Sant Bahinabai, Her Autobiography, and the Question of Translation
From The Autobiography of Sant Bahinabai (2023)
Chandrakant Kaluram Mhatre
CONTENTS
• Who Was Sant Bahinabai?
• Why Translate Bahinabai?
• Bahinabai, the Autobiographer
• Bahinabai, the Translator
• Bahinabai, the Great-Grandmother of the Feminists
• Bahinabai, the Social Commentator
• Bahinabai and Tukaram and Their Contemporaries
• Bahinabai Had a Little Calf
• Bahinabai’s Imagery
• Bahinabai and the Abhang Form
• Why & How Do I Translate?
Originally published as the introduction to The Autobiography of Sant Bahinabai (2023), this essay approaches Bahinabai through literary history, Bhakti poetics, textual transmission, women’s autobiographical writing, and the ethics of literary translation. It reads her as a figure through whom questions of caste authority, scriptural access, guruhood, and anti-Brahmanical critique become visible within Marathi literary culture.
It combines literary criticism, translation philosophy, and philological attention to textual transmission, source identification, and the history of Bahinabai’s printed editions.
Thanks to its Varkari heritage, Maharashtra has a very long tradition of women poets, beginning with the likes of Muktabai and Janabai as early as in the final decades of the thirteenth century. When the rest of the world was busy keeping its womenfolk far, far away from the literary world, poets after poets in Maharashtra were joining this pantheon of women poets to ensure that this unique cultural phenomenon does not get brushed aside as an aberration by the powers that be. Thus we have Soyarabai, Nirmala, Kanhopatra, too, expressing themselves in what can be termed as the lyrics of the highest order. Not only did they get an opportunity to express themselves but their compositions were also written down and preserved for the centuries to come - no matter how subversive these expressions were. Janabai’s abhang throwing open challenge to the patriarchy were as revered in this land as Soyarabai’s abhang documenting the brutalities of caste discrimination. No wonder then that this glorious tradition of Varkari women poets culminated in the multifaceted Bahinabai (or Baheni as she calls herself) of the seventeenth century.
How multifaceted was Sant1 Bahinabai (संत बहिणाबाई)? Here is a glimpse: Bahinabai was born on 25 September 1628 and she breathed her last at noon on 27 September 1700. How can I be so sure about these dates? Bahinabai herself has documented these details in her autobiography. Of course, she is not the first Indian autobiographer; that laurel resides with Sant Namdev who predates her by more than 300 years. However, she is definitely the first Indian woman to write an autobiography. A simple Google search and you will come back at me with Rassundari Devi’s Amar Jiban. You can do better than that if you dig deeper. What did you find? Amar Jiban was published in 1876. Now consider the literary fact that Bahinabai completed her autobiography on 27 September 1700 and it had been in circulation for a whopping 176 years before Amar Jiban saw daylight! It is settled then that Bahinabai Pathak is the first woman autobiographer of India. That may not be sufficient to call someone multifaceted though, so consider this: Bahinabai translated Vajrasuchi Upanishad from Sanskrit into Marathi and it has been in circulation for the last three hundred years, which makes her one of the very first women translators in the entire world. Needless to mention, Bahinabai is the first woman translator of India. Now, if I have piqued your curiosity enough, let’s get all serious and try to understand and appreciate the immense contribution this woman poet has made to enrich our world.
Who was Sant Bahinabai?
Sant Bahinabai should not be mistaken with the 20th century Marathi poet Bahinabai Chaudhari. Sant Bahinabai or Bahinabai Pathak (aka Bahinabai Siurkar) was born in a brahmin family of Devgaon village in the Aurangabad District of Maharashtra. Her father was Aauji Kulkarni (आऊजी कुळकर्णी) and her mother’s name was Janaki (जानकी). Shockingly, even by the abysmal standards of the seventeenth century, Bahinabai’s parents married her off to a thirty year old widower when she was just a toddler. Here starts a long series of hardships that Bahinabai had to brave out for the better part of her life. Hardly had she turned seven, when she had to leave their native place along with her family and go in search of livelihood from village to village and town to town, and that too on foot. No one knew when or where the next meal would be. To worsen the matters, Bahinabai’s short tempered husband accompanied her family during these seemingly endless journeys and Bahinabai was subjected to the most brutal form of domestic violence at the hands of her husband from a very tender age. This travesty of a married life continued for almost a decade and having been born in the so-called higher caste did next to nothing to alleviate Bahinabai’s misery, just like millions of women before and after her. What makes Bahinabai’s sufferings significant is the fact that she gave them a voice in her autobiography:
Mind was dispirited
Disliked everything
But there is no fighting
With the fate.
Having travelled far and wide from such a young age certainly had shaped Bahinabai’s disposition, making her aware of the larger world and the happenings therein. One of these happenings of the time was Tukaram’s poems with which she got acquainted as a preteen through bhajan-kirtans and was so strongly influenced by them that she craved to meet Tukaram:
Meeting Tukoba
Would be the occasion
Like attaining salvation
It would be for me.
