At Vithoba's temple in Pandharpur, Maharashtra, a poet and saint of the Varkari Panth, a religious group that worships the Hindu deity Vithoba.
Eknath was a brahmin who spent the most of his life at Paithan, an important commerce and political hub.
In Paithan now, there is a shrine dedicated to Eknath.
Eknath was well-versed in old Sanskritic learning, as befitting his birth as a brahmin.
His most well-known work is a Marathi translation of the eleventh chapter of the Bhagavata Purana, a sectarian religious literature considered to be the most essential for Krishna devotion.
Eknath, on the other hand, seems to have been acutely aware of the spiritual qualities of the lower castes, as well as the ways in which devotion may be used to break down social barriers.
He talks in a variety of voices, including those of untouchables, Muslims, and women, in short poems called as bharuds.
He treated untouchable worshippers (bhakta) as equals, even eating and drinking with them, according to traditional accounts of his life.
More orthodox brahmins—who are represented as the villains in these traditional accounts—were outraged by such blatant transgressions of social limits, but Eknath managed to avoid being outcasted by them on each occasion, often by divine intervention.
G. A. Deleury, The Cult of Vithoba, 1960; Justin E. Abbott, The Life of Eknath, 1981; and Eleanor Zelliot, "Chokamela and Eknath: Two Bhakti Modes of Legitimacy for Modern Change," Journal of Asian and African Studies, Vol. 15, Nos. 1–2, 1980.
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