1.

Let me make it absolutely clear at the very outset that I am a reluctant historiographer.

As a practitioner of what I speak or write about, articulating my biases is the only responsibility I am gladly willing to shoulder. I speak of my mother tongue as I would of the human condition which it articulates both at a subjective level and at the collective level of the plurality of communities that have practised the Marathi language for the past one millennium and as they are about 100 million today in a rapidly globalising human society, their voice is an identity that cannot be ignored by world-historians, literary theorists, and culture pundits.

Every literary culture is an expression of biases that have their own history and archaeology. All literary work can be seen as one that is foregrounded by a series of forms both fossilized and living; and seen together on a spatialized chronological scale, it does get defined so as to make a uniquely situated sense. But to make sense of literary works, what heuristic tools does one use other than cognition illuminated by empathy? This will always be a grey area for anyone venturing into the fuzzy arena of embattled concepts and contesting perceptions; and complicated by interdisciplinary implications that literary critics ignore with arrogance.

The foolhardy historiographer often forgets that she or he is located in the present and in a specific space and time surrounded by a plurality and interacting with them, actively or passively making a choice.

It is inevitable that all of us speak of the phenomenal as though it were real and thereby invent or construct the categories that theories use as their scaffolding. But condemned as we are to theorize, we must try to grasp that our theories are as finite as we ourselves are.

They ought to have an opening to cross the frontiers they create for the sake of self-defence or aggressive self-assertion into The Other that surrounds us with its omnipresent plurality.

2.

Some linguists describe Marathi as a Creole.

The term Creole is rooted in the Latin creare that means "to create" or "to beget". The term Creole was first used by Portuguese colonizers of The New World to denote slaves of African descent whom they brought to their Latin colonies in America. It was in the event applied to all persons of African, European, or mixed ethnic descent in all New World colonies as, for instance, in Louisiana.

Creoles are languages that derive from pidgin—another term invented to denote non-native (or non-mother tongue speakers of the colonizer's native language) speakers in a conquered territory, often first-generation speakers of their conquerors' language. When the speakers of a pidgin form a larger community and evolve their own vocabulary mounted on the grammar of their conquerors' language, a Creole is born.

It could be an empirical as well as conceptual error to apply the term Creole to the Marathi language. The grammar of Marathi is Indo-European and shares deeper similarities with its nearer and farther cousins in that kind of categorization.

However, the lexical layers of Marathi contain distinct accretions of sub-strata of Dravidian, Indo-Persian, Indo-Arabic, Portuguese, and English that correspond to its successive colonizers to whom their pidgin and Creole source played an active host. The result is a remarkably resilient hybrid with an open and plural capacity to reproduce itself by vigorous adaptation. In short, Marathi has achieved autonomy and the history of Marathi poetic practice offers evidence of just that.

3.

Written Marathi literary texts emerged in the 13th century, though epigraphic evidence of early Marathi dates back to about one thousand years. The first Marathi author as such is supposed to be Mukundraj. He composed his verse work Viveksindhu in 1188 A.D.

Marathi scholars trace the evolution of Marathi from Maharashtri Prakrit, Maharashtri (or Jain) Apabhransh, early Marathi during the Yadav dynasty (A.D.860-A.D.1317), middle Marathi influenced by Indo-Persian during the Bahamani rule and the Maratha rule that followed it, with Indo-Arabic, Indo-Portuguese and its siblings Deccan Urdu or Dakkhani Urdu and Konkani, and during the British Raj described in Marathi as Avval Ingraji or the 'High English' period, Anglo-Indian of the exquisite Hobson-Jobson variety—all growing merrily in one core territory as well as its diasporic extensions in Gujarat, Malwa, Uttar Pradesh, Goa, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Tamilnadu among the present states of the Indian Union.

Prior to the British Raj and after the decline of the Mughal Empire, India was under Maratha hegemony, and this is when the diasporic Marathi Creoles flourished from Thanjavur in the South to Gwalior in the North, a fact often slurred over by later historians.

