Sant Savata Mali: Onion, Radish, All of It Is God

His most famous abhanga, and one of the best known lines in Marathi:

Kanda mula bhaji, avaghi Vithai majhi.

Onion, radish, greens: all of it is my Vithai.

Vithai is the affectionate feminine form of Vitthal, roughly mother Vitthal, and it is the form Maharashtra uses when it is being tender.

And the second line, equally quoted:

Lasun mirchi kothimbiri, avagha jhala majha Hari.

Garlic, chilli, coriander: all of it has become my Hari.

Why those particular vegetables matter

This is not a general statement that god is in everything. It is far more specific and more provocative than that.

Onion and garlic are, in the standard purity codes, tamasic. They are excluded from temple offerings, avoided by many devout households, and forbidden in most Vaishnava kitchens. They are the vegetables that ritual has decided are not fit to be brought near a deity.

Savata names them first.

He is a gardener who grows what people actually eat, including the things the codes disapprove of, and he says those are his Vitthal.

That is the same move Chokhamela makes about bodies and Soyarabai makes about purity, made from the vegetable patch: the categories that decide what may approach the divine do not survive contact with a working life.

Another famous line of his: he says he will not go looking for god in Kashi or in any tirtha, because he has found him at home and there is work to do.

The shape of his poetry:

• Very short
• Built entirely from garden vocabulary: the well, the plot, the seed, the weeding, the hoe, the water channel
• Almost no philosophical terminology
• And a repeated insistence that where he is standing is enough

One of his images, used often: the body is a plot of ground. You clear it, water it, weed it, and what grows depends on what you planted and how faithfully you tended it. The weeding is the part he stresses.

How many survive: a small number, around thirty seven abhangas in the standard collections. It is one of the smaller bodies of work in the tradition and one of the most quoted, because the two lines above are known to people who could not name another Varkari saint.

The story that goes with him, and it is the tradition's way of settling the question of why he never went to Pandharpur.

What happened: Vitthal left the temple.

The accounts differ on why. In some he wanted to see Savata, in some he was avoiding Rukmini after a quarrel, in some he simply went and did not say where.

The temple was empty. The priests found the sanctum without the image, or the deity unresponsive, and the news reached Pandharpur's devotees.

Namdev went looking. He searched, and by whatever route the story takes, he arrived at Aran, at Savata's plot.

And Savata said he had not seen him.

What Namdev noticed: something. In some tellings, that Savata would not turn round, in some that his chest was covered, in some that he was standing oddly.

And it came out that Vitthal was inside Savata's chest, and Savata opened it, and there he was.

In another version Savata is watering the plot when Vitthal appears and asks to be hidden, and he presses him into his heart, and when the search party arrives he does not lie so much as decline to answer.

What the story is saying

It is answering a real objection. Savata never did the wari. The tradition is built on the wari. So there is a question about him, and this story is the answer.

The answer is that he did not need to go, because the thing everybody was walking to see was inside him.

And it is not a claim Savata makes. In the story he says nothing and is found out.

A second thing the story does: it puts Namdev in the position of the one searching and Savata in the position of the one who already has it, and Namdev is the greatest singer of the tradition. The hierarchy is being adjusted, in the same way the thapi story adjusts it.

Whether the tradition made him a Varkari anyway. It did, and worth noting how.

He never walked to Pandharpur in life. Today a palkhi carrying his padukas walks from Aran to Pandharpur every year with the others.

So the tradition eventually sent him, after he was dead, and the annual procession is the community carrying the one member who declined the journey.

His end: at Aran, in 1295, on Ashadha Krishna Chaturdashi, which is generally in July.

His samadhi is there.

Aran today:

• In Madha taluka, Solapur district, Maharashtra
• Around 50 kilometres from Pandharpur
• The Savata Maharaj temple and samadhi
• A fair on his punyatithi in Ashadha
• The Bhima river is nearby

The palkhi:

• Sets out from Aran for Pandharpur
• Joins the network of palkhis converging for Ashadhi Ekadashi
• Alongside Jnaneshwar's from Alandi, Tukaram's from Dehu, Eknath's from Paithan, Nivruttinath's from Trimbakeshwar, Sopan's from Saswad and Muktabai's from Muktainagar

The Mali community. Savata is the community saint of malis across Maharashtra and beyond.

