Introduction
Bhakti-Sufi songs have been a part of my life since my undergraduate years—and possibly even before that, but I took their cognizance around then. I continued to pursue the field academically during my postgraduation. However, the true meaning and depth of Bhakti-Sufi world opened up to me during the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly through the works of a thirteenth/fourteenth-century Marathi woman poet, Janabai. Before this, bhakti was an enquiry into the self for me, but it was during the pandemic—which coincided with the initial years of my PhD degree—when we were forced into isolation, cut off from the physical world of other people, that I began understanding the power of the Bhakti-Sufi world in forming a community—something several scholars have argued.
I began writing a diary to calm my anxiety, and to process both global turmoil and personal upheaval. I would sometimes write to myself, Dear Nitya; sometimes to another human being, Dear X; and sometimes to my diary, of course; but often, I found myself writing to the Universe. While phones provide the illusion of instant availability in our modern time and age, writing by hand to sometimes known but unavailable, sometimes unknown figures calmed my heart, soul and body. In that period, writing itself became a hāk—a call, a cry, a summons—for me, though, the recipient of that hāk was not fixed.
This essay is an attempt to theorize my experience of writing to absent figures during the pandemic. Bhakti poetry appears to be the most fertile ground for such an enquiry because the paradox of absence-presence, longing-belonging, separation-union is inherent to them. Thus, studying selected poems by Janabai, Mirabai, Kabir, and Ravidas, I argue that bhakti songs are a hāk: sometimes—most often—to a god, sometimes to inanimate objects, sometimes to the self through the divine, and sometimes to a community, and that the power of these songs lies precisely in the fluidity and flexibility of who or what the apostrophe is. In its essence, an apostrophe is a direct address to someone or something that is not present or cannot respond immediately. The absence of the addressee provides a certain freedom to the addresser. Bhakti songs, particularly, are structured through a call-and-response mechanism, an apostrophe-and-signature format. Thus, rather than dissolving the distance and difference between the self and the other, a hāk, in them, inhabits it by formulating a dialogic exchange. Here, in the bhakti domain, a hāk does not simply articulate devotion but it illustrates a desire to reach out to an ‘other’ with a kind of insistence that feels intimate and uncertain simultaneously.
This essay shows how hāk takes different forms in the respective corpora of the aforementioned saint-poets, and how apostrophe emerges as a generative mode that opens up possibilities for reimagining both subjectivity and community in moments of social and existential flux by keeping the identity of the addressee fluid and shifting across registers: divine, human, communal, or the inner self. I conclude by discussing a modern parallel to mine: the book titled Dear Tukoba. First, let’s consider Janabai’s hāk to an elusive ‘other’ mirroring my own outcries.
Mirroring Other and Unravelling Self
Eklich gata, duja sād umat-ta.
(She sings alone, another one responds.)
Kon tujhe barobari, sād deto nirantari.
(Who is with you, who keeps responding?)
(Janabai, poem 256 in Sant Janabai, tr. Author)
These lines, attributed to Janabai, present the hāk in a rather indirect form: we don’t hear the call to a clear addressee, but it is suggested that the hāk must be there because of the sād, or response. Here, a solitary voice is never quite alone—this resonance is perhaps why my heart was so moved by Janabai during the pandemic that I eventually wrote a PhD dissertation on her tradition. Janabai was a 13th-14th century woman saint from Maharashtra, who, according to the poetry attributed to her as well as her hagiography, served as a dāsi (servant, disciple) to Namdev and his household. Her poetry is laden with domestic imagery wherein she turns household drudgery into heartfelt abhangas. Tradition tells us that she was without parents from early childhood, and was discovered by Namdev and taken in by his family. Thus, she saw Namdev’s family as her own. Several of her poems portray her performing household chores in which Vitthal—the Pandharpur deity she adores—assists her. On the other hand, many poems also call out to her mother Vithabai, father Vithoba, or even Vithya, asking them to rush to meet her.
