A section from the journey

Namdev and Tukaram

The Varkari road was a ladder of saints, and birth could not block it. Namdev, a tailor, walked it early. Tukaram, a poor grain-seller of low birth, walked it three hundred years later, and became one of the greatest poets his land has known. Both poured their hearts into the abhang, a short Marathi song to Vithoba. They sang of being nothing without God, and of finding rest only at his feet. We also remember Chokhamela, a saint kept outside the temple by his birth, who loved God all the same.

Picture the Varkari road again, the long singing lines walking to Pandharpur. Now picture the saints of that road as a ladder, one above the next, reaching across the centuries. And here is the marvel of it. To climb this ladder, your birth did not matter. Your love did.

Near the bottom rungs, early on, walks a tailor. His name is , born by the tradition around 1270. He stitched cloth for his living, and he sang to God with a plain and open heart. His songs spread so far that some of them are kept even in the holy book of the Sikhs, far to the north.

Listen to how simply Namdev speaks of seeing God.

When I sing of God, then I behold Him; / Then I, His slave, obtain contentment.

No temple, no grand rite, no Sanskrit. Just the singing, and in the singing, God. That is the whole heart of the matter.

Now climb three hundred years up the ladder, to a man named . He lived in a village near Pune, around 1608 to 1649. He was a grain-seller, of the Kunbi people, a farming folk counted low in the order of that age. A famine ruined his small trade and took those he loved. Out of that ruin, he turned his whole self toward God, and out of his sorrow came some of the most beautiful songs his language has ever held.

These short Marathi songs have a name. They are called abhangs. An is brief and plain and burning, the kind of song a working person can carry in the mouth all day. Tukaram poured thousands of them out, and in nearly every one he makes himself small so that God may be large.

No deeds I've done nor thoughts I've thought; / Save as thy servant, I am nought.

Hear the honesty in it. He does not boast of his goodness. He claims no merit at all. He says only that he belongs to God, and that this belonging is enough. And he asks, with a kind of trembling, whether he is even worthy to be kept at all.

What other master shall we own? / What helper else but thee alone?

There is one more saint of this road we must not pass by, for honesty's sake. His name was . He belonged to the Mahar people, who in that age were treated as outside the four orders, the ones called untouchable. He loved Vithoba with all his heart. And yet the custom of his time kept him outside the temple walls, on the far side of the threshold, looking in.

Sit with that for a moment, without rushing to smooth it over. Here was a soul as full of God as any. The songs of the saints said all are equal before the Lord. Yet the village did not yet live by that song. The warmth was real, and so were the walls. That gap, between the love these saints sang and the world they lived in, is a serious question. Let us pause briefly at the , then carry it forward to the fuller hour it deserves later in this era.

The rishi steps to the Threshold — where accounts differChokhamela and the Varkari saints sang that all are equal before God, yet lived under caste exclusion. Did this devotion change the social order, or mainly the devotee's standing before the divine?

What scholars find

Most scholars find that the Varkari saints offered a real spiritual equality, equal access to God and dignity before the divine for all births, but largely did not dismantle the social order of caste. Jon Keune notes that these traditions stressed God's radical inclusivity rather than calling for social change, and that where hierarchy softened it was mainly through sharing sacred food, an incremental fellowship rather than a structural overturning. Chokhamela is the vivid case Eleanor Zelliot documents: a Mahar devotee whose songs voice deep devotion even as he lived the full exclusion of his caste, kept outside the temple. The saints themselves usually remained within their own castes. The honest verdict is that the challenge to hierarchy was meaningful but incomplete.

As the tradition holds

Within the Varkari tradition, the road to Pandharpur is remembered as a true fellowship of love that birth could not bar. On the pilgrimage, saints of every background, a Brahmin, a tailor, a grain-seller, a maidservant, and Chokhamela the Mahar, are honoured together as one family of devotees before Vithoba, who shows no partiality. The tradition holds that the small dark god received Chokhamela's love as fully as any, and cherishes his songs to this day. In its own memory, devotion did create real bonds across caste lines, even where the surrounding world held to its walls.

Tukaram's deepest song was simply, I am nothing without you. Where in your own life have you felt smallest, and yet held? Notice how the saints turn that smallness, not into shame, but into a kind of rest.