Introduction

There are poems, and there are poems.

There are poems that get under your skin and seep into your marrow without your even realizing you have been annexed. There are poems that become a part of the aural backdrop of your inner life, hypnotic and resonant. There are poems that tease the human cortex so that each reading becomes a decoding, an unravelling.

And then there are poems that assault you in some unknown part of your inner geography. A place both mysterious and familiar. A place that you recognize as a dark place of origin, marking the beginnings of an ancient human ache. A place that has sometimes been called the heart, sometimes the soul, and, by the doggedly unsentimental, the gut.

This is the breath-catching moment when self speaks to self more directly than you ever thought possible. A moment that sears through the smog of belief and doctrine, the endlessly recycled traffic of theology, the air waves of opinion. A moment when you know you are witness to the self pretending to be none other than itself—a simple, insatiable throb. This is a throb that will not be silenced. This is a throb that will not settle for bucket list petitions, for easy deals with a brokering god.

This is a throb that demands everything—all that ever was and ever will be, all that is here and now, and all that is before and beyond. It clamours for form and for no form, for thingy- ness and for no-thingness, even perhaps while knowing all along that there is not much difference between the two.

This is a throb so definitive, so encompassing that it blurs the conventional divide between the sacred and the profane. It is a throb that demands union and annihilation, love and liberation, ecstasy and extinction, more and no more—and demands it now.

Everyone has known it. Many choose to forget, defer, deny or dilute it. Understandably. It is inconvenient. It makes life difficult. When one does encounter it, however, one knows one is in the presence of something fragile, urgent, moltenly alive.

This is bhakti.

And this sharp text message to the human epicentre, this bruising and yet exhilarating arrow to the core of one’s being—this is the province of Bhakti poetry.

Experientially, the condition is as old as time. Historically, the movement had its identifiable moment of emergence on the Indian subcontinent—an exuberant birthing that assumed the proportions of a tidal wave that crashed across the great barrier reefs of region and language, caste and class. The poet, scholar and preeminent Bhakti poetry translator A. K. Ramanujan described it as the ‘great many-sided shift [that] occurred in Hindu culture and sensibility between the sixth and ninth centuries’. Bhakti, he says, ‘is one name for that shift’.

Sacred texts like the Bhagavad Gita and strands of Upanishadic literature had invoked it earlier. But Bhakti, as a series of popular cults, celebrating devotion as the supreme road to the divine, began taking shape around the eighth century. The historical reasons for its emergence in diverse regions are varied—ranging from the rigidity of Brahminism to the need to carve out a spiritual identity vitalized by, and yet distinct from, the Shramana movements, and, later, Islam—and it is not the intention of this book to dwell on the complex factors shaping its chronology.

It is clear, however, that the movement was not unitary. The regional cults were divergent in belief and practice. The objects of devotion were the gods, Shiva and Vishnu, in embodied and non-figurative versions, as well as the goddess or Devi in her many manifestations. But it is clear that these regional upsurges did not evolve ‘out of some original teaching or spread through conversion’ (as historian Romila Thapar points out). Instead, they surfaced across a period of a thousand years when historical circumstances were ripe for their emergence, converging with the growing need of lower castes to give voice to their aspirations.

Sanskrit, that venerable matriarch of several Indian languages, had held monarchs and metaphysicians in her thrall for centuries. The sacred traditions of revelation (sruti) and recollection (smriti) were already known to comprise a rich heritage of spiritual literature. And yet, for all her lapidary refinement, her exquisite subtlety, Sanskrit gradually began to seem inadequate to meet the needs of a growing tribe of spiritual aspirants. This new tribe comprised men and women, seized by a collective feverish thirst. They were potters and peasants, weavers and cobblers, basket-makers and palanquin- bearers, musicians and milkmen, scholars and tax-collectors, boatmen and blacksmiths, pundits and hangmen, pariahs and priests, plebeians and princesses.

What did they have in common? Nothing, seemingly. Except for the fact that they dared to give voice to their longing. They were incendiary dreamers who refused to be mere worshippers, anarchic visionaries who refused to be mere inheritors. They were less god-fearing than god- possessed, less content to receive an ancient wisdom than impatient to express their own tempestuous interiority. It was a strange condition, this bhakti, this unappeasable lust, this clamorous yearning, this greed.