While much of her poetry can be read as a hāk of an abandoned, orphaned, lone child to god, this specific poem stands out for its elusive portrayal of the addressee. At first, the structure of the line appears clear and straightforward—one sings, another answers. Yet, the second line unsettles this clarity by turning the scene into a question. Who, exactly, accompanies the singer? And is this a conversation of call-response between two parties or three: who is the one asking this question? The poem withholds a direct answer, or rather, displaces it:
Khun kal-li Namdeva, Vitthal shrota Janichya bhava.
(Namdev understood the signs; Vitthal listens to Jani’s emotions.)
(Janabai, poem 256 in Sant Janabai, tr. Author)
These lines do not explicitly state that Namdev saw or heard Jani’s voice being responded to, or heard by Vitthal. Rather, they show Namdev’s recognition in an indirect manner. Furthermore, while the first two lines emphasize responding or response, Namdev’s understanding focuses on listening—shrotā. The audience or reader is left to wonder who exactly the responding voice is. Is it Vitthal who truly answers back? Or is it Namdev’s response to Jani’s song which we construe as Vitthal’s response to her? Or is the ‘response’ something that emerges from her own singing—an echo that is only later attributed, named, or understood?
A similarly worded poem pushes this ambiguity even further by replacing the word sād with shabd to evoke an endless resonance:
Yeklich gane gasi, duja shabd umate pashi.
(She sings alone, another word arises in response.)
Kon ga tujhyabarobari, gane gati nirantari.
(Who is with you? Who sings with you, endlessly?)
(Janabai, poem 221 in Sant Janabai, tr. Author)
Here, the response is no longer a distinct voice but a limitless word—perhaps an anhad nād, one might say—that arises, as if language itself is the response to the deep emotional and physical suffering. Similar to the previous poem, these lines, too, avoid naming the responder. Rather, they abruptly move to name Jani’s parents as Pandurang and Rakhumai. Through this evasive shift, the poem situates Jani’s identity in divine lineage. Janabai’s hāk, thus, proliferates possibilities in the addressee: the divine, an externalized self, the community that hears and interprets, or the very structure of language that produces echo through the speaker. Apostrophe, in this context, creates a dialogic space without requiring a fixed interlocutor. To sing alone becomes a relationship between hāk and sād where the self and the other are constituted through the act of calling itself, and are not fixed.
Janabai's Translated Verses
देव खाते देव पीते । देवावरी मी निजतें ॥१॥
देव देते देव घेते । देवासवें व्यवहारिते ॥२॥
देव येथें देव तेथे । देवाविणें नाहीं रीतें ॥३॥
जनी म्हणे विठाबाई । भरुनि उरलें अंतरबाहीं ॥४॥
***
I eat god, I drink god; I sleep upon god.
I give god, I take god; I am in business with god.
God is here, god is there; not even nothing is without god.
Jani says, Vithabai, you have filled me inside-out.
डोईचा पदर आला खांद्यावरी । भरल्या बाजारीं जाईन मी ॥१॥
हातीं घेईन टाळ खांद्यावरी वीणा । आतां मज मना कोण करी ॥२॥
पंढरीच्या पेठे मांडियेले पाल । मनगटावर तेल घाला तुह्मी ॥३॥
जनी म्हणे देवा मी झालें येसवा । निघालें केशवा घर तुझें ॥४॥
***
The padar from my head has dropped to my shoulder,
for I intend to go to the crowded bazaar.
With cymbals in my hands, and veena on my shoulder;
who dare stop me now?
My shop is set up in the Pandharpur market,
anoint my wrists with fragrant oil.
Jani says god, I have become a prostitute.
Keshava, I have set out for your home.
मी तों समर्थाची दासी । मिठी घालीन पायांसीं ॥१॥
हाचि माझा दृढभाव । करीन नामाचा उत्सव ॥२॥
आह्मां दासीस हें काम । मुखीं विठ्ठल हरिनाम ॥३॥
सर्व सुख पायीं लोळे । जनीसंगें विठ्ठल बोले ॥४॥
***
I am the dasi of that capable one, I embrace his feet.
