your bridge home
Saints and Poets
No priest will officiate at their weddings or their funerals, so he sets about making the priest unnecessary.
The instruction is four words in Bengali: haate kam, mukhe nam.
Work in the hands. The name on the lips.
That is very nearly the whole of a religion, and what is radical in it is what it leaves out. There is no retreat. No renunciation, no forest, no begging bowl, no celibacy, no cave. You stay exactly where you are.
In the field. In the house. With the children, and the debt, and the work.
And you say the name while you do it.
Harichand Thakur was born around the 11th of March, 1812, at Safaladanga in Gopalganj, into a Vaishnavite peasant family. His father was Jashomanta Thakur, his mother Annapurna Devi. He died on the 5th of March, 1878, at Faridpur, all of it in the eastern delta of Bengal, in what is now Bangladesh.
His community was the Namasudra, known then by a name they had not chosen: Chandal. They were cultivators, boatmen and fishermen. In the low wet country of the delta.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.