- Lived:
- born, by tradition, in the 1260s at Gaṅgākheḍ on the Godāvarī; carried as a small girl to Pandharpur, where she spent the rest of her life — some eighty years — as a servant in one tailor's household
- Field:
- Bhakti poetry in Marathi — the abhaṅga song form of the Varkari tradition of Viṭṭhal of Pandharpur
- The Big Idea:
- Devotion does not need leisure, learning, a temple or a priest. God, she sang, gets up before dawn and does the housework beside the servant who loves him — grinding grain, sweeping floors, carrying out the rubbish — and a woman scrubbing pots has as much standing to talk to him, scold him and adore him as any brahmin at any altar.
- In their words:
- "Grinding, pounding, I will sing of you, my Endless One." (from an abhaṅga bearing her signature; our rendering)
- If you remember one thing:
- A servant girl from an untouchable caste signed her poems "Nāmdev's dāsī" — turning the lowest name society gave her into an author's name — and the tradition she served thought those poems worth preserving for seven hundred years.