Once she comes under the influence of Tukaram’s poems, her life completely changes and a dreamy teenager transforms into a ferocious rebel challenging the patriarchy and caste-hegemony. She even seems to have won her heroic battle for a little while, only to be crushed by the cowardly tactics of her husband. However, as luck would have it (or by divine intervention, if you like), her wish is fulfilled at the age of eighteen and she gets to meet Tukaram in person and even receives initiation at his hands:
Baheni says his hand
He placed on my head
The body in this world
Didn’t seem to exist.
I am aware this reads more like a script of an overly dramatic young adult movie but that is exactly how dramatic Bahinabai’s life was and it is to her great credit that she does not let her autobiography sound melodramatic even for an instance. Her autobiography does not capitalise on her hardships and her sufferings, rather it celebrates her immense mental strength with which she overcame all of them and attained the goal that she had set out for herself as a little girl all of eleven.
Bahinabai lived a long life of 72 years and attained such an exalted spiritual status that multiple religious sects have laid claim to her legacy, although her own autobiography and other abhang declare allegiance only to Tukaram and his Varkari teachings. Significantly enough, she named her only son as Vitthal, the paramount deity of the Varkaris and, during her final moments, she chose to listen to the recitation of Dnyaneshwari, the paramount text of the Varkaris:
I wish to listen now
To entire Dnyaneshwari
For I am left with
A few moments.
There is no room for doubt that Bahinabai lived her entire life as a devout Varkari and she took leave of this world as a devout Varkari. As there are people today, who latch onto every possible opportunity to describe Sant Dnyandev as a brahmin while conveniently ignoring the historical facts that is was the brahmins who drove Dnyandev and his entire family out of the community and caused them immense hardships, it was the brahmins who forced Dnyandev’s innocent parents to commit suicide, and it was the same brahmins who opposed the right to rite of upanayan for Dnyandev and his brothers to such an extent that they never underwent this rite in their entire life; similarly there have been people trying to hijack Bahinabai’s legacy, harping upon her brahminical lineage, nonchalantly overlooking the historical fact that this brahminical lineage was challenged in Bahinabai’s own lifetime and her entire family was persecuted systematically being labelled as lowly-borne:
Are you of goldsmiths
Or golak by caste
You have no privileges
Of the brahmins.
It is specifically for the people of this ilk that Bahinabai undertook the translation of Vajrasuchi, and declared their entire kind to be unfit to be called as a brahmin:
Baheni says caste
Never makes the brahmin
Key to brahminness
Is very different.
Bahinabai’s poems were first published in print by D. V. Umarkhane in 1913 as The Poems of Santh Bahinabai: A Great Renowned Sage of Shivpur (although the title of this book is in English, its contents are pure Marathi). He was the “Head Clerk Post Office, Khamgaon '' as declared on the cover page of the book and had obtained the manuscript from Bahinabai’s contemporary descendants at Shiur. Interestingly, this cover page also declares the edition to be the “First Part” of a series, but neither the next part ever came out nor there is a mention of what was supposed to be in the next part(s). After 13 years of this publication, V. N. Kolharkar published his Sant Bahinabaicha Gatha in 1926. There is not much information available about him, apart from having authored Gaincha Akrosh in 1922, a booklet about conservation of cows. More unfortunately, he did not bother to mention the provenance of the manuscript in his custody. Apart from a few variations that can be attributed to copying errors, both these texts are similar to great extent, but the Kolharkar Text contains some 147 abhang that are not to be found in the Umarkhane Text. After these two gentlemen, it was Shalini Javadekar who published her Sant Bahenabaincha Gatha in 1979 along with an expansive introduction. Her efforts were more critical and scholarly than her predecessors, but she has taken great many liberties with Bahinabai’s abhang, going to such an extent as breaking up multiple abhang and then reconstructing one that she finds more coherent.2 Therefore, for my translation, I have mainly relied on the Kolharkar Text, with some critical input from the Umarkhane Text.
Why translate Bahinabai? Again??
It was Justin E. Abbott who first translated Bahinabai’s abhang into English, published in 1929 as Bahinabai: A Translation of Her Autobiography & Verses. Abbot, like J. N. Fraser who translated Tukaram in 1915, happens to be a pioneer in translating Marathi Bhakti literature in the first half of the 20th century. While the class of the Marathi people who had mastered English back then were busy reaping the rich fruits of this newfound language by serving their colonial masters, these two gentlemen - from the USA and England respectively - were doing their best to preserve & propagate the centuries old Bhakti literature heritage of Marathi by the means of translation. Therefore, I have nothing but the highest praise for Abbott’s pioneering attempts at translating Bahinabai’s abhang.
Having said that, when assessed critically, Abbott's translation lays bare certain shortcomings that need to be addressed here. His rudimentary understanding of the seventeenth century Marathi language is pardonable, since most of the Marathi speakers today fail to comprehend that form of their mother tongue. His enthusiastic but bare minimum acquaintance with the Marathi culture in general and Varkari literary tradition in particular is also permissible, after all such a bilingual literary giant as Dilip Chitre has ended up - quite horrendously - putting “crocodile-shaped rings”3 in Vitthal’s ears in his critically acclaimed & trailblazing translation Says Tuka (Note for the uninitiated: Vitthal has been wearing only fish-shaped jewels in his ears for no less than 28 yugas). However, what is utterly unforgivable is Abbott’s treatment of Bahinabai’s abhang as “verses”. He fails to see Bahinbai’s abhang as lyrics, let alone appreciate them - at least some of them - as lyrics of the highest order. Result? He ends up paraphrasing her exquisitely poignant poems, rendering nothing but lifeless corpses in his translation.
