- Lived:
- by tradition 1270–1350, from Pandharpur on the Bhīmā — with a birth some tellings place at Narsi in Marathwada — to the Punjab and back; the two ends of his life are marked by shrines two thousand kilometres apart
- Field:
- Bhakti poetry and kīrtan performance in Marathi and Hindavī — the singing engine of the Varkari movement of Viṭṭhal of Pandharpur
- The Big Idea:
- The whole of religion can be compressed into one act anyone can do — singing God's name — and a song is a vehicle that no border, caste bar or language line can stop. He turned devotion into performance, and the performance travelled.
- In their words:
- "The Hindu goes to the temple, the Musalmān to the mosque; Nāmā serves a Lord who is in neither." (a hymn under his name in the Guru Granth Sahib; our rendering)
- If you remember one thing:
- A tailor's son from a Marathi temple town sang so far beyond his own world that sixty-one hymns bearing his name were bound into the scripture of another religion, in another language, at the other end of India — the first Marathi voice all of India heard.