Sant Eknath

Sant Eknath (1533 – 1599) was born in the important trading town of Paithan and, at an early age, gained mastery over the shastras, Upanishads, puranas and other religious texts. He then sought out Janardan Swami (of Daulatabad/Devgiri) as his spiritual guru and was for the rest of his life deeply influenced by and devoted to him to the extent that Eknath never referred to himself in his writings as Eknath or Eka but always addressed himself as ‘Eka Janardan’ in his verses to suggest that they were but one entity. Scholars believe that Janardan was himself the disciple of a sufi saint (Chand Bodhale) and his teachings strengthened the already existing egalitarian intellectual framework of Eknath.

In the over six hundred years of the Bhakti movement in Maharashtra, Sant Eknath, who lived in the 16th century, is often considered as an important link between Sant Jnyaneshwar in the 13th century and Tukaram in the 17th century. In a society riddled with superstition, corruption, a hidebound oppressive caste system and false prophets, the bhakti movement – bolstered by sants such as Janardan Swami and Eknath – served to make religion and the spiritual life simple and accessible to large sections of people who were otherwise outcastes or not permitted into religious observances without the mediation of the priests. Eknath’s writing and practice revitalized the Bhakti tradition begun by Jnyaneshwar and paved the way for the Varkari movement that gained wide following after the work of Sant Tukaram.

Eknath was responsible for the inclusion of Kabir and Rohidas in the pantheon of saints of the Varkari tradition in Maharashtra. While Jnyaneshwar’s seminal text the Jnyaneshwari was itself a Marathi retelling of the Bhagwat Gita so as to make it accessible to a populace who could not read Sanskrit, three hundred years later, Eknath too made available several religious Sanskrit texts by writing commentaries on them in Marathi. His scholarly works (in Marathi) include a variation of the Bhagavata Purana which is known as the Eknathi Bhagavata, a variation of the Ramayana which is known as the Bhavarth Ramayan and the Rukmini Swayamwar Hastamalaka based on a 14-shlok Sanskrit hymn by Shankaracharya.

His translation of metaphysical Vedic texts into the vernacular was not looked upon with favour by the orthodoxy of the times and Eknath was called before the pundits at Banares to defend his translation which he did successfully. Through these commentaries on Vedantic and philosophical works Eknath established his authority over the shastras and puranas even amongst the shastries and pundits of the time.

Eknath was responsible for collating different versions of the Jnyaneshwari that were in circulation over the three hundred years since the original was written, studying and editing them and reaching at what he considered the authentic version. It is this Eknath’s version that is today revered as Jnyaneshwar’s Jnyaneshwari. He composed biographies of Namdev, Gora kumbhar (the potter), Savta mali (the gardener) and Chokhamela (a sant born in the ‘untouchable’ mahar community).

Eknath wrote several hundred songs in the form of ovis and over four thousand abhangas. Eknath strongly believed that the ideas of Vedanta (especially the concept of non-dualism), the stories from the Puranas, ethical principles and the teaching that the path to reaching god was only through sincere bhakti ought to be made available and accessible to everyone irrespective of caste, religion or class and indeed, that it was the oppressed in society, the lowest castes, who needed this instruction the most. Living in the prosperous and bustling trading town of Paithan and having travelled widely to religious centers both to the north as well as the south, Eknath was exposed to and imbibed the language, idiom and cultural practices of a wide cross section of the populace. He then went on to compose verses in the form of the bharood also in order to take his teaching to every section of society.

The bharood form falls somewhere between the kirtan (that is typically performed in temple premises) and the folk tamasha tradition (that takes places in public spaces like village squares and other places where people gather or move about in). Eknath’s bharoods were street performances (often bawdy) that strove to deliver a moral or spiritual message through song and dance. Writing over three hundred bharoods, Eknath addressed the audience through different voices, as, for example, being spoken by an astrologer, mali, guard, ghost, prostitute, jogi, street performer, sanyasi, rope walker and most significantly, he composed over forty bharoods as being spoken by the mahars and maharins who were treated as an ‘untouchable’ caste, several others as spoken by women harried by domestic woes, from prostitutes, disabled persons, fakirs and even the hapsis (Siddis -Ethiopian migrants to the western coast of Maharashtra).

The bharoods were often composed as riddles and worked on different levels – first, as a source of humour and entertainment and then again as metaphors for a more philosophical statement about the relation between worldly concerns and the spiritual life. Thus, when a woman sings to the goddess Bhavani aie asking her to kill her in laws and also her husband, or when a woman sings about how she is not satisfied by her husband, when a prostitute sings about how she has been disrobed and shares her bed with strangers, what is also being said is that one needs to break the shackles of material/physical/social bonds in order to become one with the absolute. Similarly, when the mahar describes (in the ‘Johar’ bharood given below) the various ‘villages’ that have gone to ruin, he is speaking about the different human faculties that are given to decadence and corruption and also suggesting that ‘time’ (old age, Kaal or Yama) will incapacitate the human body and keep one entangled in the twin vices of kaam-krodh (desire and anger) unless one submits to Janardan (who is also the embodiment of Datta guru) and becomes one with him.

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