CHAPTER SEVEN

Sonic Equality

And He said unto them, he that hath eares to heare, let him heare.

—MARK 4:9 (KING JAMES BIBLE)

Imagine how long your journey has been. Years have gone by and now you have grown old. You have lost much. Your husband, your first daughter, and your strength to work. Your son cares for you, and you are safe, but your days are slow watching the sun move across the sky. You wonder when it will all stop. You have sat for many hours in the evenings near the tree beside the temple and listened to a young man describe the sacred discussion between Krishna and Arjuna. Now the cycle of his story is almost complete. You decide to sit a little closer this time, toward the base of the tree, where the women gather who wear much more colorful and finely stitched cloth than your plain white sari. You are timid, but you approach, so as better to hear the speaker.

 

If the Līḷācaritra appears as a response to the changing conditions of an older age, the Jñāneśvarī is a text seeking to condition and direct a new era. This era is imagined as transformative in the literary sphere, of sahitya, a sphere, as the term implies, that mingles literature, aesthetics, and sociality. Jnandev envisions not merely an innovative literature but a set of social ethics for that literature derived from the core intention of the Bhagavad Gītā, an intention left unactualized in its medium, Sanskrit. He portrays an image of fresh gold mines of Marathi literature, and he positions his new text within the Yadava century’s urban nexus through the metaphor of the crossroads, market and city. A public culture is imagined through the Jñāneśvarī, one with newly dismantled social boundaries to universal salvation. Jnandev’s text proposes a worldview where all people, regardless of caste or gender difference, have equal access to the Bhagavad Gītā, but to what degree does the Jñāneśvarī both register and critique social inequity in other less soteriological and more mundane contexts? In other words, what is the social vision of this text that carries the momentum of literary vernacularization in the social relations of everyday life? Given the foundational place the Jñāneśvarī holds in the history of Marathi literature, and the social critique embedded within vernacularization, the question of the social vision of this text is vital.

This chapter explores the specific question of the social ethics of the Jñāneśvarī regarding the distinctions of caste and gender in Jnandev’s world as emblematic of the ethics of vernacularization. We will examine this subject through the text’s statements about social differences. We will pursue this question through an analysis of the very thing that makes this literary work so decidedly local and vernacular, which is Jnandev’s use of the colloquial Marathi of his age to give his text the sense and sound of everyday life. As we will see, the radical nature of the Jñāneśvarī, its revolutionary potential, also draws it into the glacial flows of quotidian life, where the weight of normal, colloquial social practice slows the liberal visions Jnandev provides.

How is Jnandev’s clear sentiment about access to salvation represented in the Bhagavad Gītā conveyed in other social realms, outside the salvational and theological? As we will see, several points in the Jñāneśvarī advocate the rejection of caste and gender distinctions in society at large. This is particularly clear in the first nine chapters, which is the first half of the text. However, the Jñāneśvarī also evinces implicit social inequities expressed through the use of the very colloquial Marathi that makes this text accessible to the general Marathi-speaking public of the thirteenth century. We will see an explicit rejection of social distinction set against a more restricted egalitarianism emerging from the colloquial registers of Marathi. I will argue that the very process of vernacularization, invested in everyday life, both seeks a capacious discursive field, yet is also tempered by the social mores of vernacular culture itself. This balance between heterodoxy and orthodoxy is the primary subject of what I describe as a nascent public sphere represented in the Jñāneśvarī and in the Līḷācaritra. Both texts register a sphere of public debate about social inequity, though the resolution to this subject remains the ongoing question of the quotidian revolution.

It is precisely in using colloquial Marathi, the language of a new public sphere, that the Jñāneśvarī presents many conventions of caste and gender inequity prevalent in everyday life as normative conventions. Like the Mahanubhavs who used Marathi to overcome social distinctions, the Jñāneśvarī uses Marathi to surmount the linguistic barriers of access to the Bhagavad Gītā. And just as the Mahanubhavs accommodated the social distinctions of everyday life outside their immediate circle of initiates, so too does the Jñāneśvarī reveal layers of accommodation with the world of common society. This is a position at odds with an idea that has often accompanied discussions of bhakti: that is, the notion that bhakti generally presents a politics of social equality.¹ There is no doubt that many “bhakti movements” in South Asia have presented this perspective. To a great degree, this was the fundamental point of view of the early Mahanubhavs, and in the century or two before, of the Virashaivas who flourished in Kannada-speaking regions south of the Yadava realm.² However, as we will see, bhakti, if the Jñāneśvarī represents this idea to a great degree, is a mode of religious expression and practice that is deeply invested in everyday life, and while it can provide models for social equality, it can also reinscribe the social mores of that quotidian world.

Just as the “caste question” animated public discourse in the colonial period and later,³ one can also speak of a “caste question” posited throughout the Jñāneśvarī. We have seen this question asked and answered in the preceding three chapters of this book. The process of vernacularization contains a critique of caste and gender, if not explicitly so, then implied in the very course by which the interconnections of caste, gender, and language are broken through a shift from a language that came restricted to the sphere of the cosmopolis to a language that fills a region of everyday life. The terms Pollock uses—literization and literarization—signal this difference. Literization is not primarily a social issue, but a technical one—it names the rudiments of writing of a given language, which is entirely confined to an elite sphere. Literarization, however, is the process by which power, meaning, and social restriction are applied to the use of language, and this is regularly associated with things such as class, gender, region, but also—almost uniformly in South Asia—caste. Literarization is a social process, not a technical one, and a process, I have argued that exists at the nexus of the elite and the nonelite, the field of the everyday. In Maharashtra the Jñāneśvarī is remembered and extolled as a text that not only epitomized Marathi as a literary language—that is, the quintessential moment of literarization in Marathi—but also did so by setting a particular social agenda. The text, as we saw, claims to break the levees of Sanskrit that contain the sacred flow of the Bhagavad Gītā and to put its essence into a language that is local and common, the deshi or “country” language, as Jnandev so often calls Marathi. This effort at marginalizing Sanskrit cannot be disassociated from an effort to adjust, if not dismantle, a key aspect of the interconnections of caste, gender, and language. In the process, the reduction of social distinction in one sphere influences and threatens other spheres. This is the kernel of the story of Chakradhar’s trial, as we saw at the end of chapter 5: that his social egalitarianism, particularly around women, had threatened to alter a traditional way of life.

In this chapter, however, we will turn away from the question of vernacularization and literarization in the Jñāneśvarī and instead investigate directly the content of the Jñāneśvarī that addresses social difference in its many forms. I approach the text’s treatment of social difference through a diachronic analysis of the text itself, following the flow of the Jñāneśvarī to see how and when social difference is discussed. A pattern is discernible: the first nine verses articulate a theology and ethics of transcendence by which social difference is erased within the cosmic sphere of dharma; the latter nine verses contain, through Jnandev’s ample metaphorical troves, some of the kinds of caste and gender distinctions and hierarchies that lurk within the quotidian, colloquial Marathi of his age. I argue that we see an explicit critique of caste and gender asymmetries of power placed alongside colloquialisms of difference because vernacularization itself mediates social inequities through its valorization of the language and social sphere of everyday life. In other words, the ambivalence of the quotidian world informs the social politics of vernacularization itself.

The Jñāneśvarī as a whole—containing both an explicit theology of social equality and a subterranean discourse that displays the social inequity of the age—stands as emblematic of the quotidian revolution as a process that both accommodates everyday life at the core of public culture, yet also restricts that accommodation. Social change in the quotidian revolution is not a sudden charge of social revision but a slow process of progress and regress, moving ever closer toward the expansion of everyday life at the core of public culture. The process is made possible by the social conversation about inequity itself, a social debate at the core of an evolving public sphere.

In what follows I read the Jñāneśvarī as a commentary and a record of the process of vernacularization and its attendant politics. My analysis of the text is necessarily selective; I do not claim to represent the entirety of the text’s meanings, particularly its theological meanings. In this sense, I read this text in a way that is different from how it is most commonly received, which is as a theological and scriptural text as well as a literary masterpiece of Marathi. Indeed, caste and gender equity are but two of the many discursive investments of the Jñāneśvarī, and may not even be among its most prominent for those who revere the text. In many conversations with devotees and spiritual teachers for whom the Jñāneśvarī is a subject of study or devotion, when I would say that my aim in studying the text was an exploration of debates around social inequity, I would be met with a quizzical expression. For many such interlocutors, this text unequivocally expresses social equality, but this subject is hardly the core message of the Jñāneśvarī. As some critics said of my book on the Marathi sant Namdev, I may here too bypass a reading of this text as theology for a reading of this text as social philosophy and even social history.⁴ I can only say that a deep and vibrant theological literature surrounds this text, and it has not been my aim to add to this excellent work, a job for which I have quite inadequate skills. Instead, my goal is different: to see what the Jñāneśvarī can tell us about a momentous period of social and cultural change in the history of India and the world.

The Jñāneśvarī is a text, as it claims, which is exceedingly generous: it invites its readers and listeners to engage with its many meanings, confident that its overall message of social equality and humanism will be heard. Indeed, even in those quizzical encounters with theologians and spiritual teachers, I have found that each is characterized by a tremendous generosity toward me and my engagement with this text. And so I preface my reading of this text here with my deep respect for the Jñāneśvarī’s message and the legacy of Jnandev. My critique here is by no means a criticism of Jnandev or the Jñāneśvarī, or the many people who put their faith in this text and person. Quite on the contrary, it is out of a profound admiration for both the Jñāneśvarī and for the legacy of Jnandev, as well as the deep and rich history of meanings this text has produced, that I venture at all into an analysis of this essential and brilliant work of world religious literature.

The Cultural Politics of Transcendence

In some sense, caste is the very first issue raised in the Bhagavad Gītā. As Arjuna sees his armies arrayed against the forces of his cousins, he questions the nature of the war. He sees it for what it is: a moment when dharma is in decline, for only such a decline can account for the calamity on the battlefield that he now faces. The entire first chapter of the Bhagavad Gītā registers Arjuna’s despondency at his predicament and the civil war that will ensue. Arjuna rationalizes that if kin begin to kill kin, then the very nature or dharma of the family will be destroyed. The Bhagavad Gītā records Arjuna’s despondency as a series of likely results of the war’s destruction of fundamental social norms:

Son of Vrishni, when the absence of dharma has conquered, the women of the family are defiled

And caste-confusion is born in the corruption of women. || BG 1.41 ||⁵

Arjuna worries that the war he is about to wage will lead to the degradation of all social orders, and the structure of the family—which harbors the primary rules that govern caste through marriage—will be transgressed. This is the inauguration of a kind of “family values” motif within the Bhagavad Gītā that is translated and further highlighted in the Jñāneśvarī. As I have argued elsewhere, the Marathi Varkari tradition, of which Jnandev is regularly considered a primary member, evinces a very particular notion of family values, focused around a kind of Vaishnava family-oriented normalcy that has its own effect on the social practices that surround bhakti.⁶ The first engagement with caste and gender—in the Jñāneśvarī and also in the Bhagavad Gītā—involves just such a debate about family values.

