A History of the Mahrattas v1.c5.s4.22

v1.c5.s4.22

The earliest and most remarkable figure of this new period of Marāthī literature was the poet and reformer Eknāth, a Deshasth Brahman, who was born in A.D. 1528, or, according to others, in 1548, and died in 1608. Of the ridicule and persecution which he suffered at the hands of the Brahmans of Paithan and Benares many tales are told. On several occasions he was outcasted, and once his poems were publicly sunk in the river Godāvari.² But Eknāth paid no heed to the censures of a privileged priesthood, and preached boldly against the caste-system and other social disabilities which have no sanction in the Shāstras. His literary output was immense, the most celebrated of his works being a Marāthī rendering of the Bhāgavat Purān, containing about 20,000 verses in the ovi metre, which he completed at Paithan in 1573. It was for daring to render this famous Sanskrit work in Marāthī, the language of the Sūdras, that he was arraigned before the Brahman pandits of Benares, whose fervent advocacy of Sanskrit as the only suitable literary language was only equalled by their outspoken contempt for the vernacular tongue. But Eknāth triumphed over his accusers, and his Marāthī Bhāgavat, with its doctrine of personal service of Harī or God as the only road to salvation, is a lasting memorial of his struggle on behalf of the language of the common people of Mahārāshtra. His ābhangas, some of which reflect severely upon idolatry, and recall passages in the Old Testament, are not considered to possess as much merit as his translations from the Bhāgavat. But the influence of Eknāth, whether in the sphere of didactic, lyric or epic poetry, was immense. It is to his influence that Marāthī literature owes Dāsopant’s, and possibly also Vāman’s, commentaries on the Bhagavad Gīta and Tukārām’s lyrical ābhangas, while as regards epic poetry his disciple Gāoba was able adequately to complete, in a style worthy of his master, the Bhavārtha Rāmāyana, of which Eknāth, at the time of his death,¹ had composed only forty-four cantos.² In philosophy Eknāth was a monist, like Mukundrāj and Jnānēshvar.