Janabai: The Servant Who Made God Grind the Grain

What her poetry is famous for, and it is genuinely unlike anything else in the tradition.

God does her chores.

Not metaphorically. In the poems, Vitthal comes to the house and:

• Sits at the grinding stone with her and turns it
• Takes the broom and sweeps
• Helps gather the cow dung
• Carries the water pot
• Washes her hair and picks the lice out of it
• Serves her food
• Sits and eats with her
• Sleeps beside her when she is tired

The register. This is the striking part.

All the other saints approach the deity as a devotee approaches a lord: praise, longing, complaint, surrender. Janabai's Vitthal is in the kitchen.

One famous abhanga has him grinding with her, and she notices that his hands are getting sore, and tells him to stop.

Another has him sweeping the yard, and her worrying that people will see.

Another has him picking through her hair, which is an act of intimacy performed between women in a household and nobody else.

What that is doing. Three things at once.

One. It makes the work sacred without making it lighter. The grinding is still grinding. She is still doing it. But the poem asserts that the deity of Pandharpur is at the stone with her, which is a claim about where he is, not about how heavy the stone is.

Two. It reverses the hierarchy completely. A Mahar servant woman who cannot read has the lord of the temple doing her household work, and in one poem she scolds him.

Three. It is domestic, which nothing else in the canon is. The male saints write from the temple, the road, the field, the assembly. Janabai writes from inside a house, which is where women were, and she is one of the very few voices we have from there.

A second characteristic voice. She is direct to the point of rudeness with him.

She complains. She threatens to stop cooking. She points out that she has no one else. In one abhanga she says that she will take his name and drag him along by it, and in another that if he does not come she will make trouble.

The most quoted line is a version of: I eat god, I drink god, I sleep on god. I give god, I take god, I deal in god. God is here, god is there, there is no place without god. Jani says, Vitthal has filled everything inside and out.

And the second most quoted is her stating, flatly, that she is Nama's maid, that she has no learning, and that this is what she has.

Two stories, and they are both about being accused.

The dung cakes

The context: cow dung, shaped into cakes and dried, was fuel. Collecting it and shaping it was work done by poor women, and a stack of dried cakes was property.

What happened: another woman claimed Janabai's stack was hers.

The dispute went to the village, and there was no way to tell whose was whose, because dung cakes look alike.

What the story says: they went to the temple, and it was proposed that each cake be picked up and asked. And when Janabai's were lifted, each one said Jani, Jani, Jani, in the voice of Vitthal, because she had been saying his name while making them.

Why the story is loved. Because of what it takes seriously.

It is a dispute about fuel, between two poor women, and the tradition treats it as worth a miracle. The name she repeated while doing the most menial work available had gone into the work, and the work could be identified by it.

The necklace

This one is darker and the tradition does not soften it.

What happened: the necklace of the deity at the Pandharpur temple went missing.

Who was accused: Janabai.

Why: because she was the obvious person to accuse. A servant, of an untouchable caste, with access to the temple precincts, and nobody to speak for her.

What was ordered: her execution. By sula, impalement on a stake, which was a real judicial punishment.

What the story says happened: she was taken to the place, and she sang, and the stake turned to water, or melted, and she was spared.

How to read this. The miracle is hagiography. What is underneath it is not.

Underneath it is: a poor woman of an untouchable caste was accused of theft on no evidence and sentenced to be impaled, and the community was prepared to carry it out.

That is the ordinary functioning of the system she lived in, and the story is a record of it. The tradition preserves the story because she survived. It does not tell us about the women who did not.

And there is a further point in it. She had lived in Pandharpur for decades, was known, was in Namdev's household, and had composed hundreds of abhangas. None of that protected her. The accusation stuck because of who she was.

What to take from these two stories:

• The tradition's saints were not treated as saints in their lifetimes
• Being poor and low caste and a woman meant being the first suspect, then and in a great many places since
• A false accusation of theft against a domestic worker is not a medieval curiosity. It is a live problem, and if you employ somebody in your house, the story is addressed to you
• If you are facing a false accusation and cannot afford a lawyer, free legal aid is a statutory right in India under the Legal Services Authorities Act, through the district legal services authority, and the national helpline is 15100

Janabai is not alone, and the group she belongs to is worth naming, because it is unusual.

The Varkari women whose work survives:

• Muktabai, Jnaneshwar's younger sister, thirteenth century, whose Taticha Abhang is treated in its own entry
• Janabai, here
• Soyarabai, wife of Chokhamela, who signs as Chokhyachi Mahari, Chokha's Mahar woman, and whose abhangas on purity and the body are unusually sharp
• Nirmala, Chokhamela's sister
• Kanhopatra, a courtesan's daughter, treated in her own entry
• Bahinabai, seventeenth century, treated in her own entry
• Venabai and Akkabai, in the Ramdas line

What they have in common:

• Most were not literate
• Most were not of high caste
• They composed in the abhanga and ovi, which are oral, sung, and fit the rhythm of domestic work
• Their work was preserved by being sung, by other women, for generations, before anybody wrote it down
• They are read today alongside the men and no Varkari would rank them separately

Soyarabai's line is worth quoting since she is the other great voice of this group and is not otherwise covered here. She asks, in an abhanga, what impurity actually is, given that the body itself is made of flesh and blood and everybody's is, and concludes that if the body is impure then nobody is pure and the whole category is empty.