The last few lines of the first chapter of the Jñāneśvarī introduce the subject of caste explicitly through commentary on these verses from the Bhagavad Gītā. Jnandev’s commentary follows the ideological sense of the Sanskrit text, suggesting that women bear the social dharmic burden of order within families and that their corruption is the corruption of the entire social system. Following verse 41 of the first chapter of the Bhagavad Gītā, Jnandev’s commentary in Marathi reads:

When the high [uttama] enter into the families of the low [adhamīṃ], castes [varna] become mixed.

Thus caste rules [jātidharma] are turned upside down. || Jn. 1.249 ||

Great sin enters into such families

Just like a flock of crows freely descending upon food offered in the public square (cohaṭā). || Jn. 1.250 ||⁷

A curious feature of this metaphor is the way Jnandev elaborates the meaning of this verse through reference to food, which, when discussing caste, implies commensality, as we saw at the end of the last chapter and throughout the Līḷācaritra. In the Bhagavad Gītā, Arjuna’s anxiety is over the question of women and procreation, and this is the focal point of the degradation of caste. Yet Jnandev’s first commentary on this verse shifts the emphasis from women, marriage, and progeny—from endogamy—to commensality in public, in the town square and market. The metaphor he chooses compares the degradation of castes to a murder of crows descending upon a meal on a street corner, representing the deterioration of the socially institutionalized system of commensality to an “uncivilized” animal-like order. As we saw in the previous chapter, and as we will see yet again in what is to follow, food offered at the meeting place or market of the town or village—the “four corners,” as it were—is an enduring metaphor for Jnandev; it is also the location where Mahanubhavs would start their quest for alms in a new village or town. Thus Jnandev links endogamy and commensality (which are not linked in the Bhagavad Gītā at this point), bringing together two of the key features of jati in South Asia. But we should note that Jnandev here is explaining Arjuna’s statements, which represent his confusion over the nature and morality of the war; Jnandev is not yet expressing Krishna’s teaching and corrective to Arjuna’s confusion. In other words, Jnandev is expressing a misapprehension; he is not reinforcing a caste prejudice, but he does so by tying together two key issues for his audience, commensality and caste.

The next chapter of the Bhagavad Gītā contains Krishna’s initial chastisement of Arjuna in which Krishna essentially tells him to do his caste duty and to “act like a man” so to speak—that is, to behave like a warrior. Krishna does not challenge Arjuna’s vision of the chaos that will follow the fratricide before them—for, as God, Krishna must know the disaster about to unfold—but instead Krishna reminds Arjuna that all warriors must do their duty because it is the right thing to do. Though bad things will come from the war, perhaps even the kind of intermingling of castes and loosening of gender restrictions that both Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gītā and Jnandev in the Jñāneśvarī decry, shunning one’s dharma is a still greater evil.

It is in the third chapter of the Bhagavad Gītā that Krishna famously advises Arjuna: “Better one’s own dharma, even if ineffective, than the dharma of another, practiced well.”⁸ Jnandev’s commentary on this verse is presented through metaphor, and he again brings us back to commensality:

Tell me: should a twice-born, even if he be poor, and the food be delicious

Allow himself to be served in the home of a Shudra? || Jn. 3.216 ||⁹

The answer to this rhetorical question appears to be “no,” a high-caste person should not dine in the home of a Shudra; this seems neither as a critique of the “twice-born” nor of the Shudra, but a simple statement about the norms of society in Jnandev’s time. However, as I will point out in the conclusion, Jnandev is said to transgress just this social convention in his later hagiography—to dine in the homes and company of the “low castes”—even though this is not his own description of his life or activities in the Jñāneśvarī. As many scholars and commentators will explain, Jnandev, when he composes the Jñāneśvarī, is remembered to have not yet completed his social-spiritual journey. He has yet to meet all of his fellow bhaktas, many of whom are low castes, “Untouchables,” and women, and all of whom will become his companions in hagiography, especially the Shudra tailor Namdev. The Jñāneśvarī, I have regularly been told by its admirers, represents a philosophical and theological ethics that Jnandev will realize fully through his later associations with the devotees of Vitthal; it is only through this fellowship that Jnandev becomes a full-fledged Varkari, but it is also through this social change within Jnandev’s life that his social ethics comes to its fullest shape.

Caste is next invoked in the Jñāneśvarī in response to chapter 4, verse 13 of the Bhagavad Gītā, a verse that has received the attention of many commentators, especially political reformist thinkers of the modern period in India. This verse states in Sanskrit in Krishna’s voice:

The four castes were brought forth by me, distributing guṇas with actions;

Although I am the Creator of this world, know me as the Imperishable One who does not act. || BG 4.13 ||¹⁰

Jnandev essentially paraphrases this verse for his listener. Yet he also introduces something missing from the Bhagavad Gītā. In the voice of Krishna, Jnandev says that these distinctions of caste are wrought “even though all are one.”¹¹ Jnandev here is careful to remind his listeners that the question of caste is specifically one of the phenomenal world, and this is the point he believes Krishna is making when Krishna declares that he sets the conditions for caste in motion but he is not directly responsible for its effects. In the Bhagavad Gītā, caste is treated as both an important feature of human life and a secondary aspect of cosmic reality, a byproduct of the fact that the cosmos evolves from three essential elements (the basic ideas of Samkhya philosophy) and that these elements, of their own accord, form both the natural and social world. Krishna explains himself, and Jnandev replicates his answer: everything comes from Krishna in general, which is the essence of cosmic dharma, but the actual unfolding of the phenomenal world according to these immutable principles is a realm of shared responsibility, of social dharma. This latter realm is the sphere of action in the Bhagavad Gītā, the very reason Arjuna does not know what to do and why Krishna must convince him of the correct path. Caste, in the cosmic realm, is reduced to immutable traits or gunas inherent in all things and hence caste is just another by-product of cosmic order or, rather, of a kind of dharmic biology, the laws that govern the evolution of species. The Bhagavad Gītā, early on, sets these two conditional spheres in place, and this is the core of the Jñāneśvarī’s engagement with caste and gender in all its forms. Social difference and hierarchy are vital to the quotidian world, where everyday life choices either maintain or disrupt important social norms; at the same time, such social differences are utterly inconsequential in the cosmic reality that Krishna ultimately represents. This latter point is often expressed as the overall social message of the Jñāneśvarī, and it dovetails with Jnandev’s received hagiography.

The dialectical meaning of dharma here—separated into cosmic and social forms—implies that social difference is ultimately something to transcend when and if a person renounces normal social life. But for those who remain within normal social life, transcendence is not advocated. At the center of the ethical arguments of the Jñāneśvarī and the Bhagavad Gītā, then, rests a bifurcated cultural politics of transcendence, and this mirrors what we saw in the Līḷācaritra, where one set of rules applied to Mahanubhav initiates but another set applied to those who had not embarked on this path of transcendence and asceticism. Unlike the Bhagavad Gītā, the Jñāneśvarī is situated within quotidian social life played out as a conversation between two brothers; it is not a dialogue between “man” and “God” or even prince and charioteer, as is the Bhagavad Gītā, but rather between two men and overheard by an audience of “regular” people.¹² The Jñāneśvarī by design bridges the cosmic world of the Bhagavad Gītā and the quotidian world as well as the transcendence of social difference and its immanence in everyday life.

At many points in the Bhagavad Gītā, caste is a subject addressed by Krishna as a specific subject of transcendence. For example, one of the first explicit expressions of the elision of caste appears in chapter 5 of the Bhagavad Gītā when Krishna declares:

The pandits see the same—in a Brahmin, gifted with knowledge and training,

As in a cow, or in an elephant; as in a dog, or in a dog-cooker. || BG 5.18 ||¹³

This statement comes in the context of a discourse about renunciation and rejection of the fruits of action through detachment. The Sanskrit shloka juxtaposes, we can imagine, what would have been conceived of as two opposite ends of the social spectrum—a learned Brahmin and an “Untouchable” described euphemistically and derogatively as a “dog-cooker” (śvapāka), a common phrase of caste denigration in Sanskrit and other Indic languages.¹⁴ The theological ethics of the verse is clear enough: a person who understands cosmic dharma renounces not only the fruits of his actions but also the superficialities of the quotidian world, seeing all beings as the same.

Jnandev reiterates and expands upon this proclamation of the Bhagavad Gītā:

Then if a gnat and an elephant, or a dog-eating outcaste (śvapaca) and a high caste (dvija) [are not different]

How could it still be that [we consider] someone as a stranger and another as an intimate? || Jn. 5.92 ||

Or a cow superior and a dog inferior?

How could this dream remain for people who are wide-awake?

How does one wake up from the dream that this is the case,

That the cow and dog [are different], that one is high and the other is low? || Jn. 5.93 ||¹⁵

If the experience of egoism remains, then one sees the world through [such] distinction (bheda).

But if [distinction] is not there at the beginning, then how can there be difference (viṣama)? || Jn. 5.94 ||

Jnandev is unequivocal here, as he is throughout the Jñāneśvarī: caste and gender distinctions, and all other social difference, are features of the phenomenal, quotidian world, but the cosmic reality underlying these distinctions supports no differences among living things. Here Jnandev draws out and restates the radical social politics of the Bhagavad Gītā with emphasis and poetic élan. Whatever aspects of everyday life and its social distinctions exist within the Jñāneśvarī, they must all be juxtaposed to such clear statements. Yet encoded within both the Bhagavad Gītā’s text and Jnandev’s commentary is also a reification of the social distinctions erased in cosmic Truth. The social rank expressed here is dismissed as illusory, but it is nonetheless enumerated in both texts. In other words, the clear expression of hierarchy in the Bhagavad Gītā and the Jñāneśvarī, even if that hierarchy is rejected, still gives us some sense of the power of the social world to endure despite the theological and philosophical interventions of such passages.