4.

Written Marathi poetry as well as prose appeared during the fifth and the last century of Yadav rule.

Two religious cults that rebelled against Brahminical Hinduism and the scriptural authority of Sanskrit produced most of early Marathi literature: The Mahanubhavas and The Varkaris. The Mahanubhavas were an esoteric cult that worshipped living Avatars or god-men. The Varkaris worshipped the deity Vitthal or Vithoba or Pandurang whose principal temple is in the city of Pandharpur and their arch-mentor and preceptor is Jnandev (A.D. 1275-A.D.1296).

Whereas the deity Vitthal is perceived and depicted as an earthly form of the later Hindu god Vishnu, Jnandev was an ordained member of the Shaivite ascetic cult of The Natha, who werefollowers of the legendary Siddha Gorakhnath. He was born of Brahmin parents who were ostracized along with their four children who formed the nucleus of the non-Brahminical Bhakti cult of the pilgrim-devotees of Vithoba—The Varkaris.

The Mahanubhavas were a secret community and their cryptic script, Sakala was decoded only in the 20th century. Their hidden literature could not have and did not influence the development of demotic mainstream Marathi and its literary traditions. The Varkaris, on the other hand, had massive following transcending caste and gender barriers and their Sant (loosely and inaccurately translated as 'saint' in English) poets led the creation of Marathi culture till the end of the 17th century, laying the foundation of modern Marathi literature.

5.

The Marathi poetic tradition is dominated by orature and not literature.

In consciously breaking away from the scriptures and classics-dominated Sanskrit literary tradition and its Brahminical hermeneutic hegemony, Jnandev opted for the folk prosody employed by illiterate women singing while they performed their daily chores in extended patriarchal families into which they were married before they reached puberty. These spontaneous compositions were in the metre known as the Ovi that accompanies women's daily labour at the family stone-mill, or pestle and mortar, or drawing water from a well with a rahat—a Persian-style water-wheel with a wreath of pots attached. These songs are a woman's protest against her bondage and they express her nostalgia for her pre-marital native home, or for a deity that would deliver her from slavery.

The Ovi is a flexible metre consisting, usually, of three long lines that rhyme and a fourth that may not. The number of syllables in each line is flexible and corresponds to the tempo in which it is sung.

The other popular Marathi metre is the Abhang. This is the metre in which a village community congregating after work sings a series of bhajans—songs in praise of the Lord, litanies, paeans, and chants—led by a solo performer who is often the author-composer of the song. The audience joins the solo performer in singing the refrain of the song.

On special occasions, ovis and bhajans become an integral part of a Kirtan performance. Kirtan is a several hours-long live folk theatre presentation that has a principal narrator-singer-preacher who expounds the philosophy of religion or interprets spiritual values by drawing examples from the poetry of the Sant poets, or narrative poetry based on the two Indian Epics, or stories from the Puranas, or folk hagiographies of great devotees, and so on.

6.

Jnandev's brief life ended when he was just 22 years of age. He decided to enter a terminal yogic trance—the peculiar method is known as the Sanjeevan Samadhi—having accomplished his mortal mission. He did this by entering an underground vault in the Vithoba temple at Alandi near the modern city of Pune in the year 1296 A.D.

Alandi has since become one of the three sacred pilgrimage centres for the Varkari. Of the other two the first is Pandharpur where the legendary Bhakta Pundalik's devoted service to his aged parents brought down a curious Lord Vishnu from his heavenly home in Vaikuntha and to remain in Pandharpur for twenty-eight eons waiting for his earthly children—his Bhaktas—to visit him.

A stone image of Vithoba stands in the main temple of the pilgrim city of Pandharpur, on a bank of the river Chandrabhaga.

Vithoba stands erect, with his hands on hips, arms akimbo, and feet evenly placed on The Brick on which Pundalik politely asked him to wait while he continued to look after his parents. Pundalik apparently forgot his god waiting politely and patiently. He was so absorbed in performing his worldly duty.

