Sant Janabai (संत जनाबाई).

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Let me not be sad because I am born a woman In this world. many saints suffer in this way. So wrote ]anabas who is perhaps one of :he best known and best loved of Maharashtra s Varkari saint-poets. The Varkaris are the most influ-  ential bhakti sect among the Marathi-speaking peoples. Like many of these IndieBound saint-poets, janabai was born into a low-caste Audra family. Her parents Find in a library who were also Varkaris, lived in a village on the banks of the Godavari. » It was not unusual or the time for children from poor families to be sent to live in a household where they would work as domestic servants and G. when Ianabai was hardly seven, her parents handed her over to the family * * * * lr of Dama Shetty father of the revered Varkari poet Namdev. janabai spent the rest of her life in that household. Tradition would have required that she be well looked after and this would have been all the more so in this particular household, steeped as it was in the egalitarian Varkari ethos, yet Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to janabai often speaks of the restrictions even with regard to worship that the early twentieth century her status as servant or Dasi, imposed on her and of the heavy never-  ending household tasks that fell to her lot. The hardships of being a woman sent ianabai poems Go and the burden of domestic labor are ever present in her writing. In ]anabais poetry we find a response that gives a sense of how women translated the concerns of a dominant ethos as they pressed it into service. The result is an incipient feminism that is also truly Varkari in spirit and in act (see the Introduction). Vithoba the deity at Pandharpur who is of - special significance to the Varkari sect janabai proclaims is a friend a support a constant helpmate in her arduous domestic work. He is there to help her carry and heat the bathwater to sweep the leaves from courtyard to scour the vessels until they gleam to scratch  Her sensitive poetry which is popular even today