Moreover, it has been almost a century since Abbott’s translation and that itself speaks volumes about the extent of neglect that Bahinabai has suffered at the hands of her own Marathi speaking people. This translation is a small effort to remedy that unfortunate situation, with the hope that it will rekindle a new interest in Bahinabai’s poems, grab attention of young translators and result in newer, better translations in near future.
Bahinabai: The Autobiographer
The most significant feature of Bahinabai’s autobiography is her awareness of this literary form. It is apparent that she was well acquainted with Namdev’s autobiographical abhang. She had most certainly known Tukaram’s autobiographical poems by heart (one keeps hearing echoes of Tukaram’s abhang throughout Bahinabai’s Gatha). From her abhang, it is evident that she sets out on this literary endeavour knowing well what she wants to achieve thereby. In her Gatha, her autobiographical abhang are found under the section titled as “Atma-charitra” (आत्म-चरित्र - autobiography) in the Umarkhane Text and “Atmanivedan” (आत्मनिवेदन - confessions) in the Kolharkar Text. Out of these two terms, Atmanivedan is closer to the tone that Bahinabai adopts throughout her abhang, interacting with her listener(s) time and again:
Devgaon is the place
Of my parents, dear friend
To the East of which
Verul lies.
As you can see, her listener is a close friend who seems to have requested Bahinabai to recount the happenings of her illustrious life. From the extant abhang, it is quite clear that this would have happened at least twice, at two totally different times. The first attempt at a younger age is quite straightforward as exemplified by Abhang 2 of this translation, which is found only in the Kolharkar Text. Abhang 1 of this translation seems to be the beginning of Bahinabai’s second attempt at autobiography at a much later age, with a more exalted tone and a more elaborate style, a plausible outcome of pursuant perusal of Varkari literature, right from Dnyandev through Ekanath to Tukaram.
These 25 autobiographical abhang from the speculative first attempt are found at the end of Atmanivedan section (comprising 53 abhang) of the Kolharkar Text. Many of them recount the same happenings narrated in the first 53 abhang, e.g. abhang 27 in the Kolharkar Text narrates the same happenings which are already narrated in abhang 17-26. Apparently, this abhang originally formed part of another attempt by Bahinabai at documenting her life. For the sake of the continuity of the narrative, I have included this abhang in Appendix I. For the same reason, I have also rearranged the order of the remaining 77 abhang in my translation.
A third section of Bahinabai’s autobiographical abhang is found under the title “Niryanache Abhang” in the Umarkhane Text (35 abhang) and “Niryanpar Abhang” in the Kolharkar Text (37 abhang). The listener for this section is Bahinabai’s son, Vitthal and perhaps other near and dear ones, add to this the fact that Bahinabai is literally bidding farewell here, so in this section, you get abhang that are totally different in tone and style. It is difficult to not get goosebumps each time I read this section knowing their significance in Bahinabai’s life. These abhang are also unique in the world of autobiographies because they were composed in the last five days of Bahinabai’s life, making Bahinabai’s autobiography strikingly distinct in the sense that it is arguably the only autobiography in the world that ends with the last breaths of its writer. Quite interestingly, Kolharkar seems to have understood the autobiographical significance of this section and has put it right after the Atmanivedan section, whereas Umarkhane has put this section at the end of his book with Atma-charitra at the very beginning and Javadekar has put 119 abhang between these two autobiographical sections.
Bahinabai: The Translator
Being a brahmin by birth does not seem to have benefited Bahinabai much, but it certainly created a great many obstacles in her spiritual life - the biggest being the vehement opposition of the caste-brahmins to her considering Tukaram as her Guru. In the seventeenth century, no one would have ever imagined a young brahmin woman getting so subversive to touch the feet of a non-brahmin and that is exactly what Bahinabai did right in front of everyone’s eyes. Of course, she was not the first brahmin to lay prostrate before Tukaram. Renowned brahmins of the time such as Rameshwar Bhat were doing that three times a day, singing his eulogies, way before Bahinabai’s arrival in Dehu. However, a young brahmin woman all of 18 years doing the same must have sounded like the final nail in the coffin of their birth privileges for the caste-brahmins. No wonder, Mambaji sought every possible opportunity to draw her out of Tukaram’s influence or drive her out of the bounds of Dehu by every possible means. Conversely, Bahinabai got the opportunity to see up close the filthiness of the thoughts and actions of the privileged people like Mambaji and compare it with Tukaram’s completely opposite teachings and practice thereof. This must have made her question: Who is the real brahmin of these two?
She found her answers in the Vajrasuchi Upanishad, a Sanskrit treatise that holds the distinction of being the first anti-discrimination Sanskrit text. On one hand, in this philosophical attack on the birth privileges of the caste-brahmin, Bahinabai found the answer to the objection of the caste brahmin: How can a non-brahmin (or shudra4) like Tukaram become Guru of the brahmins like Bahinabai?