And so, the bhakta was born—a new and colourful figure on the Indian spiritual landscape, wild and incorrigible, unquenchable in his yearning, irrepressible in his authenticity. With his cussed insistence on singing the dialect of his heart—its lurching passions and plummeting despairs—he became the voice of a people, the leader of a community, an embodiment of the zeitgeist. In his poems, he sang and lamented, cursed and celebrated, hungered and praised, loudly, lustily, sometimes embarrassingly. And he never stopped demanding.

What did he demand? Nothing less than the divine—the glorious, unmediated divine. And what’s more, he seemed to see evidence of divinity everywhere. He saw it in the ordinary life ordinarily lived. He saw it in life’s detritus and trivia—in cloth and clay, in pots and pans, in the temple and on the street, in the grandeur of the scriptures and in his own robust demotic. He exulted when he saw it and despaired when he lost sight of it; he yearned to devour it and be devoured by it; he sought it in the world of throbbing materiality and he sought it in the shadowy provinces beyond the threshold of the senses.

‘A bhakta, ‘ as A. K. Ramanujan says, ‘is not content to worship a god in word and ritual, nor is he content to grasp him in a theology; he needs to possess him and be possessed by him. He also needs to sing, to dance, to make poetry, painting, shrines, sculpture; to embody him in every possible way.’

It was a relationship of such intimacy that it made every tone permissible—rebuke, banter, humour, lust, entreaty, indignation, rage. God was sublime, exalted, beautiful, but he was also family. He could be addressed the way one might speak to a beloved, if habitually disobedient, member of one’s household. And the only means to speak to such a god was in the homespun cadences of the vernacular, which seemed to come closest (even if never close enough) to the many shifts of the bhakta’s inner weather. Sanskrit—and indeed any standardized language, whether courtly or regional—seemed too remote to suit this hot, spluttering, sometimes inarticulate dialogue conducted in the innermost chamber of the heart.

Sanskrit was never entirely erased. Several poets acknowledged their debt to it. Several drew from its vocabulary, but at the same time further nourished their regional languages with the flavour of local dialects, to create a new idiom of striking contrasts and verbal textures. Even while Tamil poets like Appar sang the praises of Tamil and proclaimed the equality of their verse to Vedic scripture, they weren’t simply resorting to an easy chauvinism.

The bhaktas’ impatience was, instead, with everything that seemed frozen and straitjacketed. Into stone as into language, these poets sought to breathe life. They demanded a divinity and a diction that was spontaneous, responsive, alert to their needs—fiery, riverine, untamable. They sought a tongue that could be sacred without ceasing to be earthy, a god who could be human without ceasing to be divine, domestic without ceasing to be cosmic, and a path that could be particular, popular, and even profane, without ceasing to be a pilgrimage. With the scorching white heat of their words they consecrated the lowly and the inconsequential, the humble ghettos and dark enclaves of human experience, proving that every by- lane, every forgotten alleyway of language, locality and life could be just another way home.

It is tempting to see this as a sudden rupture in the fabric of time. But dramatic though it was, Bhakti was not quite as estranged from the past or its immediate context as it might seem. There were parallel strains and impulses—the esoteric traditions of Tantra and Yoga as well as the impact of Sufi mysticism—that cast their influence on the Bhakti movement and were, in turn, enriched by it. Besides, as historians remind us, even as it rejected aspects of tradition, Bhakti also imbibed from the past. And yet, even while it absorbed, it subverted and redefined.

The movement—or series of movements, as some prefer to see it—had its beginnings in South India in the Tamil regional cults devoted to the gods Shiva and Vishnu. This was not surprising. Tamil had a literary tradition of considerable antiquity with its distinct classical as well as oral and folk avatars. And so the charged paeans in praise of Shiva (sung by the saint-poets called the Nayanmar) and the lyrical-erotic hymns in love ofVishnu (authored by the bard-devotees called the Alvar) captured the popular imagination in a new and powerful way. As these poets wandered the Tamil countryside with their ever-burgeoning tribe of followers, they infused all that they encountered with their poetry of incandescent love and sacred delirium, ensuring that no crevice in their inner or outer landscape remained god-forsaken. Why couldn’t the Lord who dwelt in Kailash also reside in the Kaveri delta, asked the Nayanmar. Surely Shiva was too full of grace, too compassionate, too big to be contained in a single abode?

This inspired mayhem of lust for the divine could not be contained either. It spread from south to west, north to east, and by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had permeated the farthest reaches of the subcontinent. Regional and yet inter-regional, this participatory spiritual ethos grew widespread, holding out the possibility of mukti or liberation for all, asserting time and again that there was a path to the divine from exactly where one stood. For each and every flawed, humble, wondering human being, with her personal and collective freight of memory and aspiration, there was a way—a very singular way. You qualified by being human.

