Sant Janabai's Abhangas Hold the Spiritual Truth of Women's Invisible Labour and Devotion

She Did Not Transcend the Chores. She Wrote From Inside Them.Janabai was a dasi in the household of Namdev, the thirteenth-century weaver-saint of Pandharpur. She ground grain. She swept. She fetched water. She did every task that made the household function and that no one counted when the counting was done. And she wrote abhangas, devotional verses addressed to Vithoba, the form of Vishnu enshrined at the Vitthal temple in Pandharpur, that are still sung today, seven centuries after her hands were cracked from work.