The Poet-Saints of Maharashtra

Translations from Original Sources by Justin E. Abbott '76, no. 1 Bhanudas, Sold by Fleming H. Revell, N. Y.

Dr. Abbott of the class of '76 has sent to the Dartmouth College Library a copy in English translation of an important work, written in the original marathi language of India, nearly 400 years old, which gives us a glimpse into the devotional literature of India. Dr. Abbott gave his entire life, as a missionary of the American Board in the city of Bombay, to the study of the Marathi. language and its literature. The Sanskeitic language of India like Marathi, Bengali, Hindi, contain a vast literature of a devotional nature which has profoundly influenced the essentially religious mind of India. Tagore, the great living poet of India, has written his best works in the Bengali language and has given the western world through English translations heart-stirring samples of the ecstacy, fervour and devotion which are common to the Saints of all nations, whether Christian or non-Christian. The poetsaints of India have developed these qualities to .an extent which strikes the Christian missionary from America as impressive evidences of the workings of the Divine Spirit among an ancient and gifted people to whom has been entrusted by a strange irony of history the interesting task of continuing to be the guardians of those Aryan religious traditions. Some of which were common to the ancestors of the ancient Greeks, Romans, Persians and the Indo- Argans.

Marathi may be called the German of India. To be able to pronounce its words correctly, to grasp the intricacies of its idiomatic forms of expression and to catch the underlying spirit of its devotional literature, are tasks which are generally regarded as the despair of the foreign missionary in India. The present work therefore reflects a great credit to the genius of Dr. Abbott, who during the declining years of his life in America, has kept up his enthus- iasm for the study of that language and has given us what we are told is the first of a series of English translations from the religious literature embodied in that language, which he proposes to give to the American people.

Dr. Abbott tells us that the raw material which forms the basis of the poem he has translated was made available to the poet, Mahipati from the oral tradition current in the Marathi speaking portion of India regarding Bhanudas, the central figure of the poem. The supernatural and the miraculous elements which appear in the life of the saint everywhere are a part of the imaginative machinery which is allowed as appropriate even in such poems as Milton's Paradise Lost. It is the poetic method of indicating that God loves the Saint as a father loves his children—or to be more precise in the case of Hindu religious poetry—as a mother loves her erring child: and regardless of the faults of the saint, God is represented as specifically interested in safe-guarding the happiness of those who have made a complete surrender of themselves and all they have to Him. This aspect of the Divine relation to the Saint has its parallels in the devotional poetry of Christendom. In a scientific age where men's minds are increasingly being directed to the study and conquest of the forces of nature with the increasing emphasis on the recognition of laws which unceasingly operate in the phenomena! world, it is becoming more and more difficult to attach any value to the miraculous element in religion.

Bhanudas the saint is so absorbed in the worship of Vithoba, his special form of the national deity, that the problem of supporting his wife and children becomes a hard one. Under the pressure of economic necessity he is driven to adopt some method for earning a living. He becomes a pedler of cloth and his rivals in business have serious doubts whether a saint could ever become a successful business man. Bhanudas begins to sell his goods by telling his customers frankly the original price and the selling price— the latter being reduced to a minimum such as would ensure the support of his family. He finds that such a policy which seems apparently opposed to the standards of worldly wisdom held by the average merchant, has actually made him prosperous while his sceptical rivals have been losing their customers, much to their disgust.

This incident in the poem embodies a moral lesson for Christendom. It shows that the saint need not turn ascetic and make himself unfit for the world, that it is possible for the Christian to boldly apply the basic principles of the teachings of Jesus to all the relations of life and yet maintain a position of active usefulness in a world where the worship of Mammon is still the fashion. India has a long roll of sages, poet-saints and prophets whose message to the world throughout the centuries has stressed the lesson given by Jesus—"Seek ye first the Kingdom of Heaven and all these things will be added unto you." To-day we have in India the spectacle of a brilliant Hindu Attorney, trained in England and belonging originally to the mercantile classes, who has been boldly preaching to the modern world the same lesson. Gandhi rightly accuses Christian nations of being afraid to apply the Sermon on the Mount to all commercial, political and industrial questions which are clamouring for solution. India and her poet-saints, such as Dr. Abbott has depicted in the book he has sent to his Alma Mater, may yet succeed in disclosing the true roots of the essentially religious life to the modern world and supply some of those stabilizing spiritual elements to strengthen the fabric of western civilization.

We congratulate Dr. Abbott on his singular achievement of what is a difficult task—viz: to bring into the region of intelligibility in the new world the thought processes and the emotional activities of an ancient spiritually-minded people, through the medium of the English language. We wish him a long life so that he may continue his labors in this field for many years to come.