Person · Varkari poet-saint · India
Eknāth
Also known as Eknath at Paithan
The 16-century Marathi bhakti poet-saint Eknath (1533-1599), the great householder-saint of the Varkari tradition who lived at Paithan on the Godavari throughout his life. Eknath was the great-grandson of Bhanudas (who had restored the Vithoba image at Pandharpur in 1443) and a disciple of Janardana Swami. His 11,000-couplet Eknathi Bhagavata (1573) is a Marathi commentary on the 11th Skandha of the Bhagavata Purana. His Bhavartha Ramayana (unfinished at his death) extended Ramayana devotional literature into Marathi. Eknath's social activism — particularly his participation in Dalit communities (performing the funeral rites of a Mahar in 1596), inviting untouchables to his home for shraddha meals, and his famous dispute with Brahmins over caste discrimination — made him a key figure in the pre-modern Hindu reform tradition. His samadhi at Paithan draws Varkari pilgrims.
- Date
- 1533–1599
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Condition
- historical person + living pilgrimage
- River basin
- Godavari
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 19.480, 75.380
About the place
Placed at Paithan on the Godavari, where he lived, wrote the Eknathi Bhagavata, and where his samadhi and the annual festival are.
Connections (4)
- Teaching lineageVarkarī sampradāya
Eknāth of Paithan stands between Dnyāneshwar and Tukārām in the Varkarī succession. He recovered and edited the Dnyāneshwarī text, which had drifted in copying, and wrote bhārūds — dramatic songs in the voices of washerwomen, Mahārs and street performers that carried Vedānta in the idiom of people outside it. Tradition says he was directed to the neglected samādhi at Ālandi in a dream, which is how an editorial project came to be told as a devotional one.
- Teaching lineageDnyāneshwar
Eknāth found the Dnyāneshwarī drifting badly in manuscript three centuries after it was written and produced the recension still used. Tradition says he was directed to the samādhi at Ālandi in a dream and had the tree root clearing away from it — an editorial act told as a devotional one.
- Life routeMāhishmatī / Maheshwar
Paithan on the Godāvari is Eknāth's town, an old Sātavāhana capital and a centre of Brahmin orthodoxy — which is what gave his eating with untouchables and his bhārūds in Mahār voices their force. The censure he drew came from his own community and his own street. He also produced the standard recension of the Dnyāneshwarī, which had drifted badly in three centuries of copying, so the tradition's founding text survives in the edition made by its most censured member.
- Court associationKabīr
Eknāth at Paithan and Kabīr at Banāras reached the same conclusion about caste and ritual from opposite ends of the social order and a thousand kilometres apart, with no contact between them. One was a Brahmin censured for eating with Mahārs; the other a weaver who thought the whole apparatus fraudulent.
On these journeys
Sources
Eknathi Bhagavata and Marathi bhakti scholarship.
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