It is in chapter 9 of the Jñāneśvarī that the theology and social politics of caste and gender transcendence are most clearly presented. This chapter of the Bhagavad Gītā discusses transcendence and devotion, emphasizing how all can approach Krishna as God because he transcends the phenomenal world. Thus, chapter 9 of the Jñāneśvarī epitomizes the distinction between a social dharma—the dharma of varna, jati, and the āśrama or “stages of life”—and a cosmic dharma that will be fully revealed when Krishna displays his cosmic form to Arjuna in the chapter 11 of the Bhagavad Gītā. Jnandev’s commentary applies the philosophy of transcendence to social distinction, and it is here in chapter 9 that caste, as jati and varna, receives the greatest concentration of attention in the Jñāneśvarī.

Jnandev’s commentary on caste in chapter 9 is occasioned by this verse from the Bhagavad Gītā:

When I dwell in human form, the confused ones have contempt for me

Not knowing my highest nature as the great lord of beings. || BG 9.11 ||¹⁶

Jnandev responds to this verse with several metaphors and explanations that further explicate the Sanskrit verse’s apparent meaning: that only fools understand Krishna, or God, actually to be manifest with the mundane accoutrements of human life. In this discussion Jnandev reveals the repetitive poetics that are yet another signal of the orality and performativity of his text, and these particular passages are well known in the oral contexts of Marathi kirtan and pravacana. Jnandev expounds:

I, who have no name, am attributed names; I, who have no karma, am attributed karma.

I, who have no physical body, am attributed physicality (dehadharma). || Jn. 9.155 ||

Though I am shapeless, I am ascribed a shape; though I have no form, a form of me is adorned.

Though I am beyond all rituals and rites, they go on performing them. || Jn. 9.156 ||

I am without caste (varna), but am ascribed caste; I am without qualities (guna), but am ascribed qualities.

I am without feet, but shown with feet; I am without hands, but shown with hands. || Jn. 9.157||

The text continues this way, as Jnandev, in the voice of Krishna, elaborates that Krishna is not confined to the various physical and metaphysical qualities ascribed to him by his devotees. Krishna is without ears and eyes; without clan; without beauty, and so on. Jnandev compares all such perceptions to a person dreaming that they are in the midst of a forest, when actually they are asleep in their beds.¹⁷ As he concludes this short section of his commentary, he summarizes:

Alas, [people] still ascribe to my Name the rules of nature (prākṛta) and of social life (manuṣyadharma).

Yet their concept [of me] is the very opposite of true knowledge (jñāna). || Jn. 9.168 ||

The critique of caste—if we can call this a critique—begins in earnest in the Bhagavad Gītā and in the Jñāneśvarī as an analysis of the Divine Self, of Krishna in his cosmic form. The arguments that follow rest on the essential idea that Krishna is beyond all social distinctions, and so these social distinctions are of only fleeting, human value—they need to be transcended. Subsequently, in response to verse eighteen in chapter 9 of the Bhagavad Gītā, in which Krishna describes his nature as the seed (bīja) of the cosmic order and of universal creation, Jnandev provides these elaborations in the voice of Krishna:

I am there at the beginning of the universe as unmanifest desire and the seed of thought;

And I am there at the end of time (kalpāṃtī), like a hidden treasure. || Jn. 9.291 ||

I shatter all Names and Forms; I dissolve caste distinction (varṇavyaktī).

I erase differences ascribed to birth-caste (jati); the distance between such categories disappears. || Jn. 9.292 ||

Jnandev extends this theme in the subsequent commentary on this chapter, which explains through various metaphors and dialogic creations the way in which Krishna removes the importance of social distinction through his cosmic being. There is a particular emphasis on caste here, as a premier example of the “names and forms” Krishna dissolves. However, even in this context of the transcendence of caste, Jnandev’s commentary tends to invoke specific features of the stereotypes of caste difference, which he does in order to connect to his audience’s understandings of social order in everyday life. For example, the next time caste is mentioned by Jnandev is in response to verse 30 of chapter 9 of the Bhagavad Gītā, which says in Sanskrit:

If the one who does evil honours me and not another,

That one is thought to be good. That one has begun in the right way. || BG 9.30 ||¹⁸

Jnandev paraphrases the verse in this way:

Someone who worships me with great affection, such a person does not descend

Back into another body, whatever their caste (jati) may be. || Jn. 9.411 ||

Though caste is not explicit in the Sanskrit verse, in Jnandev’s commentary the implications of caste within the verse are highlighted. While the Sanskrit text juxtaposes two words—sudurācā or “a very wicked person,” with sādhu, or “a virtuous person”—Jnandev, in his paraphrase, elaborates upon the word sudurācā by commenting upon jati or caste, an issue not explicit in the Sanskrit verse. The sense here is that anyone of any caste, even a lowly caste, will be saved. This interpretation of Jnandev’s first line of commentary is common through the tertiary commentarial tradition on the Jñāneśvarī, that is, in such contexts as pravacana and literary commentarial contexts where scholars and lecturers (pravacanakār) often quote this line. Indeed, when I have asked Jñāneśvarī experts, kirtankars, and pravacanakars about caste, it is often this line that is invoked to elaborate Jnandev’s position on the issue.¹⁹ My point here, however, is the correlation that Jnandev appears to make, that the quality of sudurācā, of being “wicked,” is a quality that people mistakenly relate to low-caste status. Jnandev is not declaring that low-caste people are “wicked”; he is stating that worshipping Krishna nullifies all such misconceptions. And, through this connection of quality and social position, Jnandev seizes an opportunity to critique a prejudice that may be lurking in the thoughts of his listeners. One gets the sense here that he is directing this correlation between the Sanskrit text and his Marathi commentary toward those individuals who may hold that an association exists between human value and caste status.

Jnandev concludes this section by introducing a new term to his text, the Sanskrit word antyaja, or “lowest born,” a term often used to refer to Shudras, low castes, and “Untouchables.”²⁰ The term is essentially one of comparison, with the “higher” born referring to the “twice-born” or dvija, signifying the first three varnas: Brahmin, Kshatriya, and Vaishya. As a comparative term, the meaning of antyaja/antyā is highly flexible. Jnandev declares in the voice of Krishna that all who approach Krishna with devotion will be saved, even if:

One’s family may not be high born (kula uttama); one’s birth (jati) might be of the lowest order (antyā),²¹ or one may even have had the bad luck to possess the body of an animal. || Jn. 9.437 ||

This crescendo of references to caste is finally met by its engagement in the same chapter of the Bhagavad Gītā in verse 32:

Son of Pritha [i.e., Arjuna], those who seek refuge in me, even those who come from evil wombs,

Or women, Vaishyas, even Shudras, they, too, go on the highest path. || BG 9.32 ||²²

Jnandev’s commentary on this verse reiterates the nature of the various sinful and lowly people who may yet approach Krishna.²³ As a way to illustrate the capacity of Krishna to accept devotees from all social worlds, Jnandev highlights the story of Prahlad in the commentary he provides, a demon who worshipped Vishnu, was persecuted for his faith, and is often associated with low-caste bhakti figures, especially those who are persecuted for their caste status or religious beliefs.²⁴ This devout demon occasioned the necessity of an avatar of Vishnu, Narasimha, or the “man-lion,” who descended to Earth to save his devotee. Extolling the virtues of Prahlad, Jnandev, in the voice of Krishna, says:

Therefore, family, jati, and varna, all these things are utterly inconsequential.

The only thing that matters, Arjuna, is me. || Jn. 9.452 ||

And four verses later, Jnandev states:

People are born with difference—Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, women, Shudras, or lower castes (antyādi) and even others—up until that time that they reach me. || Jn. 9.456 ||²⁵

Then castes (jati) and egoism dissolve like a crystal of salt into the sea

When they have the experience of joining me. || Jn. 9.457 ||

In the voice of Krishna, Jnandev describes how all castes and all types of people can come to him for refuge and are saved. Jnandev expands the Bhagavad Gītā’s reference to “women, Vaishyas, and Shudras” to also include, on one end, Kshatriyas, and on another, “antyā and even others.” This enumeration implies a Brahminic perspective, outlining a comprehensive survey of the non-Brahmin social category. But it also reveals a rejection of a Brahminic distinction of social being. Jnandev concludes by returning to rephrase the initial verse of the Bhagavad Gītā that inaugurated this portion of commentary:

Therefore, Arjuna, whether Vaishya, Shudra, a woman, or of mixed caste [lit. “womb of sin” or pāpayonī]

All such people, if they come to me with devotion, can abide with me. || Jn. 9.470 ||

Jnandev’s cosmic social ethics are clear, and it is also apparent how he derives these ethics from the Bhagavad Gītā. These verses typify the discourse about caste and gender most commonly associated with Jnandev in Marathi public culture, among devotees, and among most scholars of devotionalism in India in which Jnandev is considered a social reformer and a person who rejected differences of caste and gender in the sphere of bhakti. Jnandev believed social differences dissolve in Krishna, in the cosmic dharma, and therefore all social contexts collapse along the spiritual path of bhakti yoga. The concentration of such verses on caste and gender difference in chapter 9 tends to typify Jnandev’s ethics of social distinction and his rejection of social inequities in the face of cosmic reality. My own experience is that scholars and devotees in India and elsewhere regularly invoke chapter 9 and these verses to establish Jnandev’s social ethics, that is, to reveal Jnandev’s highly inclusive social ethics and his rejection of casteism and sexism.

The penultimate verse of this chapter of the Bhagavad Gītā returns to the question of social difference; it follows the logic of verse 32, in which we are told that the lowest of castes, and women, can approach Krishna for salvation. In verse 33 of chapter 9 of the Bhagavad Gītā, Krishna says:

How much more the pure Brahmins and the royal sages are devoted in this way!