Bhakti—as this raging thirst for firsthand experience over secondhand knowledge came to be known—had certain similarities in its avatars across the subcontinent. Bhaktas of different provinces, backgrounds and sectarian allegiances seemed united in their adoption of a vigorous, inventive, often colloquial language; their rejection of traditional caste-bound social hierarchy; their impatience with superstition, ceremony, punditry and other traditional forms of intercession; their fierce assertion of their right to a personal and direct relationship with divinity; their avowed return to the ‘original inspiration’ of the ancient traditions (before the appropriation of the sacred by a clerical and academic elite); their affirmation of an identity distinct from the orthodoxies of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Islam (even while they absorbed and reinvigorated the legacies of these traditions); and their endorsement of a new fellowship based on spiritual attainment rather than social ascription.

Bhakti saints, as A. K. Ramanujan says, ‘have been called the “great integrators”, bringing the high to the low, esoteric paradox to the man in the street, transmuting ancient and abstruse ideas into live contemporary experience; at the same time, finding everyday symbols for the timeless. ‘

However, the devotional upsurge was far from uniform and was veined with regional and historical variations. Early Tamil bhakti, for instance, seems to have been more accommodating of ritual and temple worship, less anti- Brahmin than its later counterparts. However, even here, as scholar-translator Indira Viswanathan Peterson points out, there was a subversive emphasis on integrity of intent. The devotees reinstated the true meaning of ritual by freeing it from mechanical habit and vulgar appeasement. They brought to it the high-voltage fervour of true yearning.

Another crucial variation was based on the espousal of nirguna or saguna bhakti—whether a devotee conceived of god as formless and impersonal or as embodied and personal. The former conception was shaped, no doubt, by Vedantin ideas as well as Sufism, with bhaktas like Kabir repudiating both Hindu and Muslim orthodoxies and others like Nanak pointing to a divinity without referring to the conceptions of either faith. Over time, much venom was spewed by apologists on either side of the divide, much contempt heaped, spleen vented. Texts were erased, edited, revised, doctored (as poet and Kabir translator Vinay Dharwadker explains) to suit the viewpoint of one or the other competing sect.

Much of the rant may seem, of course, irrelevant for contemporary readers who usually turn to Bhakti literature for the poet’s voice—volatile, expressive, yearning, entreating, peremptory, despairing, and ecstatic—rather than the perfections of the god it describes. The subject of this poetry often seems, in fact, far more vivid and compelling than its object. Besides, the poet in both forms of bhakti asserts a personal devotion, without an intercessor. And so Tukaram’s yearning for a flesh-and-blood Vithoba, for instance, has a distinct kinship in terms of tenor with a nirguna poet’s commitment to a divinity beyond attributes. The originality and unconventionality of poets on both sides is in obvious evidence. As poet and translator Dilip Chitre says of Tukaram and his ferocious saguna bhakti: ‘he is an image-worshipping iconoclast;... a sensuous ascetic;... an intense bhakta who would not hesitate to destroy his God out of sheer love.’ Clearly, this kind of anarchic passion is not so different from the fearless dispassion of Kabir, so often held up as the unswerving champion of nirguna bhakti.

For all its vitality and radiance, the Bhakti movement was not without its contradictions. Its sometimes aggressive proselytizing zeal spawned its own forms of crude propaganda and bigotry. Besides, some of its rebellion seems to have remained theoretical. The challenge to caste was clearly not radical or enduring enough, and sometimes remained limited to the ideological rather than the material realm. Ironically, some of the most vehement iconoclasts of the movement were later canonized and domesticated by the very establishments against which they had dissented. There are also traces of misogyny and a puritanical rejection of the flesh in some of these poems.

And yet, the spirit of the movement, perhaps at times in spite of itself, was egalitarian. Whenever the experiential dimension overtook the doctrinal, as it often did, the poetry was charged with the resonance of freedom. Divine grace was seen as not just impartial; it was seen as indiscriminate—in fact, extravagantly democratic. The lord was no longer a distant promise, imprisoned in stone, incarcerated in theory, gridlocked in transcendent eternalism. The temple doors had swung open. Whispered arcana could now be proclaimed, sung, danced, shared. God was liberated at last.

