Bhagat Namdev
Calico printer and tailor from Maharashtra, one of the earliest bhagats. Spent his last years in Ghuman in Punjab.
Namdev was born around 1270 in Maharashtra into a family of chhipas, calico printers and tailors, and became one of the great saints of the Varkari tradition of Pandharpur, devoted to the god Vithoba. His Marathi abhangs are still sung by the pilgrims who walk to Pandharpur every year.
He travelled widely in the north and is said to have spent his last twenty years at Ghuman in Gurdaspur district, where a gurdwara and temple stand in his memory and where the Punjabi chhimba community claims him as its own. His later hymns move from devotion to an image of God towards the formless God within.
Sixty-one of his hymns are in the Guru Granth Sahib, the oldest Indian vernacular voice in it after Jaidev. They tell stories against himself: how the priests drove him from the temple because of his caste and the temple turned around to face him; how the Sultan demanded a miracle and he refused. Through him the Gurus brought the Bhakti of the south into Sikh scripture.
Connected
The scripture of the Sikhs and their eternal, living Guru: 1,430 pages of hymns by six Gurus and some thirty other saints, set in 31 ragas.
Maharashtrian Brahmin and contemporary of Namdev, who wrote on what a person carries into death.