Janabai: Devotion, Labour, and Self-Realization: A Woman’s Poetics A Theoretical Re-reading of the Devotee–God Relationship, Women’s Experience, and Spiritual Autonomy in the Varkari Tradition

Abstract

Janabai’s poetry in Maharashtra’s Varkari devotional tradition represents a unique intersection of women’s experience, domestic labour, vernacular language, and spiritual realization. Associated with thirteenth–fourteenth-century Maharashtra, much of the historical account of Janabai’s life has been constructed through the saint tradition, oral memory, and later compilations; therefore, while examining her life narrative and poetic personality, it is essential to distinguish between history, hagiographical narratives, and devotional memory.[1] In tradition, she is remembered as a maidservant in the household of Namdev; however, this very social position is transformed in her abhangas into a remarkably independent spiritual voice. Pandharipande has studied Janabai within the broader tradition of Indian women saints, focusing on her religious and social consciousness.[2] Deshmukh has identified the oral tradition of grinding songs associated with Janabai as a neglected area of devotional studies and has highlighted the centrality of absence, displacement, and women’s experience within them.[3]

The central argument of the present article is that limiting Janabai merely to the category of a “woman saint” or, in the modern sense, a “feminist poet” would diminish the historical and spiritual complexity of her poetry. Her originality lies in transforming women’s everyday labour and domestic life into legitimate grounds for spiritual experience. Grinding grain, pounding, sweeping, and managing the household are not separate from devotion in her poetry; rather, they become processes of remembrance of the divine name, service, and self-realization.[4] Her Vithoba is sometimes a mother, father, or companion; at other times, a co-worker; and sometimes an intimate deity whom the devotee metaphorically “locks” within her own heart. Thus, in Janabai’s poetry, rigid distinctions between Saguna and Nirguna, action and devotion, body and soul, and the worldly and the spiritual appear to dissolve