Bhagat Namdev

Bhagat Namdev was a saint of Maharashtra who composed fervent devotional poetry in Marathi and in Hindi. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism dates him from 1270 to 1350. His Hindi verse and a long stay in the Punjab carried his fame far beyond Maharashtra, and sixty-one of his hymns are in the Guru Granth Sahib.

By the generally accepted tradition he was born in 1270 in the village of Narasi-Vamani in Satara district, the son of Damasheti, a low-caste tailor, and his wife Gonabai. He was married before the age of eleven to Rajabai, and had four sons and a daughter. Under the influence of the saint Jnanadeva he took the path of bhakti, devoted to Vitthala of Pandharpur, and spent much of his time in worship and kirtan, singing mostly verses of his own. With Jnanadeva and other saints he roamed the country.

Key points

• He later came to the Punjab and is said to have lived there for more than twenty years at Ghuman in Gurdaspur district. A temple in the form of a samadh keeps his memory. Sardar Jassa Singh Ramgarhia built it, and Rani Sada Kaur, mother-in-law of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, had the tank beside it repaired.
• In his early fifties he settled at Pandharpur, where devotees gathered around him and his abhangas, devotional lyrics, became very popular.
• He died in 1350, at Pandharpur by one tradition and at Ghuman by the other.

His hymns in the Guru Granth Sahib praise the One Supreme God. The Encyclopaedia notes that they differ from his earlier verse, which carries traces of idolatry and of devotion to God with attributes: in the course of his search he had moved from worshipping the Divine in concrete form to devotion to the attributeless (nirguna) Absolute. Tradition credits him with more than two thousand hymns, but the real number does not seem to exceed 150, counting those in the Guru Granth Sahib. His songs are collected in the Namdevachi Gatha, which also holds his long autobiographical poem, the Tirathavali.

Namdev is one of the saints whose compositions appear alongside the Gurus' hymns in the two surviving pothis kept by the descendants of Guru Amar Das, together with Kabir, Ravidas and Bhikhan. Guru Arjan, who compiled the Granth, had access to these pothis. The Encyclopaedia lists Namdev among the Bhagats whose bani is in the Guru Granth Sahib.