He thus became the first of the 'Sants'. (A Sant is 'An Enlightened Being-who serves humanity'). And the third, chronologically the last centre where Varkaris congregate, is Dehu: close to Alandi, and on the bank of the river Indrayani that also wends its way around Alandi. Dehu is the village where Tukaram (1608-1649) was born-and after being hailed as a great poet and 'sant' in his lifetime of ordeals and miracles, 'disappeared into thin air' while performing his last kirtan.

The devout Varkari's life would seem to revolve around these three sacred places. These places signify to her/him an earthly Vaikunth where on festive days connected with sowing and harvesting, she/he recalls The Cosmic Self embodied variously in Vithoba and his beloved sants and celebrates being on earth, experiencing an immortal awareness within a mortal lifespan.

It is this philosophy of Bhakti that Jnandev spelt out for the Varkari first in his astounding deconstruction of The Bhagvad Gita, The Bhavarthadeepika (a.k.a The Jnaneshvari), and finally in Anubhavamrut where he unravels his mystical doctrine of Shaivism as what I would call The Poetics of Bhakti. All his contemporary 'sants' and those that followed worked according to Jnandev's agenda for life on earth.

I have tried to present here a synoptic view of the unique foundation of Varkari poetic praxis—a foundation on which even contemporary Marathi poetic practice stands.

7.

The Poetics of Bhakti: My Englishtranslation (in free-verse) of Shri Jnandev's ANUBHAVAMRUT (this is one of the many alternative subtitles I had in mind when of my English translation of the text: The Immortal Experience of Being (Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, 1996).

'The Experience of Being' is a key concept in Jnandev's interpretation of the opening of Vasugupta's Shiva Sutra: "Chaitanyam Atma" that Shaivites of the Kashmir school take as the utterance of the First Principle by Shiva, the Primordial Being, to Shakti, its inherent capacity and inclination to create.

The Primordial Being or Shiva is believed to permeate and transcend all that is created or exists. by the inherent dynamism that is Shakti. 'Atma' is 'The Self'. 'Chaitanya' is 'Spontaneous Awareness'. The two cohere as 'The Coupled One' or Shivadvaya.

'Sat' (Being), 'Chit' (Awareness), and 'Ananda' (Bliss) have a singular origin—Shiva.

Creation is interpreted here as a-spontaneous free play of Self-Awareness (Chidvilasa or Samvidvilasa)-continually generating 'unique finite forms and states of being that mask the Creator, who is primordial and cannot be conceived or cognised except by re-cognition (Pratyabhijna) by a finite (human) being' of the Shiva inherently present in oneself. The Cosmos is the palpable presence of Shiva that is only spontaneously and precariously reflected by human awareness.

The whole universe is seen by the Shaivite as Shiva's ever-changing, innovative, self-expression. The sentient agent herself/himself is Shiva. Once Shiva’s presence occupies a human recipient, the human individual loses Shakti or finite, concrete, awareness of the phenomenal world and experiences blissful rapture—Ananda (that is another name of Shiva).

The seeming polarity of gender-discriminated Shiva and Shakti (Subject and Object) is really an indivisible unity—Shiva-Shakti—now seeming to expand, now seeming to contract, but never coming apart.

This unity is also metaphorised as the Adi-Spanda (‘The Primordial Pulse' with its oscillation between a systole and a diastole; or Prakasha-Vimarsha—‘Energy or light cyclically excreted and reabsorbed' or 'light emitted and reflected upon itself', or 'Cognition and Recognition of The Self'; and 'Nimishonmesha' or 'the opening and closing of Shiva's eyes').

8.

Several translators and commentators on The Jnaneshvari and Anubhavamrut have tried to fit these concepts into Western philosophical categories and terminologies. When I started looking into Jnandev's work with the ambition of translating at least a part of it into my other tongue, English as an undergraduate student, my Western-style formal education led me to assume that Western categorization was universally applicable to any thought and linguistic expression of any other place and time in the history of the world. Western Indology supported the fallacy that all other civilizations grew out of Greek roots. It was as a bilingual translator (Marathi-English) with some knowledge of Sanskrit that I approached the problem and soon realized its magnitude and complexity.