When you have reached this unhappy realm, which perishes, become devoted to me. || BG 9.33 ||²⁶

Here Krishna reassures Arjuna that if lowly people as women, low castes, and “Untouchables” are saved, should they resort in bhakti to Krishna, then Arjuna has no need to worry about his own fate or that of his high-caste male fellows on the battlefield, all of whom are either “Brahmins” or “saintly kings.” It is a moment for Krishna to appeal to Arjuna’s “common sense,” which braids social normativity and theological logic. However, in Jnandev’s commentary on this verse he takes this opportunity to elaborate upon the glory of Brahmins in a fulsome, lengthy passage.²⁷ His laudatory language about Brahmins, presented in the midst of a theo-ethical explanation for why caste is ultimately irrelevant, is a peculiar intervention on Jnandev’s part, though it does not depart from the general heterogeneous Brahminic tenor of the Sanskrit Bhagavad Gītā itself.²⁸ Yet it is also emblematic of the dual meanings of such reflection on the various social differences that are dissolved in cosmic reality: for, in enumerating all such differences that are transcended, we have a recital of exactly those social differences that make up mundane, everyday life. Jnandev’s text, like the lives of the early Mahanbhavs recorded in the Līḷācaritra, must walk this line between a radical rejection of social difference and an accommodation of prevailing social norms. This line, I argue, is inherent in the ways in which the cosmic dharma of transcendence and essential unity of all things meets the dharma of complex social reality, the very problem at the heart of the Bhagavad Gītā’s narrative.

The idea that cosmic dharma transcends all social distinction is clear, yet so is the image of a world filled with social distinction. Up to this point, throughout the first half of the Jñāneśvarī, the cultural politics surrounding the transcendence of social distinction has involved recourse to arguments about cosmic dharma and the illusory nature of quotidian reality, even if similes drawn from everyday life have reinforced the power of this illusion of difference as it is expressed in the language of everyday life. Caste and gender are features of mundane existence, and those who can see beyond the mundane, to glimpse the cosmic, hold no such social distinctions in thought or practice. However, embedded in many of those passages just cited, and others throughout the text of both the Bhagavad Gītā and the Jñāneśvarī, is a paradox: while bhakti, utter devotion, provides a means to transcend social difference, it also simultaneously remains invested in normal quotidian life. Let us now turn to a discussion of how the tension between the cosmic and the quotidian unfolds in the politics of social difference, representing a sort of compromise between cosmic transcendence and the social mores of everyday life, mediate by the devotionalism at the core of both the Bhagavad Gītā and the Jñāneśvarī.

Social distinction and bhakti are intertwined in the Jñāneśvarī, both as a subject of critique and a subject of normative quotidian social order. Chapter 12 of the Bhagavad Gītā is chiefly concerned with the nature of bhakti. In general, ideas around devotion tend to proliferate in this latter portion of the Bhagavad Gītā as well as the Jñāneśvarī. In verses 6 to 7 in chapter 12 of the Bhagavad Gītā, Krishna describes the features of devotion that enable his devotees to fully reach him. These include surrendering the fruits of all actions to Krishna and being entirely absorbed in thinking of him. In response to these injunctions, Jnandev comments:

Those of the way of bhakti (bhaktipantha) are the ones who come to me [Krishna] happily

And perform their caste duties completely and wholeheartedly. || Jn. 12.76 ||

This verse elaborates upon the Bhagavad Gītā by suggesting that if one simply maintains the status quo of social convention, that is, keeps to the quotidian social mores of their world, yet does so by surrendering all such action to Krishna, then people from all stations of life are equal before God because they are judged by their “faith” not by their “birth.” In another sense, Jnandev is suggesting that, rather than be unhappy with one’s station in life, if a person can surrender this disquiet and accept his or her lot in life by offering up the sum of one’s actions in devotion to God, then he or she will be saved.

The sense here is that rejecting social distinctions in everyday life is something suitable only for those who have either understood the deep philosophical meanings of cosmic dharma (jnana yoga) or have undertaken the strenuous practices of renunciation while remaining in everyday life (karma yoga). However, for people who have done neither, or are not capable of either, the path of devotion (bhakti yoga) is the best option.

This passage links social distinction to bhakti explicitly and perhaps counterintuitively for some. It may seem ironic to a reader to see that it is precisely where we find an ample discourse that erases and undermines social distinction, in the field of bhakti, that we have a statement that seems to reinforce just those social distinctions, that appears to argue that caste distinction is an inherently good thing. Unlike the passages about caste and gender we have heard up to this point, which emphasized the illusory nature of social distinction, here, bhakti appears to enable caste and gender distinction and hierarchy or at least provide the means to abandon one’s attachment to one’s social status. Yet this moment is not ironic if one considers that, unlike the paths of jnana or “gnosis” and karma or “renunciation,” the mode of bhakti is inherently social or, rather, public, as I have argued here and elsewhere. If bhakti is the way to worship your deity socially, then it is likely to be the place where there are the most accommodations to social normativity coupled with challenges to that normative order. If bhakti is a social and public thing, then the thorny problems of sociality and public culture will be nestled within a discourse on bhakti.

Since the path of devotion is situated within everyday life, renouncing the norms of everyday life, of caste and gender in particular, is not possible in some contexts—the Līḷācaritra gave us ample demonstration of this problem. In the Jñāneśvarī we find a response to verse 10 of chapter 12 of the Bhagavad Gītā, where Jnandev expands upon the idea that if one does not have the natural ability to pursue the path of knowledge or study (abhyās), then one has another option: simple devotion to Krishna. Again, in this context, social distinctions appear to endure, as Jnandev advises, in the voice of Krishna:

Do not cordon off your senses; don’t cease your pleasures;

Do not curb your pride in your caste status (svajātī) || Jn. 12.115 ||

Here bhakti is not a yoga of the cosmic and transcendental, but the very human, practical, and ordinary and so perfectly suited for those who fully dwell within the realm of quotidian dharma. As the yoga or discipline best suited to the quotidian world, bhakti is also the path most likely to absorb one key feature of the quotidian world: social difference. And if this is the case—that the social vicissitudes of everyday life must become a theological and sociological problem in bhakti for these reasons—then it also follows that bhakti would be a premier subject of literary vernacularization. Bhakti, if it is a social form, as I have argued elsewhere, also mediates sociality itself.

The deep investment of vernacular bhakti in everyday life brings with it the imprint of ordinary social norms and hierarchies. After this particular discussion of bhakti and quotidian social mores, we have an interesting literary phenomenon: the noticeable rise in the text of Marathi colloquialisms that rely upon social difference for rhetorical effect. We have already seen some examples above, as we did in chapters 4 and 5. The Jñāneśvarī holds together the forces of its strident egalitarian theological ethics and its situation within a social world rife with distinction and difference. This is also why, though the Jñāneśvarī is filled with theology, philosophy, mythic stories, and humor, it is still considered primarily a bhakti text. I think this is so because its overarching construction is a social intervention: to bring the salvation of the Bhagavad Gītā to the common person. At the same time, it is not a text constructed from the rarefied nomenclature of high Sanskritic philosophy, but rather composed in the colloquial Marathi of the thirteenth century, in the language of a place and a time rife with social difference. A text of transcendence composed in the language of rich immanence—this is a discursive space tailor-made for social debate.

If we have seen, by and large, the rejection of caste and gender difference within the first half of the discursive frame of the Jñāneśvarī, it is in the latter half that social distinction is revealed implicitly in the colloquial Marathi Jnandev employs. And, in most cases, the use of these colloquial expressions of social inequality is metaphorical, in the service of explaining something other than social distinction. In the world of autochthonous language, high philosophy meets common idioms and a society’s values are etched therein.

Colloquialisms of Difference

While one essential lesson of the Jñāneśvarī is that social distinction is irrelevant to the machinations of cosmic dharma, the text conveys this message in the language of social distinction itself, that is, the language of the everyday, the vernacular, that meeting place between “Marathi” and “Maharashtra” that the Līḷācaritra articulated. The very nature of a “vernacular” is distinction, to be a language with a culture distinct by region, primarily, as well as other locational factors. And Jnandev envisions a theological sphere that is egalitarian, yet he, like us, lives in a world that is not. And from this unequal social world he draws the material for the explanatory similes and scenarios that enliven his composition. The language of everyday life is the art of discourse in the Jñāneśvarī, and this choice of language—this full embrace of the vernacular as a language deeply situated in the particulars of place and time—displays many of the social preconceptions of Jnandev’s age. I do not argue that what we see in Jnandev’s language is his prejudice—we have already seen that he does not believe in the distinctions of caste and gender, and his later biography will bear this out in his public memory. Jnandev’s position on social difference has been expressed very clearly in this chapter and in the preceding chapter of this book—he rejects caste and gender distinctions and is an advocate of social equity. What I will argue is that because Jnandev uses colloquial Marathi to express the salvational effects of the Sanskrit Bhagavad Gītā, some of the social inequity of his age is reflected in his medium. Jnandev calls upon Marathi colloquialisms in order to communicate his message to the general population and in this process, we can see the contours of the very social inequity that the early Mahanubhavs and Jnandev decry.

In chapter 13 of the Jñāneśvarī, caste is referenced through an interesting metaphor provided by Jnandev that draws from assumptions about social normalcy. Jnandev offers here a response to verse 8 of chapter 13 in the Bhagavad Gītā, where a rather fulsome list appears of positive attributes such as humility, nonviolence, simplicity, and so on.²⁹ Jnandev provides one of the longest commentarial passages of the Jñāneśvarī in elucidating this section. In response to the attribute of “cleanliness,” and perhaps as a prelude to his discussion of the attribute of “steadfastness,” Jnandev comments:

Even if a man is walking along the road and meets a pure woman (cokhī), or a Mahar [Untouchable] woman (Māhārī)

He touches (nātala) neither, remaining steadfast in his attention. || Jn. 13.478 ||

This passage is interesting for several reasons. The simplest reading is perhaps that a man of pure mind treats a high-caste woman and an “Untouchable” woman in the same way—he does not “touch,” that is, disturb, either one. There is some reason to accept this interpretation, because the term juxtaposed to Māhārī is cokhī or pure, thus the dialogical translation is “pure one” versus “impure one” by implications of caste normativity. Mahar, however, is not a word that means “impure” but rather is a jati name for an “Untouchable” caste. The word Māhārī simply means “a Mahar woman.” On the other hand, cokhī is an adjectival noun and makes no reference to the name of a caste. Given that Jnandev is elaborating upon the idea of “cleanliness,” one might expect that his invocation of the Mahar woman is meant to indicate a caste-based sense of impurity, thus signaling a particular reader or listener, one for whom contact with a Mahar woman would be considered impure. In other words, a “clean” man, a man of good manners, disturbs no woman, regardless of caste.