It is my resolve to celebrate his name.
This is the work of us dasis: to keep Vitthal’s, Hari’s name upon our lips.
All happiness gathers at the feet, as Vitthal plays with Jani.
माझा लोभ नाहीं देवा । तुझी करीं ना मी सेवा ॥१॥
नाहीं अंगीं थोरपण । मिथ्या धरिसी गुमान ॥२॥
रामा येऊनि काय करिसी । तुझें बळ आह्मांपासीं ॥३॥
नाहीं सामर्थ्य तुज हरी । जनी ह्मणे धरिला चोरीं ॥४॥
***
I am not greedy for your affection, god!
I will not do your seva.
Do not hold even the slightest of
your false pride within your body.
What will you do with this anger of yours?
When your strength abides with us.
You have no abilities, Hari!
Jani says, I have seen through the trickery.
भक्ति ते कठीण इंगळासी खाई । रिघणें त्या डोहीं कठीण असे ॥१॥
भक्ति तें कठीण विषग्रास घेणें । उदास पैं होणें जीवें भावें ॥२॥
भक्ति ते कठीण भक्ति ते कठीण । सोसी जो तो वार घडे तया॥३॥
भक्ति ते कठीण विचारुनि पाहे जनी । भक्तियोगें संतसमागमीं सर्व सिद्धी ॥४॥
***
Bhakti is a difficult coal mine,
To penetrate such a trench is not easy.
Bhakti is like consuming a poisonous bite;
It renders the heart and soul sorrowful.
Bhakti is hard, bhakti is difficult!
Only those to whom it strikes, endure it.
Bhakti is difficult, Jani concludes, after contemplation.
In bhakti-yog, the company of saints grants you all attainment.
अहो ब्रह्मांड पाळका । ऐकें रुक्मिणीच्या कुंका ॥१॥
देवा घेतलें पदरीं । तें तूं टाकूं नको दुरी ॥२॥
होतें लोकांमध्यें निंद्य । तें त्वां जगांत केलें वंद्य ॥३॥
विनवीतसे दासी जनी । परिसा माझी विनवणी ॥४॥
***
O Guardian of the Universe, listen—Rukmini’s husband.
You took me under your wing, deva; now don’t separate us!
That which was criticized among people, was made venerable in the world by you.
Dasi Jani implores: please attend to my pleas.
Janabai’s mysterious sād finds a peculiar echo in Kabir, whose apostrophe to Ram unravels his own identity. According to the poems attributed to Kabir and his hagiography, he was born into a humble weaver family around the fifteenth century in Varanasi. Kabir’s poetry presents a syncretic Hindu-Muslim world, rejecting rigid rituals, scriptures, and mediation by priests for raw spiritual truth. His dohās challenged caste divisions, idol worship, and empty piety, urging sadhus and fakirs to follow the path of nirguna bhakti—devotion to a formless divine—portraying God as accessible to everyone. Kabir’s irreverent style mixed earthy everyday metaphors—pots, rivers, looms—with profound insights and functioned to baffle the reader or listener. Consider the following lines attributed to him that blur the distinction between addresser and addressee:
Tell me, Ram: what will happen to me?
…
I squandered a life spent in Siva’s city: moved to Magahar when my time was ripe.
…
Kashi, Magahar: they seem the same.
…
And Kabir? Dead already.
He’s enjoying life with Ram.
(Hawley and Juergensmeyer 53)
The poem begins with a straightforward—unlike Jani’s elusive—address to Ram, but rather than answering the question, the poem shifts register to provide a background to the question, that is, why is this question even being asked by the poet? Kabir, who left the holy city of Kashi, and moved to the ordinary Magahar, where he is said to have left his body, questions religious structures. This movement from Kashi to Magahar—sites loaded with opposing associations of liberation and non-liberation—becomes a deliberate disruption of inherited binaries, which is further bolstered by the remark: ‘Kashi, Magahar: they seem the same,’ much like Ram and Kabir.