Baheni says the examination
Of deeds designated reveals
The brahminness lies beyond
Deeds designated
On the other hand, in Vajrasuchi Upanishad’s sublime definition of brahminness, she could clearly perceive Tukaram in his thoughts and actions to be the very personification of that brahminness:
Perceives the Supreme Being
Among all living beings
The very personification who is
Of equanimity
Baheni says just like
The sky is everywhere
The brahmin commingles
With the world.
Before I put forward my assessment of Bahinabai as a translator, I would like to clarify yet another widespread misconception about Bahinabai here. It is believed, quite thoughtlessly, that Bahinabai has translated Ashvaghosha’s Vajrasuchi5, a Buddhist text. She has not. Bahinabai has translated the Vajrasuchi Upanishad, a Vedanta text. It is needless to say that these are two different texts but even established scholars have ended up ascribing Vajrasuchi Upanishad to Ashvaghosha. One does not have to do much to verify this fact, just get hold of Bahinabai’s Marathi Vajrasuchi, Ashvaghosha’s Sanskrit Vajrasuchi and the Sanskrit Vajrasuchi Upanishad, then put them side by side. Even if you are not a skilled translator and even if you do not have in-depth understanding of Sanskrit, you will still be able to perceive the abhang-by-abhang movement of Bahinabai’s translation running parallel to paragraph-by-paragraph movement of the prose Vajrasuchi Upanishad. And you will be able to see for yourself that Bahinabai’s text does not include any of the multitudinous expositions that Ashvaghosha’s text adds to the philosophical formulations presented in the Vajrasuchi Upanishad. The only similarity between Bahinabai’s text and Ashvaghosh’s text is that both of these texts attack caste-discrimination, but that is only because both of them draw upon the Vajrasuchi Upanishad that attacks caste-discrimination.
Having that settled, let’s return to Bahinabai’s translation of Vajrasuchi Upanishad. Bahinabai’s clarity of thought, her logical progression of arguments in her translation makes me marvel at her impeccable understanding of her source text. To translate well you need to understand your source text really well, you need to relate with it on as many levels as possible - that is how I perceive the translation process and that seems to be how Bahinabai has approached her translation. Basically, Bahinabai’s translation is so loyal to its source as a translation can get and still, it is rendered so effortlessly that unless told specifically, one would not be able to tell it to be a translation of some other text. Here, I cannot stop myself from mentioning Dnyandev’s own assessment of his Dnyaneswari vis-a-vis Vyasa’s Bhagavad Gita, where he declares his Marathi version of the Gita to be as good as Vyasa’s Sanskrit Gita. Bahinabai does not mention it anywhere, but I find her Marathi version of Vajrasuchi Upanishad to be as good as Sanskrit Vajrasuchi Upanishad! Finally, it is a bit tricky situation here as I am presenting to you my English translation of Bahinabai’s Marathi translation of a Sanskrit text, so if you come across any difficulties/oddities in its flow, please remember that they are entirely the shortcomings of my translation, not Bahinabai’s.
Bahinabai: The Great-Grandmother of the Feminists
For the sake of perspective, let us remind ourselves here that Mary Wollstonecraft published her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects in 1792 and demanded the right to commensurate education for the women in England. That makes Bahinabai’s autobiography about 100 years older than that prototypical text of modern feminism. Now look at what Bahinabai says about the condition of women in India in the seventeenth century:
Borne as a human though
In the form of a woman
Seems to be culmination
Of uncountable sins
Deprived of the right
To studying scriptures
Gayatri is hidden away
By the brahmins.
Anyone who is remotely familiar with Wollstonecraft’s proverbial groundbreaking text will see the uncanny resemblance Bahinabai’s these words carry with the central arguments of that text. What I am driving here at is the need for a detailed study of Bahinabai’s autobiography from the feminist perspective, which is replete with gems such as the lines mentioned above.
Since my complete incompetence at feminist criticism is abundantly exposed in the last paragraph, I do not need to pretend anymore to do that and we can go about appreciating Bahinabai as a subversive voice from the seventeenth century. Being born a woman in the so-called higher castes most certainly has its privileges like being relatively shielded from the predatory elements of those echelons, that freely prey upon other not-so-privileged women. However, that also means relatively more restrictions within and without the four walls, along with extra burden of the strictures of the scriptures:
Tender of age
Considered puerile
In the terror of Vedas
Rendered silent
and
All the Vedas call out
The Puranas clamour
In the company of a woman
Nothing to gain
I am nothing
But a woman’s body
How do I find now
The Path Supreme?6
The challenge that Janabai threw at the patriarchy in the thirteenth century takes on a much more profound form in Bahinabai’s words when she calls the Vedas and puranas out as the source of her oppression. Her identification of the scriptures as the ideological state apparatus for women’s oppression is truly significant, given that the bhakti literature tradition in India goes back to almost five hundred years before Bahinabai and she happens to be the first woman to call a spade a spade in this regard, and that too in no uncertain terms. She does not stop just pointing finger at the scripture but goes on to lay bare the multiple levels on which this oppression takes place for a married woman when her marriage takes the form of shackles around her feet by the very dictates of those scriptures:
The Vedas proclaim
Do not abandon duties
But serving the Lord
Is what I love.