Some translators have associated the term Māhārī with the profession of prostitution,³⁰ even though neither Panse nor Velingakar in their glossaries of terms in the Jñāneśvarī give such a definition.³¹ However, the term prostitute does not capture the social context revealed in this verse—the man touches neither woman, after all, meaning that another man might touch either. The verse may draw some of its power from the prevailing prejudice in the thirteenth century that low-caste or “Untouchable” women were sexually available. In other words, there is not an exchange of money for sex, as in prostitution, but rather the assumption that a Māhārī is simply available, for sex, labor, or other things.³² This is not Jnandev’s prejudice—this idea would be repugnant to his social ethics. But I do think he is drawing from a common linguistic trope of Marathi in his time, and in this context Māhārī may appear as a euphemism for a sexually available woman. The effect of the passage is to argue that a man who is steadfast does not find himself attracted to any type of woman at all, and so the simplest reading of this passage is the most general even if it conveys a very specific set of ideas about caste and gender.

Jnandev earlier seems to use the feminine form of the name of another “Untouchable” community in the region, the Mangs, in a verse of chapter 3 where he means to indicate something similar.

[Desire (kāma) and anger (kroda)] have stripped peace of its goodness, then dressed up Maya as a Mang woman (Māṇgi).

Because of her [Maya], many holy men have been prone to pollution. || Jn. 3.246 ||³³

Here, as before, the feminine proper noun for a woman of an “Untouchable” caste, in this case the Mang caste, Māṇgi seems to be used as an index of something else, something negative, a disguise for the effects of “illusion” or Maya, the classic Indian philosophical idea that the phenomenal world hides the world of “ultimate truth” and often in a way that is filled with sense pleasure and distraction. Several scholars have translated the use of the proper noun Māṇgi to mean something like “prostitute” or “promiscuous,” suggesting that Maya or the personification of “illusion” takes the form of a beguiling female who “corrupts” holy men, distracting them from their pursuit of ultimate reality.³⁴ The implication here is that a Māṇgi would distract a male’s efforts at detachment and, importantly, celibacy. Caste, gender, and power are meld in such a colloquial use of Māṇgi, just as we have seen with Māhārī. Again, I do not think that this is Jnandev’s sentiment, but rather that of the colloquial Marathi of his age. But I sense here a very particular challenge that is hardly directed at Mangs or “Untouchables.” Instead, I get the impression that Jnandev is challenging tantric ascetics who use sex as part of their practice in which low-caste women often appear as essential. We saw a similar critique embedded in the story of Kamakhya’s attempt to seduce Changadev retold very early in the Līḷācaritra. Both the early Mahanubhavs and Jnandev of the Jñāneśvarī are highly influenced by Natha yoga, yet both appear to reject tantric yoga in their time.

Throughout the Jñāneśvarī caste and gender differences sometimes appear as features of a literary trope, a way for Jnandev to express through metaphor some other theological or philosophical issue. In such cases, the language of the quotidian—as we have seen, for example—registers prevailing social norms. Just as Brahmins are sometimes conceived to be gluttonous, ritualistic automatons in the Līḷācaritra, the Jñāneśvarī also observes certain stereotypes about caste and gender. Although an exposition of that norm is not the point of Jnandev’s analysis, yet we can look to such moments to recover the implications of language usage upon social normativity in Jnandev’s age.

One such example can be drawn from chapter 15, which engages caste only once, with reference to the term Chandal, a word for a “fierce Untouchable” that we have seen before. The reference appears in Jnandev’s elaboration of the second verse of this chapter of the Bhagavad Gītā, a verse that seeks to explain the cosmic evolution of the three primordial qualities (guna) of some Indian philosophy-cosmology systems, such as Samkhya. The Sanskrit verse discusses how these gunas or qualities manifest in the phenomenal world through a metaphor of a tree sending branches of different qualities in many directions. In a portion of the text where Jnandev engages the guna or quality of tamas or “sloth,” he offers these verses:

The root of bad actions grows rapidly over and over

And over and over, new roots spread widely. || Jn. 15.167 ||

Then Chandals and other lowly people, such defective births [become] many branches,

And they form a thicket that lures those who have become lax in their duties (karmabhraṣṭa). || Jn. 15.168 ||

The word Chandal, as we have seen, does not indicate an actual jati or varna, but appears to be—in Maharashtra of the thirteenth century—a term of abuse essentially meaning “outcaste” or someone who has strayed from social orthodoxy in some significant way. It is a term of abuse particularly among Brahmins, it seems, and so names a mythic or fictional “outcaste other” rather than an actual social group. The Chandal is often considered a kind of antipode to the “Brahmin” in a way that recalls the Buddhist injunction that all good people are “Brahmin” regardless, and indeed in spite of, their jati or varna.³⁵ Similarly, even Brahmins can be Chandals by action—as we have seen Prajnasagar and Mayata Hari point out in the Līḷācaritra. The term also indicates a general category of miscegenation and, by extension, of socially inappropriate intermixing. The idea here, of one bad action spawning others, is reminiscent of Arjuna’s first challenge to Krishna, that with the onset of civil war other aspects of society will descend into chaos. Though a term embedded in the matrix of caste is used, it is a feature of the theoretical typologies of varna and not the social ethnology of jati that is marked. Instead, we have a claim that bad actions promote yet more bad actions. In a section of the text on “qualities,” we must read this emphasis on how actions, compelled by one’s social ontology, determine the future. There is here the “law of karma” at work, and in such cases arguments about caste are never far behind.

The echo of the Buddhist critique of caste as a result of action not birth is heard again in chapter 16 of the Bhagavad Gītā, a text well aware of its Buddhist antagonists. The first three verses of the Bhagavad Gītā in this chapter enumerate all the qualities of one born with a divine nature. These qualities include fearlessness, purity, wisdom, charity, self-restraint, and so on. The text does not ascribe these positive qualities to any particular varna. The fourth verse, however, describes negative traits and cautions:

Son of Pritha [Arjuna], fraud, insolence, and hostile conceit; anger, rough speech too, and ignorance

These are the traits of those born to the demonic condition. || BG 16.4 ||³⁶

The set of three Sanskrit verses on the subject of the nature of good, plus one verse on the nature of the demonic, culminates in a fifth verse in which Krishna assures Arjuna that divine nature is the means of attaining “liberation” or moksha, whereas demonic nature is the cause of ensnarement in the world. Nowhere in these five Sanskrit verses of the Bhagavad Gītā is caste invoked explicitly, though the descriptions of those with a “divine” nature and those with a “demonic” nature have elsewhere been correlated to caste. Yet the absence of jati ascription is important, as it is with the designation Chandal, and this allows the Bhagavad Gītā its usual measure of hermeneutic possibilities.

In carrying the text’s meaning into Marathi, Jnandev invokes both caste and gender. He states:

[In society] there is a boundary between Brahmins, who are placed in the first position, and women and others (striyādika) on the other side,

And in the middle is everyone else according to the person’s rights. || Jn. 16.93 ||

Those religious practices (devatādhāma) that are of the highest devotional value³⁷

They are the rituals enacted in orthodox ways. || Jn. 16.94 ||

Just as the twice-born perform the required six sacraments, just so the Shudra is expected to honor (namaskārī) the Brahmin

And thus both equally should receive the fruits of this offering (yāgu) || Jn. 16.95 ||

Coming toward the end of Jnandev’s commentary on the Bhagavad Gītā as a whole, this set of three verses serves as a summation for a general view of caste as the social order of dharma as opposed to its cosmic order. These passages suggest that caste serves to regulate society. Jnandev often reiterates that performing one’s caste duties, with benevolence from all quarters, provides an ideal social dharmic scenario. This is an idea found regularly in dharmic texts for at least two thousand years, from its early articulations in the Bhagavad Gītā and Dharma Śāstra literature to the ideas of many of India’s key nationalist leaders, including B. G. Tilak and M. K. Gandhi. It is an idea prominently expressed in the Caturvarga Cintāmani of Hemadri and, by extension, in the social science discourse of the Yadava century and the Brahminic ecumene. Caste is not exploitation, this point of view suggests, but social regulation. Higher castes, if they go outside the bounds of their own duties, exploit lower castes; and lower castes, if they refuse to undertake their traditional duties, disrupt social order. But if all castes benevolently undertake their prescribed duties, society is in harmonious and dharmic equilibrium. The word for this sense of collective social responsibility is distilled in the word yāgu, meaning “sacrifice” and it echoes the idea of an actual ritualistic sacrifice accruing benefit to the sacrificer or patron (very specifically the Vedic sacrifice, the preeminent activity of the ancient Brahmin). In this case the Brahmin and Shudra are considered “patrons” in the same sacrifice; they each have a role to play, and if both do their duties both receive the benefits of that sacrifice. Sacrifice here is a metaphor for a highly Brahminically oriented notion of society. Here the sacrifice itself is doing one’s duty in the world, in quotidian life.

One can also see a particular hierarchy ascribed to this sacrifice. The Brahmin’s duty is toward God and sacred rites; the Shudra’s duty is toward the Brahmin. The duty of the Brahmin is otherworldly; the duty of the Shudra is this-worldly and circumscribed by sociality. The idea expressed here is as old as the “caste system” itself and is deeply embedded in the politics of social organization, from the family to the village to the town and city, and it undergirds practices like jajmani and baluta.³⁸ As we have seen throughout the text, this proclamation is a description of everyday life, not a prescription made by Jnandev. It is, after all, the striyādika—the “women and others”—for whom he has composed the Jñāneśvarī; Jnandev is unmistakeably their advocate. And yet we see this prevailing notion of caste normativity—so stridently rejected by modern activists and social critics, such as Ambedkar and Periyar and others—evince its deep roots here. We should notice that Jnandev’s commentary follows the idea of extrapolating the meaning of “sacrifice” from the context of the Vedic sacrifice very specifically, which is to say, of orthodox Brahminic worldviews. And we have already seen Jnandev’s critique of the “miserly” and exclusive nature of the Vedas. It would be wrong to understand that Jnandev here is expressing his own views on the order of society, and yet we have through him a familiar idealization of Brahminic social normativity, just the kind of thing Chakradhar called adhamatva or “vileness” in the Līḷācaritra, a position Jnandev, in most parts of the Jñāneśvarī and certainly in his later hagiography, shares with Chakradhar. This passage powerfully reminds us of the prevailing social orthodoxies of Jnandev’s age, even if it does not capture the capacious social ethics Jnandev asserts almost everywhere else in his text.

