A section from the journey
The Road to Pandharpur
We move now into the land of the Marathi tongue. Around the thirteenth century a young teacher, Jnaneshwar, set the Gita into Marathi verse so ordinary people could hold it. He helped open a wide, warm road of devotion called the Varkari way. Its heart is a small dark image of God, Vithoba, who waits at the town of Pandharpur, and the pilgrims who walk to him twice a year, singing as they go.
We have heard the saints of the south and the saints of the north. But bhakti was never one tongue. In every region it found the speech of the home and the field. So now let us travel, land by land, and listen to how each language learned to sing to God.
We begin in the west, in Maharashtra, where the Marathi tongue is spoken. Here a wide and gentle road of devotion took shape. It is called the way, the way of the pilgrim who keeps coming back.
At the heart of this road waits a god. He is a small, dark image who stands on a brick, his hands resting on his hips, as if he has been waiting a long time and is in no hurry. His name is , or Vitthal. He is loved as a form of Krishna, and his home is the town of Pandharpur, on the bank of a quiet river.
Twice each year, the people walk to him. They come in long lines, on foot, for many days, singing and clapping the whole way. They carry no riches. They come only to stand before the small dark god and call his name. This walking pilgrimage is the soul of the Varkari way.
The first great voice of this road was a young sage named . By the tradition's reckoning he lived only about twenty-one years, around the close of the thirteenth century. Yet in that short life he did something that changed his whole land.
He took the Bhagavad Gita, which until then lived only in Sanskrit, the language of the learned few, and he set its meaning into warm, flowing Marathi verse. This book is called the Jnaneshwari. Now a farmer who had never read a line of Sanskrit could hear the Gita in his own mother tongue, and understand.
Think of what a gift that is. For ages the deepest teaching had been locked behind a door of language. Jnaneshwar opened the door and said, in effect: come in, all of you. The treasure is yours too. This is the bhakti spirit in one act, the holy made plain in the speech of home.
Jnaneshwar did not walk alone. Around him gathered others who would carry the song forward, and after him the road filled with saints of every kind of birth, a tailor, a potter, a grain-seller, a maidservant. We will meet some of them next. The Varkari way became a ladder of love that birth could not block. The small dark god at Pandharpur welcomed them all.
Jnaneshwar gave people the teaching in the words they already spoke at home. Think of a time someone explained a hard, important thing to you in plain, kind words you could finally hold. What did that gift feel like?
Bhakti did not stay in one language. In every region it found the speech of the home and the field. Here we enter Maharashtra, the Marathi-speaking land, and meet the tide called the Varkari way. Its first great voice was Jnaneshwar, a young Brahmin sage who, by tradition around 1290 CE, set the Sanskrit Gita into flowing Marathi verse, the Jnaneshwari, so that a farmer or a weaver could taste its meaning without priest or Sanskrit. He sang too of God as near and tender. At the centre of this way stands Vithoba, also called Vitthal, a small dark image of God understood as a form of Krishna, who waits at Pandharpur with his hands upon his hips. Twice a year the people walk to him in long singing lines. A pilgrim of this road is called a Varkari, and the saints of this land are remembered as a ladder, rung after rung, across the centuries and across birth. We meet the first of them here, and the road they all walked.
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