My poetics too carried the one-dimensional burden of English poetic practice, tradition, and theory. I read other European literatures in English translation without consciously appreciating how the translator's English was modified by the source text's French, German, Spanish, Russian, Italian, or Portuguese cultural and linguistic idiosyncrasies.

Chinese, Persian, Arabic and other classical Old World literary traditions did not easily yield to English translation. Reading Chinese poetry in Arthur Waley's and Ezra Pound's translations—often comparing them—brought home to me the adventurous notion of comparative poetics and comparative stylistics; as well as the concept of the poetics of translation itself that had philosophical, linguistic, sociological, anthropological, political, economic, and practical implications.

It occurred to me then that, for instance, Aristotle and Abhinavgupta were unaware of each other and each of them was trying to explain the nature of aesthetic experience of literature with reference to literary practice in their own civilization. They cited and quoted from works of literary art in their own specific tradition. Katharsis and Shanta Rasa are definitions of aesthetic experience founded on different world-views. They also indicate divergent routes of exploring this-worldly phenomena and their spiritual meaning.

I also realized that just as I could not approach Dante Alighieri without a foregrounding in Christian theology of his time and a deep understanding of Latin, I could not begin to deal with Jnandev without a foregrounding in Hindu and Buddhist theology, and an understanding of Sanskrit and Dravidian traditions of his time. This changed the course of my career as a translator determined to clarify and internalise his source text.

9.

Clarity seemed to be the final criterion of success in translation. To achieve clarity, one had to view the source text clearly as a whole, without any 'noise' or 'cognitive dissonance' and as coherent and resonant by itself. This also defined the source text as a successful work of art, a crafted verbal artefact. That evoked a feeling of humility and wonder, awe and reverence, mystery and recognition.

But there are other ways in which clarity can be achieved in translation. Source texts appear to their reader in three broad forms: they may be opaque, or translucent, or transparent. The reader's attention is engaged by the text as an object. When attention is fixed or focussed on an object, its surrounding space-disappears, and it is effectively isolated. It acquires an identity that seems to be by itself, independent of even the space that surrounded it-when attention was first drawn to it. It acquires frontiers that define its autonomous domain, its realm of being as it were. In having frontiers, however, its location is subtly defined. That there is something beyond an object of attention is an inherent condition of its being. There is something within an object and there is something outside it. If the object were a text—a linguistic object that is spoken or written—then obviously it is specifically located in the larger universe of language where it belongs among other similar or dissimilar objects. But where is that larger universe itself located that we recognize as language? Is it Frontierless or beyondless, or does it have frontiers? How far do these frontiers extend?

10.

This is a question Jnandev raises and answers in Anubhavamrut. He devotes an entire 'movement' of his long poem that his later interpreters identify as Shabdakhandan (or Disposing of The Word), an almost Wittgensteinian 'cure' or 'treatment' of the 'sickness' or 'disease' the question is. He is inviting attention not to a text, but to all possible texts, to every conceivable use of every conceivable language. Jnandev's conclusion is that a text is located in and surrounded by language; but the universe of language is itself located in and surrounded by awareness and beyond awareness, language has frontiers of silence. Language has a limited mobility that cannot take it beyond the attention it pays to itself. That attention withers away as a concrete and finite phenomenon, real to itself and within itself but not sustainable in the presence of Absolute Awareness that is also its opposite, Absolute Unawareness of Being. This is where, according to Anubhavamrut, sat (being), chit (awareness) and ananda (bliss)merge.

The source of all that appears and disappears is, Jnandev concludes, Shiva—The One.

11.