It would have been a wonder only if extreme measures were not taken to suppress such a rebellious voice in the patriarchal framework of the seventeenth century and in Bahinabai’s case those measures turned out to be extremely brutal domestic violence. Here my non-existent scholarship in trauma studies does not need to be exposed, but I have no doubt that Bahinabai’s autobiography will rank very high among those works that document the lives of survivors of domestic violence, apart from being one of the oldest, if not the oldest, such an account in the history of the world literature:
To his heart’s content
He beat me rigorously
Tying my hands and legs
Threw me aside
What makes me appreciate this woman more and more is the fact that even the most brutal beating does not deter her from raising more questions:
Unstoppable, beating me
The cow bellowed
The calf too wailed
Grief-stricken
This all happened
When I was eighteen
Had I fallen short
Fulfilling my duties?
One can only imagine how Bahinabai would have coped with this kind of inhuman treatment at the age of eighteen, and that too with no support even from her parents, since her husband would beat her up right in front of their eyes and they would not even raise as much a finger to stop him. Under such circumstance, what could an eighteen year old do but try to rationalise her sufferings in the terms of fate and destiny7:
I console my mind
By this account
Fate is the cause
Of all these sorrows
or
Strides of Fate
Utterly unstoppable
Why to fret over it
Pointlessly.
However, no matter whether you blame it on fate or something else, there might come a point when it becomes impossible to bear anymore pain - mental and/or physical, as it happened with Bahinabai:
Now I feel like
Setting myself on fire
Or strike my head
With a saw
Feel like hurling
Myself into the river
Or just wander off
Beyond the horizon.
It is the great fortune of Maharashtra that Bahinabai was not compelled to act upon these thoughts, but there should not be an iota of doubt in anyone’s mind that it was only her steely nerves and her unshakeable devotion that saw her through this unimaginable trauma. All that unthinkable suffering on one hand and its magnificently restrained expression on the other hand - I have no compunction about admitting that I fail to comprehend the height of Bahinabai’s artistic genius.
Bahinabai: The Social Commentator
Bahinabai’s autobiography does not stop at documenting her personal life alone, in its course, it lays bare many social evils prevalent at her times. For, in Bahinabai’s case, unfortunately, these social evils were part and parcel of her own personal life. It all starts with the child marriage that she is subjected to as a toddler. In her account of this marriage, Bahinabai - in her signature calm and composed voice - makes a very strong statement as she denounces her husband’s learning for marrying a three year old at the age of 30:
Widower he was
Thirty years old
My blessed husband
A learned man.
Despite her very restrained tone, one can understand how loaded these lines are when one bears in mind the fact that her “learned” husband would have been 40ish and Bahinabai 13ish at the time of consummating their marriage. Whatever might their reasons have been to marry off their daughter so cursorily, Bahinabai’s parents also appear to be victims of the prevalent societal norms, having to overspend for the extravagant wedding and the crushing dowry:
Over four days lasted
The wedding celebrations
Couldn’t understand at all
Lord’s intents
Dear parents mine
Stricken with poverty
Under this burden
Got smothered8.
Apparently, it was this debt that Bahinabai’s father could not repay in the coming years, forcing the entire family to flee their native place. Although she does not say it in as many words, it was this marriage that resulted in uprooting of her entire family, making them go door-to-door in search of their daily bread.
In this autobiography, we also get to see how the patriarchal forces manage to subjugate such a rebellious woman as Bahinbai by all means possible and to the fullest extent. When he is not able to make Bahinabai dance to his tunes by the means of brutal beating, Bahinabai’s husband uses the typical patriarchal weapon against her and threatens to abandon her. This potent threat comes down upon her as a mighty blow that crushes her rebellion and she is left with no option but to surrender at his feet:
Service to my husband
He is my only god
My husband is for me
The Being Supreme
Water from his feet
Be all the holy waters
Without that water
Rest in vain.
Her spirit is so thoroughly crushed and her surrender so absolute that one fails to imagine the extent of helplessness of this teenage girl when she says:
My husband is life
And I am the body
My husband is all the good
That happened to me.
This suppression of voice apparently does not stop even after absolute surrender and exacts thorough purgation of the prior beliefs in Bahinabai, making her profess:
Vitthal is of rocks
Tuka is of dreams
Why should I keep
From the real bliss?
This process of mental subjugation of the woman in question gets complete only upon her unconditional acceptance of the very ideology that she had challenged in the first place:
I will partake infinite
This bliss in service
This is what the Vedas too
Expect of me.
Interestingly, we also get to see the forces of caste-hegemony in action when Bahinabai and her family arrive in Dehu. Bahinabai’s autobiography is historically significant in this regard too, since there are no first person accounts of the ways in which caste-hegemony is imposed upon those who try to challenge it, until the Marathi dalit autobiographies of the latter half of the twentieth century appear on the literary horizon. Although not from the perspective of a dalit, in Bahinabai’s autobiography, we get to see this evil power at work in the form of Mambaji when he threatens Bahinabai’s husband for not becoming his followers:
I will get you banished
From the ranks of the brahmins
Don’t you dare to talk to me
Of devotion to Guru.
We also get an insight into how these threats of excommunication were executed socially in this interaction between Bahinabai and Mambaji:
Then he said to me,
I don’t know your caste
So I will consider you
As shudras
Are you of goldsmiths
Or golak by Caste
You have no privileges
Of the brahmins
If you ever go to have food
Anywhere as such a privilege
I will drag you all then
To the court of law.
