The Poet Buried at the Step

The grave is in the way.

If you go to the Vithoba temple at Pandharpur and walk up to the entrance, there is a samadhi at the step. You do not go around it. To go in, you cross it.

The man in it was not allowed inside the building.

Who he was

Chokhamela lived in the thirteenth or fourteenth century in Maharashtra. He was born at Mehuna Raja, in what is now Buldhana district, lived at Mangalvedha, and came at the end to Pandharpur.

He was a Mahar, a community placed at the bottom of the caste order of his time and treated as untouchable. His work was what Mahars did: guarding and labouring in the fields of upper-caste landholders.

He was already a devotee of Vitthal when he encountered the poet-saint Namdev (c. 1270-1350), and was drawn by him into the Varkari movement, the tradition of pilgrims who walk to Pandharpur twice a year, singing, and have been doing it for something like eight hundred years.

The Varkari poet-saints are a startling list precisely because it is not a list of brahmins. Namdev was a tailor. Gora was a potter, Sena a barber, Savata a gardener, Narahari a goldsmith. Chokhamela was a Mahar. The movement's whole claim was that the god at Pandharpur did not ask for credentials, and the roster of its poets is the argument.