This article focuses on the writings of the lonely, orphaned poet Janābāī, a popular figure believed to have lived in fourteenth-century Maharashtra. By studying the oral tradition of grind-mill songs with which Janābāī is associated as a neglected field of bhakti composition, this article seeks to recuperate the elements of absence, exile, and dislocation central to the devotional lives and experience of bhakti poets, especially those like Janābāī who were and continue to be marginalized by gender and caste. Examining the ubiquitous way in which worship, divinity, and writing are figured as feminine in Maharashtrian bhakti as a whole, this article excavates the ways women’s oral traditions helped to shape Marathi literary and devotional ideals and deepen bhakti’s “theology of embodiment” into a poetics of exile and belonging.