It is so sickening to know how the existing legal system was used by these caste-supremacists to maintain their hold over the entire social machinery.
Mabaji’s letter to the higher authorities, complaining against Tukaram and Bahinabai, also makes a fine example of these universal mahinations in the name of protecting the “true religion”:
[Tukaram] performs kirtan
In the temple all the time
Even the brahmins fall
At his feet
…
Grievous threat I perceive
To true religion in all this
Therefore I am sending
This dispatch
…
Quackery pretentious
Threatens true religion
It must be protected
O chief of lords.
To Bahinabai’s credit, she gives us an account of all these happenings as objectively as possible, as if she was very well aware of her responsibilities as an honest documenter of her times.
Bahinabai & Tukaram and Their Contemporaries
Seventeenth century was the century that changed the course of Maharashtra’s history - politically and culturally. It was the century of two of the greatest people to have ever been born in this land - Sant Tukaram and Chhatrapati Shivaji. An autobiography written in that century could have been seldomly written without documenting the times of either or both of them. Chhatrapati Shivaji had just laid the foundation of the Swarajya by conquering Torna Fort in the year Bahinabai arrived in Dehu with her family (1646), so we find absolutely no mention of him in her extant autobiography. However, the sole purpose of her arrival in Dehu was to meet Tukaram, and not only does she meet him but she also documents all the possible happenings around Tukaram during her stay there, thus making her autobiography a first rate resource to know and to understand Tukaram.
Such was Bahinabai’s devotion towards Tukaram that even before having seen/met him ever before, she had declared:
Baheni says Tuka
Is my Guru, my brother.
Soon her devotion reaches to the point where Tukaram replaces the Lord in her prayers:
Pandurang is Tukaram
Pandurang is Tukaram
How can they be separated
From each other?
However, she is not expressing only her belief here but echoing the masses of her times, too, when she declares Tukaram to be Pandurang:
Baheni says all
People proclaimed,
Tukoba manifestly
Pandurang.
Along with the abhang of Tuakram’s younger brother Kanhoba, Bahinabai’s autobiography is the crucial contemporary document to understand Tukaram’s final years and in the context of the stanza quoted above, it is interesting to note here one of Tukaram’s final abhang:
People consider me god
Such a sacrilegious deed
Now do as you deem right
My head in your hand, and knife
Right I have none
To be worshipped thus
Mind recognises sin
Tuka says, O my Parents9.
Evidently, Tukaram was not happy at all with people treating him as a/the god and this must have proved pivotal in his consequent departure on a pilgrimage with no intention to return. Instead of speculating such baseless theories as Tukaram being murdered to replace equally unacceptable theories like bodily ascension to heaven, it is high time that we find our way with the help of such contemporary accounts such as Kanhoba’s elegiac abhang written right after Tukaram’s departure. Unfortunately, Bahinabai’s extant autobiography stops just short of revealing what transpired in those fateful days. She was present in Dehu during Tuakaram’s final days there, and it is not possible that she would not have documented something as monumental as Tukaram’s departure. Rather than propagating unsubstantiated theories, locating that copy of Bahinabai’s Gatha which has this part of her autobiography will be a true contribution to Tukaram studies.
Bahinabai had a Little Calf!
If you heard an echo of a nursery rhyme in the line above, then you are not mistaken, this is indeed going to be a bit of a literary curio. When the first time I read Bahinabai’s account of her calf accompanying her everywhere including to the place of scripture-reading, I was delighted to remember “Mary had a little lamb”:
Along with them
I would go for listening
The calf too would go
Along with us
I would sit there
Near my mother
The calf too running
Would stand beside.
A little digging up on the internet added to my delight further, knowing that it was a poem composed by the American Sarah Joseph Hale, published in 1830, which is based on a true event that Mary witnessed as a teacher. A student of hers actually was accompanied by her lamb one fine day and did not go away even after Sarah turned it out, owing to the commotion it caused in the class. Almost two centuries apart and with the proverbial seven seas separating them, an Indian and an American girl experiencing the same bond of love was a very reassuring experience for me.
Bahinabai’s Imagery
Without further ado, let me confess here - if it has not been written all over this introduction already - that I am fascinated by all of the Varkari poets. In spite of all my university education in English literature and all the reading of the world literature that accompanied it, I find Varkari poetry to be of the highest order, comparable to the greatest poetries of the world. And among all of the Varkari poets, I am particularly drawn towards Bahinabai’s Gatha for its multifacetedness which I have tried to explore thus far. Like ambiguity, yet another characteristic of good poetry is its imagery and here I would like to present just a few of my favourite images from Bahinabai’s autobiography. Bahinabai’s images are such an integral part of her narrative that sometimes it is almost impossible to distinguish between the two. For example, she uses a very exquisite image while describing the difficulties that her family faced on fleeing their native place. Standing on the bank of the Godavari, they could not go back to Devgaon, but moving forward into the unknown seemed equally daunting. No wonder, they found:
The river was flooded
On both the banks.
