Apr 20, 2004, 12.00am IST
A G Mirajgaoker.
Maharashtra has a unique tradition of Bhakti. Great saints propagated the bhakti marg, a path of complete devotion and surrender to God. Poetic compositions called abhangas, shlokas and bhajans of saints like Sant Dnyaneshwar, Tukaram, Ramdas, Namdev and others are sung or recited in all traditional Maharashtrian homes. Dnyaneshwari is a critical discourse on the Bhagavad Gita by Sant Dnyaneshwar.
The great Mahabharata war took place between the Pandavas and their cousins, the Kauravas, some 5,000 years ago at Kurukshetra. Faced with the might of the huge Kaurava army, Arjuna lost his nerve to fight against his own kith and kin. At that moment, Krishna who was the charioteer of Arjuna, exhorted him on the battlefield to perform his duty as a Kshatriya and fight without worrying about the consequences. Krishna's advice in the Bhagavad Gita is a small chapter in the Mahabharata, comprising 700 shlokas or verses in Sanskrit.
Sant Dnyanes-hwar realised that the Gita's teachings could be read and understood only by a small Sanskrit-knowing elite. Dnyaneshwar, under the advice of his guru, Nivrathinath, rendered a Marathi version of the Gita known as Dnyaneshwari. It contains more than 9,000 verses called ovies. So Sant Dnyaneshwar brought the teachings of the Gita within reach of the common man. Dnyaneshwari was composed around the twelfth century, when Dnya-neshwar was only 16 years old. He took samadhi at the age of 22 and left this mortal world.
The Bible was originally in the Latin language and John Wiklif rendered its English translation which is in use today. That was in the year 1365, about 75 years after Dnyaneshwari was composed. Dnyaneshwari has since been translated into several Indian languages.
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