The final invocation of caste in chapter 16 of the Jñāneśvarī occurs at the beginning of a series of metaphors elaborating upon the second verse of this chapter of the Bhagavad Gītā and in particular expressing the sentiment of humility and shame. Jnandev discusses such sentiments as inherent in a king who experiences defeat or a proud person humbled by failure. Jnandev writes of something like shame:

Just as a renunciate would feel tremendous anxiety

If a group of Chandals came near with wine and women…|| Jn. 16.175 ||

The example of the renunciate is interesting because he is supposed to be beyond all social difference; he is presumably one of the wise ones in Jnandev’s elaboration of chapters 5 and 9, one who sees through the illusion of caste and gender difference, a person who has surpassed the veneer of social dharma. So why the anxiety when a group of Chandals comes by? And why the association of Chandals with “wine and women”?

This passage conveys a sense of the temptations of the phenomenal world and particularly its sensual pleasures. The association with the term Chandal implies an association with sexual availability and lax moral standards, the Chandal signaling the result of moral decrepitude. I think Jnandev’s hypothetical renunciate here is embarrassed not simply because he has come upon Chandals with wine and women in tow, but because of the sexual improprieties that might occur to him, that might tempt him away from his resolutions as a renunciate. Furthermore, as we have seen, the term Chandal is typological, not ethnologically specific. In other words, a Chandal here could very well be a Brahmin—anyone who behaves in an antinomian way. One is reminded here of the novel Saṃskāra by U. R. Ananthamurthy (1979) where a Brahmin in a small village rejects the rules of caste—by eating meat (including the sacred fish from the temple’s fish tank) and taking a low-caste woman as his partner—and upon his death a debate ensues about how to treat him, as a Brahmin or an outcaste, essentially a Chandal, and thus how to carry out his funeral rites.³⁹ The figure of the Chandal with “wine and women” is an abstract representation of the temptations that can unsettle quotidian social order, and it resonates with images of the antinomian Tantrika. The term lāja, used in the passage for “anxiety,” is more apt to describe this sort of potential sentiment. As with the stories of a sage dreaming he has been born an “Untouchable,” this story of a holy person accidentally encountering Chandals is ambivalent on questions of caste difference, allowing several interpretations, which the oral tradition of exposition, or pravacana, may liberally undertake. Of course, the force of the insult implies a pernicious casteism within Yadava society in general, but the power of the word here is metaphorical, even if likely directed at high- or middle-caste people.

Chapter 17 invokes caste in various metaphorical elaborations. This chapter of the Bhagavad Gītā involves a return to the discussion of how the three gunas or qualities mingle to create individual beings, which in turn can be classified according to a strict typology of essential difference. While this seems a natural place for a discussion of varna in particular to emerge, the text of the Bhagavad Gītā does not discuss varna or caste in any other way directly. But the three-plus-one division of society in the varna categories is implied throughout the text of the Bhagavad Gītā. This chapter also discusses sacrifice, food, and many other aspects of the social and phenomenal world, but caste is certainly an important subtext, especially in the first few Sanskrit verses. And Jnandev’s interpretations of this section bear greatly on the question of caste in the text.

Chapter 17 of the Bhagavad Gītā begins with Arjuna asking if faith alone, aside from scriptural knowledge, is useful or sufficient along the path of dharma. Though Krishna’s response simply details three types of faith, Jnandev’s commentary enters a slightly different subject. Jnandev, in the voice of Krishna, describes how faith alone is insufficient; in addition, one must conform to social norms and customs and see that one’s actions have repercussions:

Don’t hold to faith alone, O Arjuna, for does not a twice-born rubbing elbows (ghṛṣti) with a lower caste (antyaju)

Himself become a lower caste? || Jn. 17.51 ||

Think about it: Would Ganga water be just as pure if poured from a liquor bottle? || Jn. 17.52 ||

Jnandev’s point here is that one cannot simply have faith, but one must also mind one’s social interactions, for the phenomenal everyday world is also self-defining: you may possess an imperishable spirit, but in this quotidian world you are a particular kind of person. You must obey the rules of social dharma, otherwise suffer the effects. What is implied here is the transference of qualities through a system of purity that moves downward; what is stressed here is that a pure thing can become impure—though the converse, how an impure thing might be purified by association with purer objects, is not addressed. Though metaphors of caste and Ganga water are both used to express this point about “faith” in lieu of righteous action, the two features of this metaphorical passage are both meant to indicate something about “purity” in general within the social realm. The space for radical social action is the sphere of otherworldly salvation. And like Chakradhar among the Mahanubhavs, Jnandev carefully delineates the necessities of salvation and the necessities of common social interaction. As with other metaphors that invoke social order, this one gestures toward caste divisions of society based on birth, but also on actions.

The question of purity in the social and phenomenal world is a preoccupation of this chapter of the Jñāneśvarī and provides one further reference to caste. Verse 6 in chapter 17 of the Bhagavad Gītā discusses the “demonic” nature of people who senselessly torture their bodies through austerities or simply cause misery to themselves and thus the divine “Self” or atman—all of which appear as references to the kinds of tantric practices that both Jnandev and Chakradhar reject, hints at which we have seen above in at least two places. Jnandev adds that Krishna has mentioned these kinds of people so that the reader or listener can avoid them. This elaboration is given:

Just as a corpse must be placed outside the home, one should avoid chit-chat with a lower caste (antya).⁴⁰

Doesn’t one wash one’s hands when they are dirty? || Jn. 17.106 ||

The reference to both a corpse and an “Untouchable” conjures images of a severe left-handed tantra, where corpses, graveyards, and “Untouchables” are featured as essential elements of certain practices. However, these references are placed within quotidian life: the death of a family member or an encounter with a person of a lower caste out in public. Clearly, we have a point of view expressed from the Brahminic ecumene—from the cultural sphere of high-caste people—presented as a question of social propriety in Jnandev’s quotidian world. Jnandev invokes the habitus of everyday life, noting that, just as one washes one’s hands, one removes a corpse from one’s home and avoids contact, even conversation, with “a lower caste.” But this is the habitus of the high-caste world specifically. Since we know that Jnandev wants antyaja (as in “women, low castes, and others”), among others, to hear the Jñāneśvarī, this sort of statement may seem incongruous.

The sahitya, the literary sphere that Jnandev seeks to enter and expand, to make more public, is not fully participatory, which is, of course, the norm even today—the modern literary sphere, as the modern public sphere, is highly restrictive, though in principle both are open to be passively received. The metaphors of impurity here function in a public culture that shares an understanding of the underlining social dictates of “purity” as a physical substance, adhering in normal social circumstances, of which Jnandev’s examples are illustrative. If the public sphere of modern secular democracies (like that of the U.S. or of India) tends to select participation by class,⁴¹ then the emergent corollary of Jnandev’s age is a sphere that selects by purity, in a sense, which is also a restriction by caste and gender. What this says about the relationship between “twice-born” and the “lower castes” is perhaps nothing more than what passed as social “common sense” in the Yadava century.

No mention of caste is made again in this chapter until Jnandev offers a commentary to verse 22 of chapter 17 of the Bhagavad Gītā toward the chapter’s end. This is a verse that warns against giving alms to people who are not deserving and giving alms begrudgingly, both of which Krishna identifies as features of tamas, the guna associated with negativity. The corresponding set of verses in the Jñāneśvarī has served some historians and scholars as a snapshot of public life during the late Yadava period. Indeed, historians have mined the Jñāneśvarī, as well as the texts of the Mahanubhavs and songs associated with the earliest Varkari sant poets, for such portraits of everyday life from this period.

In this section Jnandev diegetically locates his listener within an urban area. We hear of money and goods given as “alms” in potentially iniquitous contexts to people of uncertain moral character, it seems: among bards, jugglers, prostitutes, gamblers, sorcerers, and barbarians (mleccha), particularly in town squares, military camps, and markets. Here is a translation of these verses in full:

In the regions of the foreigners (mleccha),⁴² in the mountains,

In the tribal forests, in the military camps, and in the street-corner markets in town (cohaṭā) || Jn. 17.293 ||

In all such locations, any time, day or night,

You can find the magnificent plunder (coriya) of deception. || Jn. 17.294 ||

Actors, bards, snake-charmers, prostitutes, and gamblers—

They seduce as the very form of delusion. || Jn. 17.295 ||

Beautiful dancing enhances [the delusion], a feast for the eyes,

While songs of praise are whispered continuously into the ears. || Jn. 17.296 ||

In addition to these trifles, floral fragrance wafts about,

Then the specter of confusion appears. || Jn. 17.297 ||

In this total conquest of the world there are great spoils,

As if a Matang were giving away free food. || Jn. 17.297+ ||⁴³

Jnandev draws us into his urban area by beginning with the space beyond the borders of Maharashtra, it seems, and his reference to the regions inhabited by Muslims may very well be the Ghurid line of northern India, which was then moving closer toward Maharashtra. The term here for “foreigner,” mleccha, usually means “Muslim” and may suggest the emergent Sultanate power to the north of the Yadava realm, beyond the Vindhya Mountains, a natural barrier between northern India and western and southern India that would be crossed by Khilji’s armies within a few years of the Jñāneśvarī’s date of composition. This passage invokes a geography of perceived sedition that draws us from the regions of “the foreigner” to the urban core of commerce and public society. The progression of that text’s geography—from the mountains, to outlying tribal regions, to forests that surround an urban area, to military encampments that skirt a city, and then into the town core itself—all moves us deeper into urbanity. And so we arrive within the first verse at a familiar place: the town square market. We are then given a description of something like the “nightlife” or even the red-light district of such an urban area, a place filled with distractions, intoxicants, and moral dangers. While it is the urban that contains the allures Jnandev highlights here, urbanity or nāgarapaṇe is also invoked by him in more positive contexts—this may be his “City of Marathi,” but dystopically represented. This passage seems to carry both a literal warning about the allures of the city, but also the heft of a metaphor about the kinds of illusory distractions that Jnandev has highlighted elsewhere. It is as if he wants his “City of Marathi” to challenge and reform the city he depicts here. Jnandev seems to emphasize that in these urban locations one loses one’s sense of self and propriety in the context of what he calls “ill-gotten gains” and “spoils”—the services of pleasure and their exchange.

The rich metaphors Jnandev weaves here are aimed at making a point about giving money and goods for charity that follows the Sanskrit Bhagavad Gītā verse in arguing that charity given without the proper intention, without conscious discernment, is wrong. In this passage Jnandev warns that in the morally ambiguous places he describes one will be beguiled and compelled to give out money to those who do not deserve it. The recipients of charity here are not the needy or the spiritually heroic but another cast of characters entirely.

