Vaishnava Jana To

The story

"Vaishnava Jana To" is a Gujarati devotional poem, a pad, by the 15th-century poet-saint Narsinh Mehta of Junagadh in Gujarat. Mehta (c. 1414–1480) came from the Nagar Brahmin community, who mostly worshipped Shiva, but he was devoted to Krishna from childhood and spent much of it singing with sadhus camped outside the town; his devotion kept his family poor. He wrote in the Gujarati that people of the region spoke rather than in Sanskrit, without the backing of any religious order, and from the late 19th century Gujarati scholars called him ādikavi, the first poet, since his songs were the earliest to circulate widely among Gujarati speakers. The pad is a short lyric built on a refrain that a group sings back.

Its authorship has been studied closely, because the poem is missing from the earliest 17th-century manuscript collections of Mehta's lyrics. The oldest known manuscript that contains it, at the B. J. Institute in Ahmedabad, is dated 1835 (Vikram Samvat 1892), though K. K. Shastri reported examining an early 18th-century one. A 19th-century claim that the poet Dalpatram (1820–1898) wrote it was dismissed once the date of that manuscript was set against the start of his career. Some scholars name Mehta and the 15th century without qualification; others note that the earliest manuscript is of the 18th century. Mehta's poems were first printed in 1852, and this one appeared again in anthologies of 1885 and 1913.

The poem defines a Vaishnava, a devotee of Vishnu, by conduct alone: empathy for the suffering of others joined to the duty to relieve it without pride, equal regard for all, truthfulness, restraint, freedom from greed and lust, and steady devotion to God, with nothing said of caste, community or gender. Mehta's songs were made for singing to morning ragas, and they are sung on dawn processions through towns and villages (prabhāt-pherī) and in all-night sessions that end at daybreak.

Mahatma Gandhi made the poem a centre of his spiritual practice. It was sung daily at his ashrams, its opening stanza stood on the title page of his Ashram Bhajanavali, and he said that even if he forgot the Bhagavad Gita this hymn alone would sustain him. It was sung on the Salt March in 1930, during his fasts, at his son Devdas's wedding in 1933 and at Kasturba Gandhi's cremation in 1944. When the Christian Joseph Royeppen and a Muslim imam asked to sing "Christian" or "Muslim" in place of "Vaishnava", Gandhi took it as proof that the poem spoke to everyone. Facing resistance to his campaign for the acceptance of Dalits in Hindu society, he cited it in his weekly Navajivan: a religion that had produced a devotee who saw all as equal could not hold some people untouchable. In his ashrams, where it was sung daily, Dalit families lived as equals with everyone else.

In the 1920s Narayan Khare, musician at the Sabarmati ashram, set the poem to a semi-classical tune in the evening raga Mishra Khamaj, to carry it beyond Gujarat; this, not the old morning tune, is the melody by which it is now known. Mumbai radio played it in the 1940s, often sung by his daughter Mathuriben Khare; Vijay Bhatt's film Narsi Bhagat (1940), made at Gandhi's suggestion, ends with it; and M. S. Subbulakshmi sang it near the close of her Carnatic concerts. It closes Richard Attenborough's film Gandhi, was sung at Drew Gilpin Faust's installation as Harvard's first woman president in 2007, and was carried by Indian and Pakistani activists on a Dandi March to Gaza in 2010–2011. It has also been sung as a qawwali and used in hip-hop.

What it says

The poem answers one question: what makes a true devotee of Vishnu? Its answer is a way of living rather than rites or birth: feeling and easing the suffering of others, treating all alike, speaking truth, wanting nothing that belongs to another, and staying humble and devoted. Its tone is calm and teaching, and it makes goodness, not caste, the measure of faith.

The words