual functions as a substitute for the inner movement it was meant to signify. Tukaram's most cutting abhangas on this subject treat the man who has performed every external observance and remains spiritually empty as the central figure of religious failure.

The attack on scholarship is not anti-intellectual. Dnyaneshwar produced one of the great philosophical poems of the Sanskrit-derived world; the Dnyaneshwari is a Marathi commentary on the Bhagavad Gita that runs to roughly nine thousand ovis in the standard recensions, with verse counts that vary modestly across manuscript families. The tradition is not against learning. It is against learning that has become a form of pride, against the use of Sanskrit competence as a marker of caste superiority, against the scholar who knows the verses and has not surrendered to what they point at. Eknath, two centuries after Dnyaneshwar, continues this critique in his Marathi commentary on the eleventh book of the Bhagavata Purana: the householder scholar is exemplary precisely because his learning has not insulated him from the duties of ordinary life or from the company of those his caste peers would shun.

The attack on caste pride is the political edge of the same theology. The name dissolves caste, the sants say, because what the name is in contact with is prior to any social marking. Jon Keune's Shared Devotion, Shared Food: Equality and the Bhakti-Caste Question in Western India shows how complex the actual record is. The teaching was clear; the institutional practice fell short of the teaching, and Chokhamela's samadhi outside the temple wall is the most honest material trace of that gap. Eleanor Zelliot, particularly in From Untouchable to Dalit, develops the same point.

Ambedkar would not let the chapter end here. The argument he made through his life, and that this chapter must let him make again, is plain. The Varkari sants taught that the name dissolves caste. The institution they founded did not dissolve it. Chokhamela was kept outside the temple wall in his life and his bones were buried outside it after his death, and the wall is still where it was. Ambedkar's position, set out across his speeches and the Writings and Speeches edited by the Government of Maharashtra, is that a doctrine of interior equality which leaves an exterior wall standing is not equality. It is consolation. The sants' claim that compassion is the test of bhakti is then the chapter's own indictment of the tradition, not its credit. Section 4 made the strong theological case. The institutional record, on the evidence Ambedkar marshalled and on the evidence the Mahad satyagraha and the Kalaram entry struggles set into the public record, fails the case. A test that the institution does not pass is not less of a test for that. It is more. The full account of this failure, and of how the tradition ought to be read in light of it, is the work of Chapter 5. This paragraph is the place in the theology chapter where it has to be named, because a chapter on Varkari doctrine that did not name it would be a chapter writing about a different tradition than the one that exists.

The sadguru in Varkari practice

The Varkari tradition is not as guru-justified as some bhakti traditions. The sampradaya does not insist on a chain of formal initiations as the indispensable condition of the path; the sant, the name, and the wari, taken together with the kirtan-mandali, do most of the work that an initiating guru does elsewhere. The sadguru is not absent from Varkari thought, but Varkari thought is unusually willing to let the position be filled by the sangha, by the name, and by the absent or remembered teacher, rather than by a present credentialed lineage-holder.

Tukaram drew the distinction with characteristic sharpness. The pandit who carries the credentials of learning is not for that reason a sadguru; the sadguru is the one whose presence does the work of bringing the practitioner toward the recognition the name carries, and that work is not a matter of caste, of Sanskrit, or of formal authorization. Bahinabai's relationship to Tukaram is the chief Varkari instance of this. She received Tukaram as her sadguru without ever meeting him in his lifetime in the ordinary biographical sense; the relationship is interior, dream-borne, and yet structurally determinative for her path. Wave 2 Chapter 9 takes up Bahinabai's witness in detail. It is named here because the doctrine of the name and the doctrine of the dissolution of self both depend on a teacher position that the Varkari tradition fills without requiring the institutional apparatus that other bhakti and tantra lineages demand.

