Philosophy
Where most dominant philosophies often glorified self-sufficiency, the Varkari bhakti tradition treats openness, suffering, and dependence as the very ground of encounter.
The Bhakti Tradition
It is worth pausing to note that the syncretic Indian philosophical inheritance offers something significantly different, not a triumphant alternative, but a genuine counterweight. The bhakti tradition and particularly the Varkari saints of Maharashtra, who are closest to home for me, are explicitly a theology of vulnerability. Dnyaneshwar, Namdev, Janabai, Tukaram: these are not figures of Stoic self-mastery. They are figures of radical openness. The devotional abhanga is not composed from a position of invulnerability. It is composed of the experience of being undone by love for Vitthal, yes, but also by the weight of caste, by hunger, by grief, by the sheer difficulty of living in a body in the world.
What makes the bhakti tradition philosophically distinctive is not simply that it acknowledges suffering; every tradition does that, in its way. What is distinctive is the refusal to treat suffering as something to be transcended on the way to a more dignified state. The abhangas do not say: endure this, and you will arrive somewhere better. They say: this- the hunger, the exhaustion, the longing, the indignity; this is where Vitthal is. Not beyond it. Inside it. The divine does not wait at the end of invulnerability. The divine is precisely what becomes available when invulnerability is released.
This is a theological claim, yes. But it is also a philosophical one. It locates value, meaning, and relation not in the achieved state of the protected self but in the condition of openness itself. Exposure is not the obstacle to encounter. It is the medium of it.
Janabai is particularly worth thinking with here. She was a servant, a woman, a person of low caste; she occupied, structurally, a position of enforced vulnerability. And yet her abhangas do not read as the literature of defeat. They read as the literature of someone who has found, within exposure itself, a form of freedom that protection cannot provide. The God she addresses is not a protector from vulnerability. He is a companion within it, one who grinds grain alongside her, who enters her condition rather than lifting her out of it.
There is something in Janabai’s image of God grinding grain that deserves to be held for a moment. It is not a God who resolves the difficulty. It is a God who shares it. The philosophical implication is significant: a genuine relation between persons, between the human and the divine, does not require that one party be invulnerable. It requires that both parties be present. And presence, as we have seen, Levinas argues from an entirely different tradition, is always a form of exposure.
The Varkari wari, the walking pilgrimage to Pandharpur, enacts this understanding physically: you arrive at the threshold of Vitthal not fortified but worn, wet, blistered, dependent on the generosity of strangers. The pilgrimage does not end with your invulnerability restored. It ends with its surrender. And something else- something more honest in its place. The wari is, among other things, a philosophical argument made in the body. An argument that the self capable of genuine encounter is not the self that has achieved independence, but the self that has walked long enough to know it never had it.