That is a Mahar woman in the fourteenth century dismantling ritual pollution in four lines.

Why this matters for reading Janabai. She belongs to a body of women's devotional composition that is genuinely large and mostly anonymous.

The grinding songs of Maharashtra, collected in the twentieth century, run to hundreds of thousands of verses, composed by women at the mill over centuries, on marriage, brothers, in laws, work, children, and god. Janabai is the named figure at the head of that, and most of the others were never recorded.

A note on the phrase Namyachi Dasi. It can be read two ways and both are true.

One: as an accurate description of her legal and social position. She was a servant, she says so, and she does not romanticise it.

Two: as a chosen identity. In the tradition, calling oneself the servant of a devotee, rather than of god directly, is the higher claim, and every Vaishnava tradition has some version of it.

She took the fact of her servitude and used it as her signature, and it is impossible to say she meant only one of those.

Her end. She is said to have died at Pandharpur, and in one account on the same day as Namdev, in 1350.

Where to go:

• Pandharpur, where she lived and worked. Her samadhi is there, near the Vitthal temple
• Gangakhed, on the Godavari in Parbhani district, her birthplace, with a Janabai temple and a fair on Ashadhi
• Her grinding stone is shown at Pandharpur

Reading her

The abhangas, around 350, are in every Marathi Varkari collection. English translations exist, and there are good ones in anthologies of bhakti poetry.

Which ones to start with:

• The Vitthal at the mill abhangas, which are the ones she is known for
• Jhadu ghei hati, on him taking the broom
• The god everywhere abhanga: I eat god, I drink god, I sleep on god
• The abhangas where she scolds him
• Her verses on Namdev, her guru

She is also credited with narrative works on the lives of Jnaneshwar, Namdev and the Krishna stories, though attribution in the abhanga corpus is never clean.

Listening. This is the better route with her.

Her abhangas are sung. Recordings by Marathi devotional singers are widely available, and the jate yavarchi ovi tradition, women's grinding songs, is also recorded and is the living context her work came out of.

What to take from her

One. The work is where the practice is. Not before it, not after it, not instead of it. She had no other time and she did not ask for any.

This is the single most usable idea in this entry. Most people reading this do not have an hour of undisturbed leisure. Janabai had none at all for eighty years.

Two. The name fits inside physical work. Grinding, sweeping, walking, cooking, driving, waiting. A repeated name occupies the part of the mind that is otherwise unused during repetitive work, which is why every tradition that has poor people in it uses one.

Three. You may speak plainly. She complains, threatens, scolds and demands. The tradition kept all of it and put it in the canon.

Four. The domestic is not lesser. Nothing in her poems is grand. It is a mill, a broom, a pot, a stack of dung cakes, and hair being combed, and the tradition holds that the lord of Pandharpur was present at all of it.

A daily practice from this entry:

• Pick one repetitive task you do every day. Cooking, dishes, the commute, the walk
• Attach one name to it. Vitthal Vitthal, or Rama Krishna Hari, or whatever name is yours
• Do not add time to your day for this. That is the entire method
• Once, read the abhanga where she tells him his hands are getting sore and he should stop grinding

A closing thought

A girl of seven was left at a stranger's house in Pandharpur because her mother had died and her father could not keep her.

She swept that house for eighty years.

She could not read. She was accused of stealing a necklace and was very nearly impaled for it. Her name for herself, in every poem she made, was somebody else's maid.

And what she wrote down, or rather what she sang while grinding and other people remembered, is that god came and sat at the stone with her, and that she told him to stop because his hands were hurting.

Was she literate? Almost certainly not. The abhanga is an oral form, composed to the rhythm of work and preserved by singing. Her poems were written down long after her.

Was she a slave? The Marathi word she uses is dasi, servant or maid. She was left at the household as a child and worked there without payment for around eighty years. The relationship is domestic servitude of a kind that had no exit, and it is described in her own poems without euphemism.

Did Namdev teach her? She treats him as her guru and says so. She lived in his father's house, so she heard the household's devotional life from the age of seven.

Are the poems really hers? The abhanga corpus of every Varkari saint has attribution problems, because the poems circulated orally for centuries and were compiled much later. What is not in doubt is that a body of poems signed Jani or Namyachi Dasi, with a consistent voice and consistent domestic imagery, has been sung in Maharashtra continuously.

Why does Vitthal do housework in her poems? Because that was her life and there was nothing else in it. The poems place the deity inside her actual day rather than moving her out of it into a temple or a forest, and that is the specific contribution she makes to the tradition.

Is she worshipped? Yes. She has a samadhi at Pandharpur, a temple at Gangakhed, her abhangas are sung on the wari, and she is counted among the Varkari saints without qualification.

What is the single best entry point? The abhanga in which Vitthal sits at the grinding stone and she notices his hands are sore. It is short, it is famous, it is easy to find in translation, and it contains her whole approach.

And the practical takeaway? Attach a name to work you already do. She had no leisure for eighty years and produced three hundred and fifty poems, which means the method does not require leisure.