Sant Dnyaneshwar (also Jnaneshwar; 1275–1296) was a Marathi Vaishnava saint of the Yadava era whose Dnyaneshwari, a vernacular commentary on the Bhagavad Gita composed at Nevasa in 1290 at age 15, is the founding text of the Varkari Marathi literary tradition. Born at Apegaon on the Godavari near Paithan into a Deshastha Brahmin family that had been excommunicated for his father’s broken sannyasa, he and his three siblings (Nivruttinath, Sopan, Muktabai) became leading bhakti poets of late 13th-century Maharashtra. Dnyaneshwar entered sanjeevan samadhi at Alandi on Kartik Krishna Trayodashi of Shaka 1218 (about 25 October 1296 CE) at age 21. His samadhi shrine at Alandi, 25 km north of Pune on the Indrayani, is the starting point of the annual Dnyaneshwar palkhi to Pandharpur.
Family and excommunication
The four siblings were the children of Vitthal Pant Kulkarni and his wife Rukmini of Apegaon village. Vitthal Pant had been initiated into sannyasa at Varanasi by Swami Ramananda; on his return south he resumed householder life at his wife’s insistence, an act the orthodox Brahmin assembly held to be impossible. The Paithan Brahmin council excommunicated the family. After the parents took their own lives in the Godavari to remove the impediment from their children, the four orphaned children, all under 15, lived as outcastes at Alandi and Nevasa.
The eldest brother Nivruttinath, then about 14, received initiation from the Nath yogi Gahininath in the cave at Trimbakeshwar and in turn became guru to his three younger siblings. The Nath sampradaya, founded by Gorakshanath in the 12th-13th centuries, is the principal yogic lineage of the Deccan and the technical foundation of Dnyaneshwar’s later writings. The lineage Dnyaneshwar names in the colophon of the Dnyaneshwari is Adinath (Shiva) – Matsyendranath – Gorakhnath – Gahininath – Nivruttinath – Dnyandev.
The Dnyaneshwari
The Bhavarthadipika, popularly called Dnyaneshwari, was composed in 1290 at Nevasa on the Pravara river, dictated by Dnyaneshwar to his scribe Sacchidananda Baba. It is a free Marathi commentary on the 700 verses of the Bhagavad Gita, running to roughly 9,000 ovi verses (about 60,000 words). The text takes each Gita verse, paraphrases it in Marathi, and then expands the meaning with similes drawn from village Maharashtra: agricultural images, river images, household images, weaving images. The style established Marathi as a literary language equal to Sanskrit for the first time.
The doctrinal framework is Advaita Vedanta filtered through the Nath yoga of his lineage. Dnyaneshwar treats Krishna as the saguna form of the nirguna Brahman, and the Gita’s three margas (karma, bhakti, jnana) as complementary expressions of the same realisation. The Dnyaneshwari is preserved in over 700 manuscripts; the standard critical edition is the Vasudev Annaji Apte text of 1909, with subsequent editions by VK Rajwade and others.
The Amrutanubhav and the Haripath
Dnyaneshwar’s second major work, the Amrutanubhav (“experience of nectar”), is a shorter independent treatise of about 800 ovi verses, dating from 1294. It is not a commentary but a freestanding philosophical poem on Advaita: the nature of Brahman, the relation of Shiva and Shakti, and the analysis of speech, knowledge and realisation. The text is more concentrated and more technical than the Dnyaneshwari and is regarded as Dnyaneshwar’s mature philosophical position.
The Haripath, a set of 28 abhangas, is the daily-recitation text of the Varkari sampradaya, taught to every initiate. Two further texts attributed to Dnyaneshwar are the Changdev Pasashti, 65 ovi verses written to instruct the 1,400-year-old yogi Changdev (a yogi of mythical longevity), and the corpus of independent abhangas, of which several hundred are accepted as authentic.
The pilgrimage and the samadhi
In 1295 Dnyaneshwar and his siblings made the pilgrimage to Pandharpur with Namdev, the senior Varkari poet of the period. The Pandharpur visit established the Dnyaneshwar-Namdev partnership at the centre of the Varkari literary canon. After the pilgrimage, Dnyaneshwar returned to Alandi and announced his intention to enter samadhi.
On Kartik Krishna Trayodashi of Shaka 1218, in the presence of Nivruttinath, Sopan, Muktabai and Namdev, he entered a stone chamber prepared at the Siddheshwar temple at Alandi, and the entrance was sealed. He was 21. The samadhi was held by the tradition to be sanjeevan, the saint in continuing meditation rather than dead. The site became the Sant Dnyaneshwar Maharaj Samadhi Mandir, the principal Varkari shrine in the Pune district, and the starting point of the annual palkhi to Pandharpur.
Influence on Marathi and Maharashtra
The Dnyaneshwari and the Amrutanubhav established Marathi as a vehicle for philosophical exposition; before them, Vedanta was written in Sanskrit only. The text was studied and memorised across rural Maharashtra for the next seven centuries and remains the foundational Marathi text for the Varkari sampradaya. Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s Gita Rahasya (1915), the most widely read modern Marathi commentary on the Gita, draws heavily on the Dnyaneshwari’s structure and idiom.
For what it’s worth, the most useful first reading of Dnyaneshwar in English is the V G Pradhan translation of the Dnyaneshwari (State University of New York Press, 1969), which preserves the ovi structure and gives the village similes their full force. Modern paraphrase translations soften the texture of the original.
Common questions
Was Dnyaneshwar really 16 when he wrote the Dnyaneshwari?
The colophon of the Dnyaneshwari gives the date as Shaka 1212, which corresponds to 1290 CE. The traditional birth date of 1275 makes him 15 at composition. Some scholars (R G Bhandarkar, Datta) have argued for slightly later dates that would make him 18-20. The age is exceptional in any case; the philosophical and literary maturity of the text supports the tradition rather than a more conservative dating.
What happened to his three siblings?
Nivruttinath, the eldest, took samadhi at Trimbakeshwar in 1297, the year after Dnyaneshwar. Sopan took samadhi at Saswad, near Pune. Muktabai, the youngest and the only sister, disappeared in a thunderstorm at Vidyapur on the Tapti river in 1297 at age 18. The three are commemorated alongside Dnyaneshwar in Varkari kirtans, and Muktabai’s own abhangas form an important sub-corpus of early Marathi women’s bhakti poetry.
How does the Alandi palkhi work?
Each year, in the second half of June, the silver paduka (sandals) of Dnyaneshwar are placed in a palkhi (palanquin) at Alandi and the procession sets off for Pandharpur, a distance of about 230 km, walked in about 21 days to arrive in time for Ashadhi Ekadashi. Hundreds of thousands of warkaris join the procession on foot, organised into dindis (groups), each with its own banner, kirtan leader and food arrangement. The Dnyaneshwar palkhi merges en route with the Tukaram palkhi from Dehu.
One limitation worth noting
The traditional dates given here follow the standard Varkari chronology. The historicity of specific events such as the meeting with Changdev or the precise date of the Pandharpur pilgrimage rests on the late biographies of Mahipati and Namdev, written centuries after Dnyaneshwar’s death. The Marathi medievalist R C Dhere’s Sri Vitthal: Ek Mahasamanvaya sets out the documentary problems carefully. The biographical summary is at the Dnyaneshwar entry on Wikipedia.
