Adikathaa

A village on the banks of the Krishna, a family of priests called the Gurubhakts, and hymns that survived generations.

There is a small village on the banks of the river Krishna where I come from. It is called Narsobawadi. A place where our childhood and growing years were full of fun and laughter, and where, without quite realising it, we were imbibing the feeling of bhakti.

A day was incomplete without a visit to the temple. For us, the temple, the structure, and the God we worship are synonyms. And so much that it reflects in our colloquial lingo. Outsiders may find it strange when they ask where so-and-so is and we answer “देवाकडे गेले”, a phrase that usually refers to a person’s passing. The other meaning never struck me, in the context of my wadi, until someone pointed it out recently.

To most people it is a place of pilgrimage. To me it is simply where my family has always been, because the connection to the god is there like an invisible umbilical cord.

Narsobawadi, or Nrusinhwadi, is sacred to those who follow Dattatreya. It is said that Shri Narasimha Saraswati, revered as an avatar of Datta, lived here for twelve years, on the land where the Krishna meets the Panchaganga. There is no idol in the temple. Only his padukas, his footprints in stone, beneath the old Audumbar tree. People have come for centuries to bathe at the confluence and sit before those footprints.

But this is not really a story about the temple. The temple is well documented, and a hundred others can tell it better than I can. This is a story about my family, and about something that was never written down at all.

We are a Pujari family. Priests, for as far back as anyone can trace. And among my ancestors there was one whose given name was Vitthal Dhobale. This too is one of the recent findings.

While I heard some of these stories as a child and was mesmerised by them, taking them for miracles, I may not remember the stories themselves. But the belief system was set. The connection with God, in broader terms the divine connection, was deep, an integral part of life. Everyone in the family looked forward to doing service at the temple or reciting the hymns.

The fact that we have written hymns was a moment of pride for me. I learnt of it only after my father passed away. He was a sincere devotee and recited many of these every day. After his passing, I was going through his documents. In his retirement he had spent a great deal of time digitising his prayer verses, had even made them Kindle friendly. Among them I came across a Ganapati aarti, and the memory of him reciting it is still fresh in my mind, even a few years after he is gone. My mother, as we wandered down that memory lane, mentioned that this one was written by our ancestors, and that the गुरुभक्त (Guru Bhakt) named in the verse is in fact us.

I felt so good.

And then, recently, I received an article written by someone who had visited the wadi and attended the temple rituals (where my uncle was reciting) and described these as the legacy of the Dhobale family.

So the story goes. A saint named Narayan Swami Maharaj was at the wadi, and Vitthal Dhobale received his blessing. The way it has come down in our family, after that blessing Saraswati herself, the goddess of speech, came to dwell on his tongue. He composed आरत्या and पद्ये, aartis and verses, in praise of the Guru, in language so flowing and so vivid that they became the principal songs of worship at the wadi. Not for a season. For generations. The aartis sung at Nrusinhwadi today are, in large part, still his.

He wrote on things no one else had thought to sing about. An aarti for the दक्षिण द्वार (south gate) of the temple. One for the भोजनपात्र (bhojanpatra), the sacred meal-vessel, of Shirol. And he signed his work not with his own name but as गुरुभक्त, the devotee of the Guru. That is why, to this day, our family is known by that name.

We are the Gurubhakts.

The stories that travel with him are the kind you half believe and never quite doubt. That his devotion was such that Datta Maharaj would come each day to sit in his home, and that the coming was known by a fragrance in the air, like incense though none was lit. As children, we were always told that our ancestral home held certain secret basements and places where that presence could still be felt. And we would be so excited and curious to find out.

The hymns go beyond praising the Lord. They ask something for us. They pray that the lineage itself continue, that the family go on. Some of them read like a conversation, like a child putting his innocent wishes and complaints before Him.

I am writing this down now, which no one before me in the family has done. The songs were never meant for paper, and many of them still are not.

There is a symmetry I only noticed while writing. My ancestor, the one whose voice began all of this, was named Vitthal. And the next thing I want to write about is another Vitthal, the one at Pandharpur, whose name I cannot chant without my skin rising. Perhaps the pull was always there, in the blood.

A village on a river, and a family who kept a promise by remembering. Now it is written down too. Not lost in time, but still here for anyone who seeks it.