By shifting from a second-person conversation to a third-person assertion, ‘And Kabir? Dead already,’ the poem destabilizes the distinction between Ram and Kabir, the addressee and the addresser; if Kabir is already ‘dead,’ who is speaking? And to whom? This move exposes the fragility of the frameworks through which the divine is understood as an external authority. Apostrophe, here, becomes a mode of undoing—of dissolving distinctions between life and death, sacred and profane, here and elsewhere. Ram is addressed, yet the poem focuses on meditation and reflection of Kabir and thus, the address, the hāk, the poem folds into a realization of immanence: ‘He’s enjoying life with Ram.’
In this sense, the distance or difference that an apostrophe typically presumes is unsettled. Kabir’s hāk calls only to reveal that while the separation between the devotee and the divine, the addresser and the addressee may be illusory, it is necessary for self-actualization. This poem shows only one example of hāk in Kabir’s corpus, particularly a hāk to Ram. However, Linda Hess has shown how Kabir’s poetry uses dialectic—kahe Kabir, suno (says Kabir, listen)—to “assault” its audience or readers, that it is composed to break something in them, through such direct calls—several of his poems address a fakir, a sadhu, a pundit, a Qazi, and a friend (Hess, 2002).
Both Janabai’s and Kabir’s calls converge in the idea that composing a song is itself an act of calling which unsettles the boundary between self and other. While Janabai’s ‘other’ remains obscure, Kabir’s addressee, though named explicitly, functions as a means of unpacking the self. In both cases, however, the hāk is not merely a call across spatial or temporal distance or difference but also a creative space where the self is produced relationally, dismantling the illusion that there is separation between the divine and the devotee, the speaker and the listener, the self and the other, or even, the past, present, and the future. Such a formulation brings us to poet-saints for whom calling becomes a way of imagining, anticipating, and even inhabiting possible futures: Mirabai, who anticipates the arrival of a lover, and Ravidas, who imagines a just city.
Anticipating and Imagining future(s)
Mira’s poetry or songs are exceptionally popular across public and academic domains. She is usually considered the epitome of a lovelorn heart, and many Bollywood songs borrow their lyrics from the poetry attributed to her. Popular stories tell us that Mirabai, the sixteenth century Rajput princess from Mewar, took Krishna as her husband when she was just a child. However, she was soon married off to a Rana. Upon the Rana’s death, Mira is known to have abandoned material luxuries, and to have embraced Krishna as she danced ecstatically amid sadhu-sants. Her songs pulse with a consistent erotic longing for the dark-skinned Giridhar. For instance, consider the following lines where we see her preparing for the arrival of her beloved:
Come cloud, fill Thyself with water and come.
O my companion, the raindrops are falling
…
Today the Beloved will come to my house.
…
And you, O my companions, will sing Him songs of welcome.
Says Mira: O Hari, O Indestructible One,
Fortunate indeed are those who attain Thy side.
(Alston 95)
It is a particularly interesting poem, as the call unfolds across multiple addressees: the cloud, the companion, and ultimately Hari, Mira’s Girdhari, her beloved. Each invocation adds a layer to Mira’s hāk wherein natural elements, such as the clouds, also participate—not just as metaphors, but materially—in this emotional and personal outcry of waiting for the lover. By beginning with the line: ‘Come cloud, fill Thyself with water and come,’ the poem immediately establishes the hāk as an address that exceeds human interlocutors. Here, the natural, non-human world appears as an extension of the addresser’s—or the speaker’s—subjectivity and desire.
At the same time, the invocation to companion is itself layered: in the first instance, it is an address to Girdhar or the beloved, and in the second, it is to the sakhi, the friend, the companion—conventionally a woman, who witnesses, or will witness this communion. What is implicit in Janabai’s poem is made explicit in Mira’s through this invocation to the sakhi. The call, or hāk, here, oscillates between Mira and her companion(s), redistributing anticipation across a shared field. Through this dispersal, longing becomes communal, sustained through repeated and shared invocations. The apostrophe, thus, exists between the divine and the social, binding them together in a personal network of longing.