6. Relation to Advaita Vedanta and to the other Vedantas

Among the major Vedantas, Varkari has often been read as closest to Advaita, with which it shares non-dual moves; the placement is a defensible reading rather than a settled fact, contested by living kirtankars who reject the assimilation. The reasons it is read this way are real. Dnyaneshwar's lineage runs through the Nath sampradaya, which had absorbed Shankara's non-dualism in its own way; the Dnyaneshwari and the Amritanubhav both think non-dually; the mature Tukaram abhanga does not preserve a residual two-ness between soul and Lord. But Varkari is bhakti-Advaita, not jnana-Advaita. The classical Shankara position privileges knowledge as the immediate cause of liberation; bhakti is preparatory. The Varkari sants invert the emphasis. The Varkari sant walks to Pandharpur, sings the name, weeps before the murti, and arrives where Shankara's commentator arrives, by a different road that never abandoned the road's particulars.

The other Vedantic neighbors do not quite fit either. Madhva would not concede the collapse of soul and Lord; he would say that the Tukaram who claims he has become what he sought has slipped into the very confusion the Vedas were given to forbid, and that the eternal distinction between jiva and Ishvara is the precondition of love, not its cancellation. Ramanuja would soften the rebuke and say that the soul is a real mode of Brahman, eternally distinct in its nature within its non-difference, and that the relation of soul to Lord persists through liberation; the Varkari abhanga's "I have become" reads, in his terms, as a metaphor over-extended. Vallabha would say the world is not maya but Krishna's lila, and that the soul is a portion of Brahman that remains, in love, what it is.

The Varkari tradition's center of gravity is closer to Shankara than to any of these on the question of whether the final realization preserves a residual two-ness, but it is not Shankara. It is formed in Marathi over four centuries, with its own teachers and its own canon. These positions are not, in the tradition's own life, settled by treatise. They are argued out in courtyards in Alandi and Dehu, in the kirtan tents along the palkhi route, by kirtankars who keep one eye on the manuscript and the other on a tiring crowd seated on bare ground; the Vedantic placement is decided again every year, in Marathi, by people who have walked in to hear it. The cleanest description is the one the Marathi tradition gives of itself: a path of the name walked in the company of sants toward the standing god of Pandharpur, in which what is met at the end is what was always present at the start.

A closing note on what the tradition is for

A theology can be summarized, but the Varkari theology is not finally a doctrine to be held. It is a path to be walked. The same texts that make the metaphysical claims insist that the claims are made true only in a life.

The name on the lips. Company kept with sants. Food shared. The road in Ashadha. A refusal, fierce and inward, to let religion become a status.

The sants would have been suspicious of a chapter that treated their teaching as a position to be filed alongside other positions on the Vedantic map. They wrote because they had something they wanted the reader to do.

And so the chapter bends back to the figure that was its origin. Vitthal stands on the brick. Hands at his hips, eyes level, neither stepping forward nor stepping away. The doctrine is that he is the formless and the form, the name and the named, the lover and the beloved, the test of compassion and the road in Ashadha, all gathered into a single standing posture that has not moved in eight centuries. The pilgrim who has walked the road kneels. What kneels and what is knelt before are not, finally, two. The tradition's last word is not a sentence. It is the figure on the brick, and the body that has come to it, and the silence between them.