I am particularly interested in the verse that concludes this metaphorical section in the text. In this verse Jnandev epitomizes the “conquest of the world” by describing a Matang giving out free food for Brahmins, holy men, and the poor. The metaphor of a free public service of food is something we have seen before: we have noted the verse in chapter 18 of the Jñāneśvarī where Jnandev equates the benefits of reading the Bhagavad Gītā with those accruing to a wealthy person who freely distributes food to others.⁴⁴ The term in both contexts is the word gavandi. As mentioned earlier, a gavandi is generally a good thing, an act of generosity. Indeed, this is exactly how Jnandev uses the term in chapter 18, indicating that the Bhagavad Gītā is like a gavandi that gives out brahman or “The Universal Truth,” freely and to all. However, here, one chapter earlier in the Jñāneśvarī, this same metaphor of the gavandi typifies the very degradation of dharma. How can we read this iteration of the metaphor of the gavandi?

Some scholars have appeared to relate the figure of the Matang here to the idea of theft, choosing to interpret the final lines of the section as indicating that the Matang, like the other figures, seeks to “rob” someone of something, making his gavandi an ironic one—not the distribution of free nourishment but the acquisition of something ill-gotten.⁴⁵ This is likely a reading of the word coriya to mean “theft.” The interpretation of the word as indicating “theft” may also be related to a historical prejudice about Matangs. In the colonial period, British ethnology classified the Matang jati as a “Notified Caste,” a caste the colonial government associated with criminality. This was not merely the invention of the British, but was a long-standing prejudice. The caste designation Matang has conveyed some sense of suspected “thief” in the modern reception of the Jñāneśvarī. For example, Dandekar, in the glossary for the critical edition of the Jñāneśvarī, provides the definition of Matang not as a name of a jati but rather as cora or “thief.”⁴⁶ Recall how in chapter 4 a group of thieves offered to guide Chakradhar through the “Untouchable” neighborhood because, they claimed, that neighborhood was “full of thieves.”⁴⁷ The association between low caste and theft seems apparent. And so this verse is read by some to state that the height of moral decrepitude is exemplified at the moment when a thief gives out food as charity. Or, another way to put it: a Matang who freely distributes food is somehow “robbing” the world of something—the Matang, giving away food, is construed as a “thief.” The “theft” in this sense, as Dandekar likely reads it, involves the ritual impurity of food being distributed by an “Untouchable.”

I do not think this reading is right, however. Given the great weight Jnandev has placed on freely distributing the salvational words of the Bhagavad Gītā to those who cannot access it, and especially to someone like the Matang person mentioned here, the idea that the Matang would be a thief seems to me contrary to Jnandev’s ethics. I believe this passage communicates the negative inversion of the flow of benevolence, the result of the “deception” or misapprehension of reality by those invested in the sensual and quotidian world. A gavandi should serve those in need, not the other way around. I think Jnandev is expressing the idea that it would be the opposite of charity to require that a figure of abjection in a world of caste inequity, here a Matang, be distributing free food to others. Such a sight would be one’s indication that one inhabited a world of illusion and deception, an inversion of the generosity implied in the gavandi. The gavandi, recall, will become Jnandev’s metaphor for the Bhagavad Gītā, rendered intelligible through the Jñāneśvarī, and thus a gift of “alms” to all people, but especially to “women, low castes, and others.” The Matang is arguable the figure of Jnandev’s ethical mission, of his gavandi through the Jñāneśvarī; the metaphor given here reverses this relationship.

If my reading is correct, then we can see this metaphor’s position on caste distinction as a problem situated within the quotidian world. The urban descriptions here, the menu of sense pleasures of the city, are the locations of the everyday. It is in this context that Jnandev introduces his own text and his own social ethics, and he will also invoke the same metaphor of the gavandi in chapter 18,⁴⁸ as mentioned, but in a positive context. Here, in this inverted ethical world, Jnandev appears to express the vulnerability of the Matang, the way in which the quotidian world constructs the social relationships that have created “Untouchability” itself. The metaphor of a Matang giving away free food is an inversion of the egalitarian message of the text, but it is also a possibility in the sphere of the “ordinary” where action is determined by choice and decision, by discernment, the faculty Jnandev seeks to cultivate here in his listener.

The metaphor of a Matang giving out free food may have resonance with rules of commensality and perhaps even be a precursor to the problems of the “public restaurant,” of not knowing who prepared one’s food or how it was prepared. Yet this is not an indictment of the Matang, but of the society that inverts its proper ethics, a society in the midst of the “age of misfortune,” the Kali Yuga, which is explicitly where Jnandev locates his text. And this critique of social ethics is the very reason for the Jñāneśvarī to exist. The Matang here is not a “thief”; rather, he has long been the victim of a theft—kept from the salvational message of the Bhagavad Gītā—and it is Jnandev’s social ethics that returns to him his right to hear this text. While this passage, like others, has the effect of reminding the listener of the quotidian rules of social order, it also challenges an interpretation that might engender a new perspective. Jnandev’s text, itself described as a gavandi in chapter 18 of the Jñāneśvarī, freely gives out “the bliss of liberation” to all within the world of samsara, of everyday life. In chapter 17 too we have samsara, but viewed through a different lens, configured as a world of dharmic dystopia. This passage, with its highly colloquial and detailed description of urban public pleasure, draws together several senses of the “vernacular”: the particularities of place, language, and culture, but also of social practice gone wrong. Jnandev’s unique challenge to this social inversion is apparent as the Jñāneśvarī comes to a close.

The Jñāneśvarī’s Last Words

The Jñāneśvarī concludes with two distinct parts: a penultimate section that contains a prayer for a “gift for grace,” called the Pasāyadān, and finally a colophon.⁴⁹ The nine verses of the Pasāyadān are often extracted from the Jñāneśvarī as a kind of stand-alone “prayer,” or “the gift of grace,” the literal meaning of the word in Old Marathi.⁵⁰ Though this section says nothing explicitly about Marathi or social equality, it is often cited as a prime example of Jnandev’s humanism tied to his literary effort and is for many Marathi speakers the original moment of Marathi humanism in general.⁵¹ Often when I have raised the question of “caste” and “social justice” with Jñāneśvarī scholars and pravacanakars, they have invoked this section of the Jñāneśvarī as a representation of Jnandev’s social egalitarianism as it relates to the rationale for the creation of the Jñāneśvarī in Marathi. Given how directly and consistently this penultimate section of the text is raised by people in discussion in public contexts, in writing and scholarship, and in the modern Indian public sphere in Marathi, I feel it contains a key sentiment relevant to our exploration of an emergent public debate about social justice as revealed in this text and time.

The Pasāyadān displays an ethics that we have seen in this chapter and the preceding one, a moral sentiment intimately tied to the use of Marathi as a language of public culture in the dissemination of spiritual, philosophical, and religious materials to a general population of listeners disenfranchised by the social restrictions in which they live. And so the Pasāyadān carries the weight of a primary statement of the overriding idealist and humanist impulse of the Jñāneśvarī. Many Maharashtrians, including those who may never have read or heard the Jñāneśvarī, may know this prayer as a composition in its own right.⁵² Indeed, the Pasāyadān is a central text of Maharashtrian identity itself. For example, the Pasāyadān (rather than the Jñāneśvarī in its entirety) for decades has been on the standard syllabus of the Maharashtra State Board of Secondary and Higher Education.⁵³ Here is my rendering of it:

“May God, the Universal Self, be satisfied by this offering of words

And because of this satisfaction, may he bless me with the gift of his grace. || Jn. 18.1772 ||

May the wicked drop their crooked acts and may they desire to keep good company.

May a sense of friendship develop mutually among all beings. || Jn. 18.1773 ||

May the darkness of sin be dispelled, and may we see the rise of personal responsibility (svadharma) in the world.

May all living beings attain whatever they desire. || Jn. 18.1774 ||

May the Lord’s affection fall like a torrential rain

And bring together all beings upon the earth in ceaseless company with auspicious souls || Jn. 18.1775 ||

Who exist like a grove of wish-granting trees, like an array of wish-granting gems,

With words like a sea of nectar. || Jn. 18.1776 ||

Like unblemished moons, like suns that never burn away

May those good people remain kin to all forever. || Jn. 18.1777 ||

Throughout the three worlds, let there be complete happiness

And may all perpetually praise the Ultimate Lord. || Jn. 18.1778 ||

And may those who live according to this text [the Bhagavad Gītā] in this extraordinary world

Have the same victorious dialogue [with God] that Arjuna had.” || 18.1779 ||

Then the Lord of the Universe [Nivritti] says, “This gift of grace will be given.”

Upon hearing this Jnandev was content. || 18.1780 ||

The last invocation reveals the capacious social ethics of vernacularization in the Pasāyadān and throughout the Jñāneśvarī and also highlights the prevailing cultural politics of such access within the time of the text’s creation. Though, we are told, the “text” by which all should live is the Bhagavad Gītā, the medium through which all people might understand that text is the Jñāneśvarī. The “gift of grace” that Jnandev ultimately requests from his guru is the permission to complete and transmit the Jñāneśvarī in Marathi: the “gift of grace” is the Jñāneśvarī itself. This is a prayer for all people, but it is also a final request for the transference of charisma from the Bhagavad Gītā to the Jñāneśvarī, from Sanskrit to Marathi, a prayer for the power of the vernacular to transcend social boundaries. The echoes of a humanistic impulse are clear as Jnandev invokes a desire for the common, moral good of society, and the idea that enforcing this moral good is the individual duty of all. A prayer for a vernacular world of mutually intelligible debate about the common good ends the Jñāneśvarī.