Further down the narrative, Bahinabai again faces a dilemma when she finds her married life becoming an obstacle in her spiritual path. This must have been a very tormenting experience for the conventionally brought-up Bahinabai as she was drawn towards two opposing goals with equal might. It is at this point that she uses one of the most inspired images that I have ever come across. Unable to decide between the two options before her - pursuing the spiritual path abandoning her married life like Mirabai did or continuing her married life abandoning her ever increasing spiritual aspirations like the scores of other women did - and with the compulsion to choose between the two, she cries out:
Cobra at the door
House engulfed in fire
How to save one’s life
In such an event?
Finally, for the sake of perspective, I would again like to take you back to England but this time in the year 1818 when on 27th February, a certain John Keats wrote to his publisher John Taylor:
“But it is easier to think what poetry should be, than to write it, and this leads me to another axiom. That if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all”10.
Keats has used some of the greatest images ever committed to paper but I find this image drawing a comparison between writing of poetry and sprouting of leaves to be the most beautiful. It seems that the great minds do not just think alike but they think in similar images too, because Bahinabai has described her process of writing poetry using a very similar image:
Baheni says my mind
Began to compose
Like the sea advances
With the moon in the sky.
Bahinabai and the Abhang Form
A very distinct feature of the Varkari tradition of Maharashtra has been the composition of the abhang which are essentially lyrics that can also be employed for narrative purposes, among others. Origins of the abhang are murkier but one finds the most diverse explorations of this form in Sant Danyandev’s Gatha, whereas the most accomplished practitioner of this form is known to be Sant Tukaram. In its most widely used forms, an abhang comprises either two-lined stanzas or four-lined stanzas. Four-lined stanzas have three hexasyllabic lines and the last line has four syllables, while the line length in two-lined stanzas varies greatly. Further, two-lined stanzas are rhyming couplets, while four-line stanzas have mostly abbc rhyme scheme but also can have aaab rhyme scheme occasionally. However, these two stanza-forms are never used together in the same abhang, in other words, an abhang is always composed entirely in either four-lined or two-lined stanza form. Generally, an abhang consists of a minimum of four stanzas with no upper limit on the number of stanzas. Basically, an abhang provides immense freedom of movement and expression to the poet, hence their popularity. Bahinabai has preferred the four-lined stanza form for her autobiography and also for her translation of the Vajrasuchi Upanishad. In doing so, Bahinabai has made noteworthy contributions towards expanding the horizons of the abhang form as she happens to be the first saint-poet to use the abhang form to translate a sanskrit text into Marathi.
If the abhang seem to be so simple in their composition, why do they appear to be so difficult to read? Even after mastering the Old Marathi, why do people struggle in understanding the abhang? The main reasons are that the abhang do not employ punctuation marks and the interrelationship between and/or among the words in a line is not determined only by the laws of syntax, demanding a great deal of effort on the part of the reader in the process of signification. Additionally, most of the abhang employ end-stop lines but some use enjambment, too. This makes the situation especially trickier in the absence of punctuation marks with no guidance provided for the reader as to whether to stop reading at the end of the line or to run on to the next. In other words, the Marathi abhang are the quintessential writerly text in the Barthesian sense.
Naturally, ambiguity abounds, as it is supposed to in any good poetry, in the abhang. Let’s understand this better with an example from Bahinabai’s autobiography where she is narrating her initiation at the hands of Tukaram in her dream:
I placed my head
On his feet earnestly
He gave me the text
Mantra Gita
These happen to be the most debated lines in Bahinabai’s Gatha, since there is no comma between 'Mantra' and 'Gita' in the source, which leaves it open to multiple interpretations: What was given to Bahinabai? A text called “Mantra Gita” or the mantra (Ram Krushna Hari) and The Gita? Or was it three things? However, adding a comma here will rob this abhang off this significant (in the semantic sense of this word) ambiguity it carries. Therefore, here and in all my translations of other abhang, I have used punctuations only when I could not do away with them altogether without affecting signification. For example, I have used a comma to indicate the beginning of direct speech, but I have not used inverted commas. Basically, I have tried to present the nearest version of the source text in my translation, instead of imposing my singular interpretation of that abhang on the reader.
Why & How do I Translate?
As someone who has managed to master English to some extent and is blessed enough to still have remained deeply rooted in his mother-culture, I consider it my foremost duty to take my literary heritage to the world in the language of the world. Marathi has one of the oldest literary traditions among all the modern languages of the world but, unfortunately, those who are deeply immersed in that tradition shy away from English, while those Marathi speakers who have the ability to express themselves in English lack the deep connection with that tradition, which is the prerequisite for a good translation of this kind. This realisation increased my sense of duty towards my Varkari heritage infinitely and gave birth to the translator that I am today. It was with this realisation that I began to translate Varkari poets a decade ago, and to commemorate the centenary year of Rabindranath Tagore’s One Hundred Poems of Kabir, I published my first works of translation One Hundred Poems of Tukaram and One Hundred Poems of Chokha Mela in 2015. I chose this year not because I am a fan of Gurudev’s translation (for me, paraphrasing cannot be termed as translation), but I understand the significance of his book of 1915: It was the first English translation of Bhakti literature by an Indian, to the best of my knowledge. Also, 1915 happens to be the year in which J. Nelson Fraser completed his Poems of Tukaram, making it a golden letter year for the translation of Bhakti literature in India.