Sources

• Ranade, R. D. Mysticism in Maharashtra: Indian Mysticism. Originally published 1933; standard reprints by Motilal Banarsidass and Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan. Especially chapters on Dnyaneshwar (chs. 2 to 4) and Tukaram (chs. 8 to 10).
• Chitre, Dilip. Says Tuka: Selected Poetry of Tukaram. Penguin India, 1991. The standard scholarly English translation of Tukaram's abhangas; cited for the saguna/nirguna abhangas, the "I have become" cluster, and the abhangas on compassion as the test of bhakti.
• Tulpule, S. G. Classical Marathi Literature: From the Beginning to A.D. 1818. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1979. Foundational philological survey for dating, attribution, and the Marathi sant corpus.
• Tulpule, S. G., and Anne Feldhaus. A Dictionary of Old Marathi. Mumbai: Popular Prakashan, 1999. For technical terms.
• Feldhaus, Anne. Connected Places: Region, Pilgrimage, and Geographical Imagination in India. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. For the geography of the wari and the Maharashtrian devotional region.
• 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 ethical criterion of sainthood.
• Novetzke, Christian Lee. The Quotidian Revolution: Vernacularization, Religion, and the Premodern Public Sphere in India. Columbia University Press, 2016. For the Marathi vernacular as theological act and for Varkari political theology.
• Keune, Jon. Shared Devotion, Shared Food: Equality and the Bhakti-Caste Question in Western India. Oxford University Press, 2021. For the gap between Varkari teaching and Varkari institutional practice on caste.
• Zelliot, Eleanor. From Untouchable to Dalit: Essays on the Ambedkar Movement. Manohar, 1992 (and later editions). For Chokhamela, the sants of the margins, and the Varkari tradition's caste record.
• Zelliot, Eleanor, and Mokashi-Punekar, Rohini, eds. Untouchable Saints: An Indian Phenomenon. Manohar, 2005. For Chokhamela and the structural exclusion that coexisted with veneration.
• Tharu, Susie, and K. Lalita, eds. Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Present, Vol. 1. Feminist Press / Oxford University Press, 1991. For Janabai and the textual transmission of women's voices in the Varkari corpus.
• Bhagwat, R. K., trans. Amritanubhava of Jnanadeva. Madras: Samata Books, 1979 (and reprints). Standard English rendering of the Amritanubhav.
• Chitre, Dilip, trans. Anubhavamrut: The Immortal Experience of Being. Sahitya Akademi, 1996. Alternative literary translation of the Amritanubhav.
• Deshpande, P. Y. Marathi commentaries on the Dnyaneshwari and the Amritanubhav; widely circulated within the tradition and cited here for the philosophical reading of Dnyaneshwar.
• Pradhan, V. G., trans. Jnaneshvari (Bhavarthadipika), ed. H. M. Lambert. 2 vols. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1967 to 1969. Standard English translation of the Dnyaneshwari.
• Mahipati. Bhaktavijaya and Bhaktalilamrit. Tr. Justin E. Abbott and N. R. Godbole as Stories of Indian Saints. 2 vols. Pune: Scottish Mission, 1933 to 1934; Motilal Banarsidass reprint. Hagiographical compendium for the lives of the sants, cited per the project's sourcing rules.
• Ambedkar, B. R. Writings and Speeches. Multi-volume edition, ed. Vasant Moon. Government of Maharashtra, Education Department, 1979 onward. Cited for Ambedkar's recurring engagement with the Varkari and Mahar bhakti record, including the Mahad satyagraha and Kalaram temple entry materials.
• Bulgakov, Sergei. Filosofiya imeni (1953). English translation by Thomas Allan Smith as Philosophy of the Name. Brill, 2012. For the Eastern Orthodox imiaslavtsy controversy and the comparative theology of the divine name.
• Florensky, Pavel. Selected writings on the imiaslavie question, in Sochineniya. Mysl', Moscow. For the second principal theological defense of the name-glorifier position.
• Kenworthy, Scott M. "The Name-Glorifiers (Imiaslavie) Controversy." In The Oxford Handbook of Russian Religious Thought, ed. Caryl Emerson, George Pattison, and Randall A. Poole. Oxford, 2020. For the synthesis and bibliographic apparatus of the Orthodox controversy.
• Satsang with Ananta. Selected discourses cited inline in this chapter: "Atma Darshan – There Is No Greater Gift in Life" (video_id 2imYf2CHpt0); "Remain at the Doorway of Our Heart Temple" (AEvC2AgYPjM); "Radical Abandonment" (3EW91ALNhyw); "God Lives Within You" (Ds6OYnAfrfc); "The Awe of Being in God's Presence" (jXuhj8NzVpk).

For the comparative remarks on Vishishtadvaita, Shuddhadvaita, and Dvaita, see the standard treatments in: Sharma, B. N. K., Philosophy of Sri Madhvacarya (Motilal Banarsidass); Carman, John B., The Theology of Ramanuja (Yale, 1974); Barz, Richard, The Bhakti Sect of Vallabhacarya (Thomson Press, 1976; Motilal reprint).