They tumbled out in a festive cascade—gods and goddesses who were now free to saunter in and out of hearts at will. They could sulk when neglected, be wooed when peeved, be reprimanded when capricious. And they never ceased to be lovable, for they wept with the dispossessed and celebrated with the joyous. They understood lapses in attention and errors in grammar. They enjoyed trivia, relished detail and local gossip, revelled in the particular, had no ideological issues with the concrete. You didn’t have to know their language; they already knew yours. You didn’t have to propitiate them with a cargo of coconuts and terror; they were simply waiting for an invitation into your heart. They responded to sincerity and to love wherever they saw it. They weren’t snobs.

And even for those bhaktas who saw god as unnameable and beyond personality, this was not a divinity shuttered in doctrine, swathed in esoteric wisdom. This was a presence that was unmistakably alive and immediate, pulsatingly now. No one could manipulate it, no one monopolize it, no one miss it.

This anthology is an invitation to listen to some of these poems of urgent love and impassioned unreason. These are poems that have permeated the collective unconscious of centuries of Indians, poems that comprise some of the timeless demotic literature of the subcontinent. Many of these poets were individuals recorded in history, but most of them have since been morphed into myth, beatified into sainthood, transformed into tradition. It is often difficult to tell which poems were authored by the individual and which by the many oral traditions they left in their wake. The voices in these poems, however, whether authored by one individual or many, are strongly, almost savagely, personal.

Most of these poems strike one with their emotional immediacy, their raw desire, and their vulnerable admissions of doubt, fear and uncertainty. There are others that remind you that poetry is the province of mystery, that you are now in a realm closer to mantra rather than manifesto; dreamtime rather than didacticism; song rather than sermon. Some are in a mode that has come to be known as ‘twilight language’ or sandhyabhasha, a dense, coded, elliptical language that shatters conventional notions of causality and daytime perception.

Here is a chance to tune into these sacred pop songs—from the bracing irony of Kabir, the weaver, to the wild abandon of Mirabai, the Rajput princess; from the distilled clarity of Lal Ded in Kashmiri to the audacious sensuality of Annamayya in Telugu; from the cannibalistic lust of the great Tamil Vaishnava saint Nammalvar to the uncompromising integrity and protestant ethos of Basavanna in Kannada; from the earthy mysticism of Tukaram in Marathi to the fiery eroticism of Chandidas in Bengali.

These are voices that readers have probably encountered before. But this selection is an invitation to hear them in a great melodic chorus, in the magic of polyphony. The channels are deliberately mixed. The arrangement is not chronological, sectarian or linguistic. The specific social, doctrinal and literary contexts of these poems are certainly important. But there are several books that have already explored these regional and individual timbres. What this volume offers is instead a chance to hear these voices in unison—as a single soaring octave of human longing and freedom.

Abandoning a schematic editorial approach, this anthology positions each poem in an aural mosaic based on tone and texture. There are lust poems, rage poems, raging thirst poems, wistful poems, erotic poems, funny poems, ecstatic poems, ironic poems, doubting poems, adoring poems, anguished poems, protest poems, celebratory poems, the whole gamut. The gestalt, one hopes, will make for a varied and yet cohesive listening experience.

This is as much a book of poems as it is a map of the existential journey. It is intended as much for lovers of poetry as it is for seekers across the board. Above all, this collection attempts to offer the flavour of an epoch—the foam and brine of an oceanic explosion of yearning, when men and women spilled out of their social definitions and gods and goddesses spilled out of shrines and scripture, and the two met in a tantalizing duet of seeking and finding, touching and losing, glimpsing and forgetting, that has never been seen before or since on this scale in the history of this subcontinent, and perhaps the world.

Empowered by the Bhakti poets who used the first person singular without apology, it is time to implicate my own role in this project. I do not consider myself a scholar in the field. I am, however, a seasoned listener and lover of poetry, and I share with these poets a deep conviction in the power of the word, when it is born of heightened states of consciousness, to transfigure. Not all these poems embody blazingly obvious literary merit. While some of these poems do experiment with idiom and prosody, and some even invented new forms and interrogated traditional notions of poetry, others are relatively simple lyrics, waiting to be released into the landscape of song. Almost all of them were sung. And yet, if even the written words are capable of creating inner tectonic shifts it is because they were fashioned in places of extraordinary ferment.

