your bridge home
Saints and Poets
His trade was beating raw cotton until it separated into something soft enough to spin. The verses do the same thing to a person.
A dhuniya carded cotton.
The work is this: raw cotton comes off the plant matted and full of seed and dirt, and it is useless until it is opened. The carder uses a large bow with a taut string.
He plucks the string against the mass of it, again and again. And the vibration shakes the fibres apart. What was a compressed dirty lump becomes a light clean cloud, and only then can anybody spin it.
It is loud, dusty, repetitive work, done by people of no standing.
Dadu Dayal was born in 1544, into that community, and it was his trade.
Dadu left around five thousand verses. The Dadu Anubhav Vani, composed in Braj, the spoken language of the region.
And he founded a following, the Dadupanth. It still exists in Rajasthan.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.