Perhaps it is because I translate the poets whom I revere that I do not agree with the prevalent flagrant standpoint: A translator requires / possesses more creativity than the source writer. I also have very strong objections to the incestuous liberties that the translators are taking with the source text in the name of their pseudo-creativity. In fact, I firmly believe if you have so much creative juices flowing, why not go ahead and create something of your own? Why feast parasitically upon someone else’s creation? This standpoint of mine should not be misinterpreted as assigning the translator’s work and talents lesser significance. Quite contrarily, I believe that a good translator possesses the highest possible verbal intelligence and works as the bridge between minds that would not have come together ever otherwise. However, I refuse to weigh the source writer and the translator in the same scale simply because only one of them has the power to create something new and for me, even the best translation cannot be as considered as creating something new. Set aside all other arguments and ask yourself this question: Can a translator even exist without a source writer?
For me, as a translator, the form of a poem is as important as its contents and the smallest unit of translation is the line in a stanza. Looking from this vantage point, I try to recreate the nearest possible English copy of the abhang at hand, line by line, stanza by stanza. If there are multiple interpretations possible, I try to retain those too in my translation. I would have loved to retain the rhyme scheme also, but such efforts proved to render the translation veering far off from its source, so I had to abandon rhymes in my translation. I am painfully aware of the fact that this approach of mine has resulted in some very awkward phrases and frequent contorted syntax, which may lie far away from natural English - some might even refuse to call it English at all - but that is the compromise I choose to make in order to remain semantically as loyal to my source as syntactically possible.
Navi Mumbai Chandrakant Kaluram Mhatre
January 2023
NOTES:
1. I find it difficult to translate Marathi संत as “saint” in English, especially before the name of a particular individual, since these two terms are simply not analogous culturally. To be a “saint” one needs to be dead, performing miracles (after dying, too) is a must, and getting canonised by the Roman Catholic Church is paramount. This is not the same as becoming a sant solely on the merit of one’s thoughts (as expressed in one’s poems) and actions (as performed when alive). This might sound as hair-splitting to many and maybe it is, for such words are known to gain newer meanings over the time, so I may use “saint” in the general sense but while referring to a particular individual, I will stick to “Sant”.
2.Javadekar, Shalini. “Abhang 589, 590”. Sant Bahenabaincha Gatha, Continental Prakashan, 1979, pp. 457.
3. Chitre, Dilip. “The Image of Vithoba”. Says Tuka, Sontheimer Cultural Association, 2003, pp. 69.
4. कलियुगीं दोन वर्ण । शुद्र आणि ब्राम्हण
“In the Kaliyuga, there are only two varnas: the shudras and the brahmins”.
This was the dictum coined by the caste-brahmins during the mediaeval times in Maharashtra. It was by this illogical logic, that the caste-brahmins could declare even the Mahajan of the village to be a shudra, as it happened with Sant Tukaram. Despite being born in a farmer family (vaishya), he was labelled and treated as a shudra in accordance with the above mentioned dictum.
5. I am well aware of the controversy around the Ashvaghosha’s authorship of Vajrasuchi, however for the sake of keeping the arguments readily accessible, I am not going down that lane.
6. These lines keep reminding me of Harivansh Rai Bachchan:
वेद-लोकाचार प्रहरी
ताकते हर चाल मेरी
बद्ध इस वातावरण में
क्या करे अभिलाष यौवन!
(Madhukalash, Rajpal & Sons, 2018, pp. 36)
7. One comes across similar fatalistic, and equally poignant, rationalisation to make sense of one’s unending sufferings in Chokha Mela’s abhang:
Now I am not angry
With anyone, O Lord
I have accepted
My own fate.
(One Hundred Poems of Chokha Mela, Runaal Publications, 2015, pp. 32)
8. This is one of those abhang that appear only in Kolharkar Text. Given its highly critical tone, it is no wonder that it was expunged from the Shiur manuscript which Umarkhane has relied upon. It is the inclusion of such significant abhang that makes me consider Kolharkar Text to be the authoritative extant text of Bahinambai’s poems.
9. Mhatre, Chandrakant. One Hundred Poems of Tukaram, Runaal Publications, 2015, Pp. 32
10. Keats, John. Selected Letters of John Keats, Harvard University Press, 2002, Pp. 97
How to Cite This Essay
Web version
MLA
Mhatre, Chandrakant Kaluram. “Sant Bahinabai, Her Autobiography, and the Question of Translation.” Chandrakant Kaluram Mhatre, 2026, www.chandrakantkmhatre.in/work/sant-bahinabai-autobiography-question-of-translation.
APA
Mhatre, C. K. (2026). Sant Bahinabai, her autobiography, and the question of translation. Chandrakant Kaluram Mhatre. https://www.chandrakantkmhatre.in/work/sant-bahinabai-autobiography-question-of-translation
Original publication
MLA
Mhatre, Chandrakant Kaluram. Introduction. The Autobiography of Sant Bahinabai, translated by Chandrakant Kaluram Mhatre, Sitaram Mhatre Foundation, 2023, pp. i–xxxii.
APA
Mhatre, C. K. (2023). Introduction. In The autobiography of Sant Bahinabai (C. K. Mhatre, Trans., pp. i–xxxii). Sitaram Mhatre Foundation.