At last, the poem arrives at its destination: the hāk to the lover. This final and direct invocation to Hari, the divine, projects a possibility of ‘attaining’ him following the previous line: ‘my beloved will come home today.’ In that sense, the poem does not suggest the final arrival, but a potential of imagining the arrival. In other words, the hāk, here, is forward-looking, conjuring a presence that has not yet arrived; it is promised but deferred, and it is precisely this deferral that sustains the essence of hāk in Mira’s poetry. The house is readied, songs are imagined, and companions are gathered—not because the beloved has arrived, but because the call insists that arrival is expected. Mira’s song, an outcry of a separated lover’s heart, preserves the gap between absence and presence. Through and in this gap, the call does not resolve absence but holds it open as a productive condition. What emerges, then, is not simply devotion but a form of reality. Thus, the beloved’s absence is not a lack to be remedied but the very condition that enables this expansive, participatory mode of being. Apostrophe functions productively not despite the absence of the addressee, but because of it—which brings us to Ravidas’s call to an imagined city.
Ravidas was a fifteenth or sixteenth-century saint-poet from the historically stigmatised ‘untouchable’ Chamar caste—he is revered as a distinguished Dalit saint in north India. His poetry refers significantly to his occupational tasks of collecting and dyeing leather. The signature or the identifying marker of attribution in his poems is also Raidas khalās chamārā, the pure, or liberated, or true chamār. In one of his poems, he envisions Begumpura—a utopian city where there is no caste hierarchy, no sorrow, no taxes, and no wrongdoing. While Mira prepares for the arrival of the lover, Ravidas is already there to claim his vision of a just city. In Ravidas’s poem, through the hāk, the addressee—a brother—is named, invoked, and drawn into this shared outward political and social vision:
The regal realm with the sorrowless name:
They call it Queen City [Begumpura], a place with no pain,
No taxes, no cares, nor own property there,
no wrongdoing, worry, terror or torture.
Oh my brother, I’ve come to take it as my own,
my distant home, where everything is right.
(Hawley and Juergensmeyer 32)
Several of Ravidas’s poems address a peddler, and in some, he refers to himself as a peddler. Thus, the envisioning of a city, or a hāk to an imagined but equitable city, can be read as a resolution to a constant and systemic homelessness. Ravidas’s Begumpura has since become a symbol as well as a call for an anti-caste revolution leading to a utopia based on radical equality—Gail Omvedt’s Seeking Begumpura (2008) is a testament to it. In the aforementioned lines, this utopic city is imagined and claimed through collective assertion. The first one appears in the line: ‘They call it Queen City,’ which highlights how the city comes to be through a collective voice—they; the city exists insofar as it is spoken of, invoked, and shared.
And thus, the apostrophic turn, ‘Oh my brother,’ is crucial to how this space is crafted. The ‘brother,’ here, functions both as an audience and a participant in the call to envision and claim this city. This kinship and equalizing term mirrors the social order of Begumpura as a living community of fellow human beings, not just as a distant utopic space. The address collapses distance and difference between the addresser and the addressee, enacting within language the very dissolution of hierarchy that the city promises. The hāk—to a brother and to the city—functions as a social gesture: it brings together a community capable of recognizing and inhabiting this social vision based on fairness. This socio-political hāk, which bridges the gap between lived experience and imagined possibility, has been influential for anti-caste movements.
Furthermore, the line ‘I’ve come to take it as my own’ carries a dual force. It suggests arrival, but also aspiration; unlike Mira, who suggested the potential in arrival, Ravidas already inhabits the vision to claim it as his. The call, then, is both a declaration and an invitation, as it asserts an individual relationship to the future while asking others to recognize and inhabit it. The paradoxical phrase ‘my distant home’ reinforces this doubleness—Begumpura is simultaneously claimed as ‘my own’ and ‘distant’, existing in a space that must be bridged through a hāk, a call. The poem’s language holds together the perpetual contradiction of presence and absence, of possessing and lacking, in bhakti poetry, and the imagined city becomes inhabitable within and through the act of calling itself.
