your bridge home
Saints and Poets
He wrote the book Maharashtra has been reading for seven hundred years, and he was about fifteen when he did it.
He was born in 1275 and he died in 1296, and in between he did the thing Marathi has not stopped thanking him for.
There were four of them, Nivrittinath the eldest, then Dnyaneshwar, then Sopan, then Muktabai, the only girl and the youngest. They grew up under a shadow their parents had made, and they had not.
A disputed religious status in the family. It meant the orthodox society around them would not accept them.
The details of that are a story of their own. What matters here is the effect.
The four children were on their own. Largely outside the institutions. With no position, and no patron.
Nivrittinath had received initiation in the Nath lineage, and he passed it to his brother. So Dnyaneshwar's teacher was his own elder brother, and the two things he had were that transmission and a formidable mind.
At Nevasa, around 1290, he composed the Dnyaneshwari.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.