A History of the Mahrattas v1.c5.s4.51

v1.c5.s4.51

In conclusion one may venture to remark that there is a tendency among some writers to over-estimate the influence upon the public mind of Mahārāshtra of the message of the Marāthī poets of the Bhakti school. They would have us believe that these poets welded the different and often mutually hostile groups composing the population of Mahārāshtra into one people, that they made the Marāthās a nation, and that they ennobled and humanized the moral character of the people so deeply that the latter relinquished the tendency to gain their ends by violent means, and adopted in the face of all the trials and chances of those unrestful years an attitude of humility and resignation. It cannot be gainsaid that the remarkable literary movement, which centres so largely about the god Vithoba and Pandharpur, bears many of the signs of true spiritual devotion, and that in its revolt against the empty ritual and thaumaturgic priestcraft of Brahmanism it embraced persons of various castes, and elevated to sainthood representatives of even the lowest classes in Mahārāshtra. Some of those associated more or less closely with the Pandharpur movement were women; ‘a few were Muhammadan converts to Hinduism, nearly half of them were Brahmans, while there were representatives in the other half from among all the other castes—Marāthās, Kunbīs, tailors, gardeners, potters, goldsmiths, repentant prostitutes and slave-girls, and even the outcaste Mahārs.’¹ Nowhere perhaps did the great religious revival, associated in other parts of India with the names of Rāmānuja and Tulsīdās, exercise an influence so genuinely for good as in the case of the worship that gathered about Vithoba of Pandharpur² (Macnicol, *Indian Theism*, pp. 126–7).