माऊली (Mauli) means mother. Varkaris use the name for Sant Dnyaneshwar, and for one another.
A manual for living,written by saints,free for everyone.
Mauli is a mobile app that puts the writings of Maharashtra's Varkari saints on your phone. It will give you a carefully checked text of the originals, their meaning in plain Marathi and English, and an AI guide that answers your questions from the verses themselves.
In development. The app is not launched yet, because we are still correcting and translating the texts.
A pothi, the loose-leaf book in which these works were copied by hand.
What the app does
Many people in Maharashtra can sing a line or two of Tukaram or Dnyaneshwar. Far fewer have read the books. The Marathi is centuries old, and a reliable text with its meaning is hard to find in one place. Mauli is being built to close that gap in three ways.
Read a carefully checked text
Every ovi and abhang in clean Devanagari, checked letter by letter before it is published. This is the first ovi of the Dnyaneshwari.
ॐ नमो जी आद्या ।वेद प्रतिपाद्या । जय जय स्वसंवेद्या ।आत्मरूपा ॥१॥
Dnyaneshwari 1.1
आत्मरुरूपाआत्मरुपा, दुरुस्त: आत्मरूपा
Marathi Wikisource, when we checked in October 2026, gave the last word of that ovi as आत्मरुपा. The word is आत्मरूपा, with a long ū. A single stroke like this is the kind of error we are finding and fixing, verse by verse.
Scribes often painted yellow orpiment, हरताळ, over a wrong letter before writing the right one. This page marks a correction the same way.
Understand every word
Old Marathi is hard even for people who speak Marathi every day. Each verse comes with word meanings and a plain explanation, in Marathi and in English.
ॐ नमो जीOm, I bow to you, revered one
आद्याthe first, before all else
वेद प्रतिपाद्याwhom the Vedas expound
जय जयvictory to you
स्वसंवेद्याknown only from within
आत्मरूपाwhose form is the Self
Om. I bow to you, the origin of everything, whom the Vedas expound. Victory to you, who can be known only from within and whose form is the Self.
A sample entry. The final wording is still being reviewed.
Ask about your own life
Type a worry the way you would say it to a friend. The guide searches the saints' writings for verses that speak to it, answers from those verses, and shows them so you can read the source yourself.
Question
Things keep going wrong. How do I stay happy?
Answer
Tukaram describes joy as a deep pool. The pool is joy, and so is every ripple on its surface. Nothing in the picture arrives from outside. Read that way, the question shifts from when things will go right to what you are standing in now.
आनंदाचे डोहीं आनंदतरंग । आनंद चि अंग आनंदाचें ॥१॥
In the pool of joy the ripples are joy. Joy is the very body of joy.
Tukaram Gatha, abhang 3241 (numbered as on Marathi Wikisource)
An example of what the guide is being built to do.
And it is free
The saints gave these words away. So will Mauli. The app and every text in it will cost nothing.
A mridang, the drum that keeps time in kirtan and on the road to Pandharpur.
They wrote for ordinary people, in the language people spoke.
In 1290, while still in his teens, Sant Dnyaneshwar did something unusual. The Bhagavad Gita was in Sanskrit, which few people could read. He retold it in Marathi, in about nine thousand verses, so that anyone who spoke the language could follow it.
The saints who followed kept to that rule. They sang in everyday Marathi about anger, grief, greed, pride and the fear of what people will say. Their answers still hold.
They came from every kind of household. Namdev was a tailor, Gora a potter, Savata a gardener, Narhari a goldsmith and Sena a barber. Janabai worked as a maid. Muktabai, Kanhopatra, Bahinabai and Soyarabai are honoured as saints alongside the men.
जें का रंजलें गांजलें ।त्यासि म्हणे जो आपुलें ॥१॥ तो चि साधु ओळखावा ।देव तेथें चि जाणावा ॥ध्रु.॥
Whoever calls the worn-down and the troubled his own, know that he is the saint. Know that God is there.