My fascination with these poems stems from the fact that I know something of the condition of the upstart seeker, the amateur flounderer. And I know the experience of the sometimes desperate devotee. At times when my own journey has seemed scarily unmapped, it is to some of the churning Marathi abhangas of Tukaram and Namdev, to Ramanujan’s glorious translations of Nammalvar, to Pandit Kumar Gandharva’s inimitable vocal renditions of Kabir, that I have turned. And it is in those hoarse, unvarnished words that I found my campfire, a dim outline of community. It was in those fractured silences that I found, however fleetingly, my satsangh. Later, when ambushed by that cyclone of dark joy and bewilderment, which is how I experienced my encounter with a spiritual guide, I realized that bhakti isn’t just starry- eyed song and comfort food. It is, above all, the deep science of the heart.

The divide between nirguna and saguna bhakti, despite its heritage of sectarian tensions, poses no real barrier to the omnivorous seeker. Devotion, as followers of all spiritual traditions realize at some point, is merely a device, a means to fuel the spiritual quest. It is the experience of bhakti that transforms, rather than its content. One senses how the notion of a formless divine could be a valuable means to check the obsessive literalism of some votaries of saguna bhakti. Equally, the god with name, shape and form (not to mention consort, constitution, family history and preferred choice of vehicle) is a wonderful means to counter the sterile metaphysical strain among some nirguna dogmatists.

What is particularly interesting in these poems is the way devotion is often suffused with eroticism. The fervour of bhakti shot through with shringara, or sexual love, comprises, in fact, some of the richest poetry in the genre. Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman have pointed out how the fifteenth-century Telugu poet Annamacharya’s metaphysical or introspective poems seem to emerge from the same ‘inner space’ as his erotic poems. The former, written in the male mode, has a voice that is troubled, tormented and conflicted; the latter, written in the female mode, has a voice that is far more confident and relaxed in its bold and playful sensuality. Eroticism here is not just courtly or romantic love; spiritual hunger is notjust pasteurized asexual longing. One leaks into the other, and together both ‘articulate a wide range of human experience’ that is never monochromatic, never anaemic. It is a reminder of how inextricably linked the sexual is to the spiritual, the physical to the metaphysical. It is also a reminder of a fact familiar to every poet: that there is no way to articulate subtler areas of experience except in sensuous terms.

At first glance, it is possible to feel somewhat discomfited at the seemingly pat gender roles in some of these poems: passive female devotee, dynamic male god. But as you look deeper, you find these are enlivened and undercut in all kinds of ways, with power equations fluctuating crazily the closer you get to the rising temperature of the bedchamber. The ‘female’ devotee is no demure bride; she is capable of tying her lover’s arms to the bedpost (Narsinh Mehta), kicking him out of bed (Salabega), imperiously designating him her slave (Annamacharya). And god, as we see in Jayadeva and so many others, pines for his beloved in a way that can be pathetic and heart-rending; he is both creditor and debtor, conqueror and conquered, raider and raided, capricious boss and humble slave. And he even shows an occasional propensity for cross- dressing, to add an exciting twist to the recipe.

I find myself drawn by the resolute absence of sentimentalism in these poems. The bhaktas here are feral. They are willing to wreck homes and marriages, commit adultery and suicide, turn homicidal and cannibalistic with impunity, as long as it brings them closer to the objects of their desire. ‘Take these husbands who die,/ decay, and feed them/ to your kitchen fires!’ cries Akka Mahadevi with breathtaking brutality. Nammalvar warns his god of his intention even more plainly: ‘If I see you anywhere/ I’ll gather you/ and eat you up. ‘

To live in these seismic zones, then, is to live in the knowledge that intimacy can be alarmingly disruptive, turning hierarchies into states of hectic disarray. The irreverence is rooted in the deep recognition that the lover and the beloved cannot be separated for long, however hard they try. The union is only a matter of time. And so, it is possible to reproach a god, hurl the choicest cuss words at him, personalize him, infantilize him, cannibalize him, knowing all along that he is the sustainer of life and the world. ‘Just calling a large thing small.../ does not diminish its size,’ says the poet Rahim. ‘Krishna, who lifted the vast mount Govardhan/ won’t take it amiss if called Murlidhar.’