The Sant Savata Mali name appears on schools, cooperative societies, community halls, agricultural bodies and vegetable market associations across western Maharashtra, and his punyatithi is observed by mali associations.

That is worth noting because it shows what a working caste's saint does for it: he is the answer to the claim that the community's occupation is lowly, made by somebody the whole tradition venerates.

A note on the flower connection. Malis grew flowers for temples, which means the community that was excluded from many kinds of ritual participation was the one supplying the material for it.

Savata's line about onion and radish is aimed exactly at that: the person who grows what goes on the deity is being told that what he eats is impure.

One. You do not have to go anywhere.

This is his specific contribution and it is the most useful thing in this entry.

The whole tradition is built on a pilgrimage, and its own saints include a man who did not do it and is honoured anyway.

What that means practically:

• If you cannot travel, for money, health, work, caring responsibilities or any other reason, you are not excluded from anything
• A pilgrimage is a good thing and it is not a requirement
• The person who does the wari every year and the person who has never left their district are in the same position with respect to what matters

Two. What you handle all day is the material.

Savata's poems are made of onions. That is not a metaphor for something else; the onions are the poem.

If your day is spreadsheets, patients, students, machinery, deliveries or children, that is the material. The tradition's saints used what was in front of them: clay, cloth, grain, hair, gold, vegetables.

Three. The purity codes do not survive a working life.

He names onion and garlic first, which are the excluded vegetables, and says they are his Vitthal.

The general principle: rules about what may approach the divine, when they end up excluding ordinary food, ordinary bodies and ordinary people, have gone wrong somewhere, and the saints of this tradition say so consistently.

Four. Weeding.

His recurring image for practice is the plot: cleared, watered, weeded. He stresses the weeding because it is continuous, unrewarding, and the thing that actually determines the crop.

Applied: the practice is not the occasional intense effort. It is the small repeated removal of what should not be growing.

A daily practice from this entry:

• Vitthal Vitthal, or Rama Krishna Hari, said while doing what you do
• Once, out loud: kanda mula bhaji, avaghi Vithai majhi
• If you keep plants, or cook, use that. It is the whole method
• On Ashadha Krishna Chaturdashi, his punyatithi, cook and feed somebody

A closing thought

Every year, several hundred thousand people walk two hundred and fifty kilometres in the monsoon to stand in front of an image at Pandharpur, and it is one of the great sights of the world.

One of the saints they walk with never went.

He stayed in a vegetable plot fifty kilometres away, worked a well with bullocks, grew onions and radishes and coriander, and wrote about thirty seven short poems, one of which says that the onions are Vitthal.

And when the god went missing from the temple and the greatest singer of the tradition came looking, the story says he was in the gardener's chest.

Who: Sant Savata Mali, roughly 1250 to 1295, a market gardener of Aran in Solapur district, Maharashtra, around fifty kilometres from Pandharpur, and a contemporary of Jnaneshwar, Namdev, Gora Kumbhar and Chokhamela.

What made him different: he never went to Pandharpur. The entire Varkari tradition is organised around walking there, and he stayed in his vegetable plot.

His famous lines: kanda mula bhaji, avaghi Vithai majhi, onion, radish, greens, all of it is my Vithai; and lasun mirchi kothimbiri, avagha jhala majha Hari, garlic, chilli, coriander, all of it has become my Hari.

Why those vegetables: onion and garlic are excluded as tamasic from temple offerings and most Vaishnava kitchens. He names them first, which makes the line an argument and not just an image.

The story: Vitthal left the Pandharpur temple, Namdev went searching, arrived at Aran, and found the deity hidden inside Savata's chest.

His works: around thirty seven abhangas, short, built from garden vocabulary, with the plot as the image for the body and weeding as the image for practice.

His end: at Aran in 1295, on Ashadha Krishna Chaturdashi, generally July. His samadhi is there with an annual fair.

Now: a palkhi carries his padukas from Aran to Pandharpur each year, so the tradition eventually sent him on the journey he declined. He is the community saint of malis across Maharashtra.

What to keep: you do not have to go anywhere, and what you handle all day is the material.