With the Pasāyadān, the Jñāneśvarī reaches its narrative conclusion and closes the dialogic, diegetic frame of the text. What follows is the final portion of the text, the colophon, in the voice not of Jnandev but of Satchidananda, Jnandev’s “scribe,” who has written down Jnandev’s oral literary performance, his hybrid of a granth or book and a kirtan or performance, literally, an oral-performative text. Here is the colophon:

In this age of strife and in the region of Maharashtra (mahārāṣṭramaṇḍlīṃ)

Along the southern bank of the Godavari River || Jn. 18.1781 ||

Purest in the world, eternal, like Varanasi,⁵⁴

The lifeline of the Universe, the Goddess Shri Mahalasa, dwells.⁵⁵ || Jn. 18.1782 ||

[In Maharashtra], where all arts flourish, resides the descendant of the moon dynasty [i.e., the Yadavas],

Who rules justly, nourishing the land, [King] Shri Ramachandra, || Jn. 18.1783 ||

There too Jnandev, the disciple of Nivritti Natha, in the lineage of Mahesha [Shiva]

Ornamented the Bhagavad Gītā with Marathi. || Jn. 18.1784 ||

Thus, in the text of the [Maha-]Bharata, in the famous chapter called “Bhishma,”

A beautiful dialogue was held between Arjuna and Krishna. || Jn. 18.1785 ||

That dialogue is the essence of the Upanishads, which is the maternal home of all sciences (śāstra),

And which is like the lake [water] the Great Swans imbibe.⁵⁶ || Jn. 18.1786 ||

“Here, at the pinnacle of the Bhagavad Gītā, the Eighteenth Chapter is complete.”

Thus says Jnandev, disciple of Nivritti. || Jn. 18.1787 ||

Again, and again, and again, may a wealth of merit from this book |

Bring all happiness to all beings. || Jn. 18.1788 ||

In Shake 1212 [1290 CE] Jnandev composed this commentary. |

Satchidananda Baba, with great reverence, was his scribe. || Jn. 18.1792 ||⁵⁷

This colophon gives us important information. The exact details it provides, in terms of date, location, and personnel, serve to reinforce the text’s historicality, locality, and language—colophons like this one serve as their own devices of vernacularization, of rooting a text in time and place. Unlike the Līḷācaritra, which makes great efforts at self-referential historicity through its form of literary realism, the Jñāneśvarī’s only explicit historical anchor, other than the language of the text itself, is in this colophon. This is a text that seeks to be philosophically enduring, conveying historical specificity as its conclusion.⁵⁸

We hear the name and the praises of the Yadava king, Ramachandra, for example, which gives us political historical time and political geography. However, this does not indicate that Ramachandra actively supported the production of this text, or was even aware of it. Rather, it was a matter of social etiquette for an author to praise his ruler; I think the inclusion of this “vote of thanks” represents that kind of literary decorum, but not more than this. No stories accompany Jnandev that suggest he was either persecuted by Ramachandra or supported by him, but simply that Jnandev lived and composed during Ramachandra’s reign. If we consider that the story of Chakradhar’s purported trial was known in Jnandev’s time, we might also imagine such a statement as a desire to register a gratitude that might inoculate one against the anger of a king. Whether or not Jnandev knew of Chakradhar is a topic too large to enter into here and one that has been examined by others.⁵⁹

Politically, we can see these two texts as significantly different. Where the Mahanubhav texts reveal a religious sect extracting itself from political life—rejecting opportunities for royal largess, avoiding court figures, countermanding the orthodoxies of the Brahminic ecumene—we see in Jnandev’s text a desire to praise or perhaps even placate the current Yadava ruler. While this does not imply any sort of support from the king, it does locate this text within the general field of conventional public culture rather than afoul of the normative social world of the Yadava century. Importantly, it links this message, passively, but attentively, to the political structure of the age, referring to itself—the Jñāneśvarī, that is—as within the ambit of the benevolence Ramachandra shows toward “art.” The colophon indexes something like the gap that Habermas identifies as the space filled, in part, by the modern public sphere. The Jñāneśvarī intercedes between the “state”—the royal sovereign and his field of power—and the world of everyday life. This field of everyday life in the region of the Yadava dynasty is here referred to by the phrase mahārāṣṭramaṇḍla. We should read this term in relation to the invocation of Maharashtra in the Līḷācaritra (as a linguistic, cultural, and political region) and in the inscriptions studied in chapter 2 around the term marāṭhe (a community designation that combines the meanings of linguistic, cultural, and political region with the idea of devotion to Vitthal). Here we have a third, and unique, iteration. The geographic, political, and linguistic zone named Maharashtra is described as a mandal. This word indicates social organization primarily, but carries the sense of a familiar community. Though it can be used to designate geography, the sense here is not “territory,” but a unit organized as a cohesive social entity, a social field.⁶⁰ The term indicates a community bounded by something more than terrain; it indicates a community unified by language.⁶¹ The mandal is a linguistic and now literary sphere into which Jnandev speaks.

Immanuel Kant, some five hundred years later, will speak into the emergent public sphere of Prussia in his response to the question, “What is enlightenment?,” and he will exhort his reader to “dare to think” but also “to obey.” Here, similarly, Jnandev challenges his listener to dare to think beyond the orthodoxies of the Brahminic ecumene and even of normal everyday life; yet his obeisance to Ramachandra, like Kant’s to Frederic the Great, also remains within the structures of social and political order. Like Kant, Jnandev seems to say that one must press at the boundaries of thought, but remain within the confines of normal social order. How can we describe Jnandev’s radical ethics, confined as they are by the constraints of his quotidian world?

The field of the vernacular—if it is the field of the quotidian, as I have argued—always imports its cultural orientations into its representations of language, but also of images and in other forms. The vernacular sphere is already a field of context and uncertainty, and, as such, it is a field of constant social debate. In the Jñāneśvarī, vernacularization has a double valence: it is radical in challenging a perceived Sanskrit hegemony over a salvational text like the Bhagavad Gītā, and yet it must embrace the “ordinary” as it returns to the cultural and literary field of everyday life where social distinction is endemic and deeply rooted.

In discussions I have had with pravacankars and others who expound the Jñāneśvarī, the ultimate evidence of Jnandev’s challenge to traditional social orders in society, and his apparently “anti-Brahminic” perspective, is exemplified by the simple fact that he took a sacred Sanskrit text—available only to those rare high-caste males who could read or understand Sanskrit—and transformed it into a literary work in Marathi for the benefit of all, irrespective of caste or gender. For them, whatever else Jnandev may say about caste or particular jatis in his text, whatever artifacts of colloquial Marathi of his age might indicate about social distinctions, the fact of the text itself is an indisputable witness to his egalitarian social ethics.

The reigning literary subject of the Yadava century, as we have seen, was Dharma Śāstra, orthodox Brahminic rules about correct social behavior and order. Even Hemadri, in his Sanskrit text about the correct order of society, his Caturvarga Cintāmaṇi, sought to supply a set of rules for the structure of everyday life that he expected would be enacted by women, low castes, and others. That is, like Jnandev, Hemadri also wrote a text “for the people,” though in a language entirely inaccessible to that population.⁶² To whatever degree the Jñāneśvarī is “conservative” or “radical” on the question of social distinction, the very fact that the text is on dharma, within a Brahminic ecumene obsessed with producing dharmic treatises, and yet not in Sanskrit, the lingua franca of such works in the period, is itself radical. Rather than take up a novel subject in an old language, Jnandev has taken up an old subject in a new one, and a politics must surround such a choice. Furthermore, Jnandev, as we have seen, describes his text as a dharma kirtan,⁶³ a public performance of dharma rather than a written “social science” text situated within the rarefied field of other such texts. How can we understand this ethical impulse that seeks to balance an unequivocal commitment to sharing a salvational message to all people with a careful modulation of the social effects of this idea?

I propose the concept of “sonic equality” as a description of the core of Jnandev’s social ethics. Jnandev demands an unfettered field of sonic access to the Bhagavad Gītā, which requires both that the Sanskrit text be transferred to Marathi and that its meaning be explained in familiar, colloquial Marathi terms. At the same time, this text must be primarily oral or performative, though its preservation and perpetuation—clearly demonstrated by the scribe Satchidananda—requires also that it be written. Yet the medium of communication is clearly orality—the text should “enter the ears,” as Jnandev informs us.

What is not fully present here is an unequivocal critique of all social inequity and an invitation to new social forms of organization. Though the Līḷācaritra does express this idea, it is also confined, in this case to the field of Mahanubhav initiates. In both the Jñāneśvarī and the Līḷācaritra we see social radicalism and social conservativism, a dialectic the texts try to balance. However, as we turn to the conclusion of this book we will see that the seed of sonic equality that is remembered, to be planted in the Jñāneśvarī by Jnandev, transforms into a discourse of social equality in the centuries after his life, when a set of sants and hagiographers will assume stewardship of Jnandev’s public memory and portray him as a man who undergoes a significant social transformation, who comes to not only embrace but champion a full social egalitarianism. This portrayal of a shift from sonic equality to full social equality is premised on Jnandev’s revolutionary act of vernacularization, his creation of the magisterial Jñāneśvarī. Though Jnandev does not fully dissolve the boundaries of social segregation in his text, he enables the vision of such a possibility by participating in a new discourse in Marathi about social critique. I see the rudimentary elements of a public debate about social equality emerge here in the swirl of this engagement, and there is no limit to the subjects it might embrace. Jnandev and the early Mahanubhavs are the progenitors of this humanist horizon and of the quotidian revolution as it slowly unfolds in the centuries to come.

The sonic equality of the Jñāneśvarī sits alongside the colloquialisms of inequality that populate the speech of thirteenth-century Marathi. On the one hand, we have a text that is marked by egalitarianism, constructed from the impulse for universal access, and dedicated to the spiritually disenfranchised. On the other hand, the text registers social distinction as a key feature of the aesthetic of the vernacular. The process of vernacularization limits egalitarian possibilities, even while it opens up other opportunities. The everyday is the place where patriarchy and casteism sit alongside the sonic equality that Jnandev champions and the seeds of social equality to come. A text that challenges social privilege and asymmetries of power is also a text that registers this inequity as normative. Vernacularization both confronts casteism and sexism in one realm and reinforces it another.

Here we see a cultural political process inherent in vernacularization, an unbounded dialectic of resolving difference and reproducing difference continuously along the plane of the everyday. This forms the very core of any public sphere, a field of debate in public contexts about vital social questions, about the “common good.” Arriving at this common good, as the frog in the well discovered, is a halting path toward an uncertain goal. The quotidian revolution moves slowly because it contains within it both immanent critique and immanent contradiction. The debates of the public sphere usually contain some idea of a social world more capacious than the one in which the debate is occurring—in other words, by engendering a discussion of the future, the debate also precedes social change. This stimulates the effort to resolve difference in the context of the very distinction under debate, yet simultaneously compels new problems and sites of conflict to arise. This process of resolution of difference and the re-creation of it seems endemic to all public spheres of debate about the common good, new and old. I have read Jnandev’s text in this midst of this enduring process as a conversation about the common good, about human worth and social justice sounded in the world of everyday life in the thirteenth century and still heard today, as urgently as ever.