The body remains a recurrent and important presence in these poems; interestingly, it is not denied, wished away, or spiritualized into bloodlessness. We are told time and again that there is more to us than flesh and bone. ‘That pampered carcass/ believes maya to be his friend./ But maya will chew him down/ to his entrails,’ says Akho in no uncertain terms. All the poets reiterate that theme of material perishability in their own ways. But the body is also the locus of wisdom, an instrument of knowing. ‘Man is the greatest Truth/ of all,/ Nothing beyond,’ proclaims Chandidas, supremely confident that his declaration in no way contradicts his love of Krishna. For the body is, above all, a shrine, worthy of being the sanctum for the greatest mystery of all. The moving temples are the ones that last, says Basavanna in what is one of the justifiably most famous poems in the vachana tradition. ‘If menstrual blood makes me impure/ Tell me who was not born of that blood,’ asks a fearless Soyarabai. And Devara Dasimayya, the weaver, rebukes God for creating the body and then enjoining its transcendence: ‘Just once/ Take on a body like mine/ And see for yourself, O Ramanatha.’

These poems also remind us that the paths of devotion and knowledge are not mutually exclusive. They reaffirm that no human being is just a bhakta or a jnana margi, a devotee or a savant. Devotion, for all its seeming unreasonableness, I have grown to understand over the years, has its own deep intelligence. Likewise, the most discerning intellectual enquiry is empty without the lubrication of passion. Reading many of these saint-poets is a reminder that bhakti is not (as so many believe) a state of imbecilic joy or emotional jingoism. There are several instances in these poems of psychological complexity—nuances, darker subtexts, sudden humour, a startling carnality. All these moments testify to the fact that the bhakta was not a beaming saint with a calendar art halo. She was instead an insurgent who knew the perils of the border game she was playing, and the yawning chasm that lay just beyond the horizon of her insatiable yearning.

There can be no knowing without love and no love without logic. In a world that splinters idea and emotion, mind and body, faith and reason, into easy binaries, this essential synthesis is often forgotten. When Abhirami Bhattar gives us the striking image of Devi’s breasts searing Shiva’s chest—’But you/ you scarred/ this warrior’s body/ with your breasts,/ great Goddess’—he integrates seeming incongruities in a single metaphor. We are reminded in one stroke that fragility is not without power, subtlety is not without strength, love is not without wisdom. The poet Surdas’s lines jolt us into a similar state of recognition, as he underscores the need to forego a glib intellectualism in order to uncover a deeper vision: ‘For who has ever recognized the brilliance of the sun/ but by seeing it through eyes gone blind?’ Likewise Lalon Fakir implores us to awaken to the dangers of a barren, self-serving rationality before it is too late: ‘Or else/ You’ll die/ A useless death/ Bailing out/ Water with a thimble.’

For any reader who has known some of the peaks and troughs of the human spiritual cardiogram, Bhakti poetry brings its own very particular rewards. The poems offer sanctuary, companionship, illumination—signposts on what often is a turbulent and uncertain journey. They are reminders of the human struggle to give utterance to that strange hunger for something that we seem perennially on the verge of apprehending—the mystery that, in Mircea Eliade’s words, is ‘totally foreign to us, but [with which] we are completely at home’; the intimate tug towards something so familiar that it could be mother, father, lover, child, teacher, master, and yet obstinately more, much more, than the sum of all those roles.

What continues to inspire me about these poems is that they tell us that even at all those times when we felt homeless, desolate, dislocated or despairing, we were not abandoned. They remind us that the gnawing human experience of distance or viraha from the deeper mysteries of life need not be a cause for despair. There can be no harvest without fallowness, they tell us. No experience of separation, however arid, they say, is ever devoid of presence or grace. Waiting is not mere passivity; it can be a state of dynamic receptivity, a radical and alive responsiveness. God lurks even in the condition of exile, says Akka Mahadevi, in her memorable image of ‘the Brahman hiding in yearning’. For Tukaram, every crisis can be seen as a visiting card from the divine: When He comes/ Out of the blue/ A meteorite/ Shattering your home/ Be sure/ God is visiting you,’ he says in what I consider to be my talismanic poem in the book.

For all its ordeals and trials, the journey can offer, through the alchemy of love, moments as exhilarating as the destination. And at times, evidently, there is not much difference between the two. These poems remind us—time and time again—to enjoy the ride. For if there’s one thing that is not in short supply, it is grace: ‘I lost myself in myself and found a wine cellar... jars and jars of the good stuff,’ exults Lal Ded. ‘Blue is one’s Guru and one’s Guru’s resort/ I behave blue I feed on blue/ I become blue I envision blue,’ exclaims a dazed Jnaneshwar. ‘He is reaching the brim now! In an instant, He is going to overflow!’ declares Tukaram, lost in a surplus of drunken ecstasy.

This book invites you to sit back and drink in that abundance.