This is an extremely sophisticated poetics and it has no comparable and similar Western counterpart that I know of. It stems from an ancestry that is itself a fusion of many Agamas that are distinct from and radical alternatives to Nigamas. Agamas are directly communicated to a living disciple by a mentor’s Presence—Shiva’s Presence. They strip the disciple of Avidya—her/his nescience (‘cognitive dissonance’, ‘confusion’, ‘false premises’, ‘unconscious adherence to animal instinct or beastly proclivities’). Shiva is Pashupati ( Lord of the Beasts); the unenlightened human being is nothing more than another species of animal whose awareness is ‘chained’ to its senses and its drives such as the sexual urge and hunger and thirst’).

Jnandev’s philosophy proposes an evolutionary awareness inherent to the human form of being and it is goal-directed.

The goal of human awareness is self-recognition of the inherent Shiva by giving up or ‘the discharging of ’ Shakti—‘coherent’ with Shiva as Shiva’s will to be An Other and exist as an assumed form, a persona or mask, a role-performing actor or singer or dancer. The Cosmos is Shiva’s ‘total theatre’ as the playwright-director—and ensemble of performers playing their assigned roles. So this is not just poetics but a comprehensive aesthetics as well. It is also a meta-poetics and meta-aesthetics revealing the deep-structure of the cosmos itself out of a unitary force that spontaneously generates polarities and pluralities that seem to search for a single elegant equation that states and identifies cosmic coherence. That coherence is Shivadvaya the foundation of Chidvilasa.

12.

Abstruse and translucent as this may seem in a present-day English summary such as this, Jnandev’s original exegeses of The Shiva Sutra with his own insights was grasped by people in his own circle: Namdeo (a tailor by profession and balute/jati, Chokha Mela ( a Mahar by balute and a shudra by Varna), Sena ( a barber by balute and a shudra), Janabai ( a woman by gender and a maidservant-retainer in Namdeo’s family), and several others. They grasped the metaphysics of Bhakti and created an idiom and a metaphor out of their trades and daily work. They connected with the whole universe and were able to infuse it with their individual voice and unique presence.

The 13th and the 14th century were, for Marathi Bhakti poetry, comparable to the Early and Middle Renaissance in European art and literature. The images created by the Varkari poets are like the images created by European painters and sculptors. The former gave a spiritual presence to the ordinary Marathi man captured in everyday action just as the latter revelled in reflecting The Bible in the faces, body language, and ethos of different European ethnic and regional types.

The seeds sown by the first generation of Varkari poets were so potent and vigorous that they survived the political turmoil of later centuries by springing up in surprising forms.

The 16th century saw the next great Varkari poet, Eknath. He was a Brahmin and an erudite scholar. As Jnandev was a decaste Brahmin; so was Eknath, who was inspired by his precursor. Finally, the last great Varkari poet-sant, Tukaram burst onto the scene in the 17th century.

As his follower, Bahinabai Sioorkar says in a marvellous abhang of her entire Varkari lineage:

The temple is one integrated concept of design and as in the case of the monolithic Kailas rock temple, generations spanning the next four centuries chipped away the rock to add details that seem to have been chiselled by one immortal hand. It bears the same signature, and a unanimous hermeneutic intelligence illuminates it.

I would coin the term Spiritual Expressionism to characterize the driving force of Varkari Bhakti poetry. As Sadanand More has brilliantly shown in his recent work, Tukaram Darshan, this is the guiding spirit of later Marathi poetry right up to the present day. It gives Marathi culture and literature itself a distinct face and presence in the global community of literatures.

13.

Elsewhere, I have presented my translations of Marathi poems of the last eight centuries from Jnandev to Arun Kolatkar, only to make the point that the continuities of Marathi poetry challenge us to look for alternative historiographies to explain what seem ‘ruptures’ to the Occidental eye. Nietzsche thought that (the Judaeo-Christian) God was dead; Kierkegaard struggled to keep that God alive; Rimbaud scrawled ‘Murder God!’ in a frenzy.

Pandurang alias Vitthal met no such fate. He was only a mirror in which human self-awareness of the time was reflected and recognized as man’s spiritual dimension.

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