Vaishnava Jana To

Narsinh Mehta, the fifteenth century poet of Junagadh honoured as the first poet of Gujarati, answered the question in his hymn's first line, call that one a Vaishnava who knows the pain of others. The verses that follow build the portrait. The true devotee helps the suffering without letting pride enter the mind, honours everyone and speaks ill of no one, keeps truth in speech and never touches another's wealth, is free of desire and deceit, has renounced greed and lust, and sees all women other than his wife as his mother. Such a person, the hymn ends, sanctifies their whole lineage. What is startling is what the hymn does not say.

There is no mention of temple, image, pilgrimage, fast or ritual competence, the standard markers of religious identity in Mehta's world or any other. The definition is entirely ethical, devotion measured by compassion, and it belongs to the wider bhakti insistence that God is reached through love and character rather than status, a current Mehta shared with the sant poets across India. Mehta's own life, as tradition tells it, enacted the point, a Brahmin who sang among those his caste world excluded and was ostracized for it. The hymn compresses that stance into a dozen lines simple enough for a child, which is how it has been transmitted ever since.

Vaishnava Jana To entered world history through Mahatma Gandhi, who grew up with it in Gujarat and made it the moral anthem of his movement. It was sung constantly at his ashram prayer meetings, and he referred to its definition of the true Vaishnava as the standard by which he wished to be measured, compassion for the suffering as the whole of religion. Through him the hymn attached itself to the public memory of Indian nonviolence, sung at his commemorations, at Gandhian institutions, and at the sites of his life and death.

For the sesquicentenary of his birth in 2019, India's foreign ministry organized recordings of the hymn by artists in scores of countries, a fifteenth century Gujarati text performed around the planet as a diplomatic gesture, probably the widest single dissemination any bhakti hymn has received. The hymn also remains what it was before Gandhi, part of the living Narsinh Mehta repertoire of Gujarat, sung in his native region with the prabhatiyan and padas of its author, whose memory Gujarat keeps in shrines, festivals and a literary award bearing his name. Its double life is instructive, within Gujarat a beloved piece of a poet's corpus, outside it a freestanding ethical statement, carried by a melody plain enough to survive both uses.