Conclusion
The hāk, as we observed in the essay, appears in interconnected and diverse forms: in Janabai, as an elusive echo where all we know is who the addresser is but the real identity of the responder remains indeterminate; in Kabir, as a direct address that ultimately is reflected back to unsettle the distinction between the addresser and the addressee; in Mira, as an evocatively personal and love-laden anticipatory invocation; and in Ravidas, as a summon to imagine, bring into being, and claim an alternative social order, where there are no taxes, no wrongdoings, no one is second or third, and all are rich and secure. While these variations differ in tone, direction, and addressee, they converge in demonstrating that the bhakti songs are a hāk where the distance and the difference are continually shared and redistributed across the positions of speaker and listener, self and other, and past, present, and future. It is this very instability that prepares the ground for a crucial turn: when the poets themselves—once the callers—are drawn into the position of those being called.
The above trajectories, thus, culminate not in closure but in circulation, as ordinary people call out to the saints, the way the saints called out to something or someone—majorly divinity. A beautiful example is Vinayak Hogade’s book Dear Tukoba—the book actually inspired me to write this essay. It brings together three different forms of calling out to someone, remembering someone, and conversing with someone. The first section, called Tukaramayan, contains poems composed by Hogade that imagine a meeting between Tukaram and other thinkers and revolutionaries of different times. The second section imagines what would have happened if Tuka lived today in the twenty-first century, how he would face the scrutiny from the protectors and gatekeepers of religion and God. And the third, my favourite section, consists of letters that Hogade writes to Tukoba—and is titled “Dear Tukoba.”
Just as Tukaram, the seventeenth-century Marathi saint-poet from Dehu near Pune, transformed systemic and personal agony into spiritual and social power through thousands of abhangs, Hogade attempts to do the same, turning love for his and several others’ Tukoba into public discourse and finding solace. This act stimulates human connection by inviting readers to revisit Tukaram’s abhangas not as relics, but as living responses to today’s chaos. In this manner, the bhakti saints—not just Tukaram—occupy the position once held usually by the divine or the unimagined. The structure of apostrophe reproduces itself across time, reconfiguring its addressees while retaining its fundamental openness.
The hāk, then, is more a mode of inhabiting relations without the eventual closure. It echoes, anticipates, questions, and imagines, and thereby, continues to sustain a space between self and other in which productive meaning can emerge. Hogade’s hāk to Tuka, in the form of his book, culminates with a poem likely composed by him to express his admiration for Tukoba, but in his letter, imagined to be sung by Bahinabai at Tuka’s birthday celebration. The poem shows Tukoba to be several things to people: the essence of life, the soul of a poem, a ray of hope, words for the mute, the seed of resistance, etc. Let me conclude this essay with the following lines, which, while referring to Tukaram, can also refer to hāk, as both of them “remain(s) flowing; splashe(s); surge(s) again,” and “remain(s) despite speaking” (Hogade 169, tr. Author).
References
- Alston, A. J. The Devotional Poems of Mirabai. Motilal Banarsidass, 1980.
- Hawley, John Stratton, and Mark Juergensmeyer. Songs of the Saints of India. Oxford University Press, 1988.
- Hess, Linda. “Introduction.” The Bijak of Kabir, translated by Linda Hess and Shukdeo Singh, Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 3-37.
- Hogade, Vinayak. Dear Tukoba. Madhushri Publication, 2022.
- Omvedt, Gail. Seeking Begumpura: The Social Vision of Anticaste Intellectuals. Navayana, 2008.
- Sant Janabai: Charitra va Kavya. 2nd ed., Janabai Shikshan Sanstha, 2018.
Image: “Janabai”, 0010 by Irina Glushkova from Regional Bhakti resources licensed under CC-BY-UN
Note: All English translations of Janabai’s verses in this work are done by the author.