Tukaram Gatha, abhang 347 (numbered as on Marathi Wikisource)
This is Sanatan Dharma at its most open. There is no qualification to meet and no fee to pay, and you do not need Sanskrit. You sing the name, you walk to Pandharpur when you can, and you see God in the person in front of you.
1290At Nevasa, Dnyaneshwar composes the Dnyaneshwari. It explains the Gita in Marathi in about 9,000 ovis.
1300sNamdev carries kirtan from village to village. Tradition says he walked as far as Punjab.
1584At Paithan, Eknath completes a corrected text of the Dnyaneshwari. His note at the end of the book says he sifted the right readings from the wrong ones.
1600sTukaram of Dehu composes more than 4,500 abhangs in the Marathi of his own village.
Every yearThe Wari. Hundreds of thousands of people walk roughly 250 km from Alandi and Dehu to Pandharpur over nearly three weeks, singing these verses the whole way, and arrive for Ashadhi Ekadashi.
Mauli continues that work. We are checking the same texts again, this time for a phone.
शून्य, zero.
The same tradition counted, measured and doubted.
In Sanatan Dharma, devotion and inquiry grew side by side. The culture that sang these abhangs also produced mathematicians, grammarians and surgeons. Here is some of what its texts recorded, with the dates historians give. We have kept to what the texts say and what historians accept.
०
Zero as a number
Brahmagupta's book is the earliest known text to treat zero as a number and to give rules for calculating with it. It also gives rules for negative numbers, which it calls debts.
Brahmasphutasiddhanta, 628 CE
३.१४१६
π, and a turning Earth
Aryabhata gives π as 62,832 ÷ 20,000 and calls the value approximate. He explains the stars' nightly drift westward by the Earth's own rotation, the way the riverbank seems to slide backward to someone in a moving boat.
Aryabhatiya, c. 499 CE
√२
The rule of the diagonal
A manual for building fire altars states the rule about the diagonal of a rectangle that now carries Pythagoras's name, and gives √2 as 577 ÷ 408, correct to five decimal places. Babylonian tablets show the same relation earlier still.
Baudhayana Sulbasutra, perhaps c. 800 to 500 BCE
अइउण्
A grammar that reads like code
Panini sets out the grammar of Sanskrit in just under 4,000 short rules, some of which call on other rules. In 1967 a computer scientist proposed renaming the standard notation for programming-language grammars Panini-Backus Form, to credit him alongside John Backus.
Ashtadhyayi, c. 4th century BCE
Each seed is placed by the golden angle. Count the arms of the spiral and you get two neighbouring numbers from the prosodists' sequence, now named after Fibonacci.
। ऽ । ऽ ऽ
Counting verse, finding numbers
To list every possible rhythm of a line, Pingala wrote metres as patterns of light and heavy syllables, a code of two symbols. Later prosodists, Virahanka, Gopala and the Jain scholar Hemachandra, counted how many such patterns fill a line of a given length, a heavy syllable lasting as long as two light ones, and wrote down the sequence 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13. Fibonacci's book came later, in 1202.
Chandahshastra, c. 3rd to 2nd century BCE. Hemachandra, c. 1150 CE
१०१ + २०
Surgery, written down
The Sushruta Samhita describes rebuilding a nose with a flap of skin from the cheek, an operation for cataract, and 121 surgical instruments, 101 of them blunt and 20 sharp.
Sushruta Samhita, in its present form by c. 300 to 500 CE
4 − 4/3 + 4/5 − 4/7 + …
An endless sum for π
Later Kerala texts credit Madhava of Sangamagrama with infinite series for π, sine and cosine, more than two centuries before the same series appear in Europe.
Madhava, c. 1340 to 1425 CE. Preserved in Kerala texts of the 16th century
को अद्धा वेदWho really knows?
Room for doubt
A Rigveda hymn about how the universe began ends without an answer. The one who watches over it from the highest heaven knows, it says, or perhaps even he does not.
Nasadiya Sukta, Rigveda 10.129
प्रमाण
Knowledge needs a source
The Nyaya school asks how we know anything at all. It accepts four sources of knowledge, which are what we perceive, what we infer, what we learn by comparison, and reliable testimony.
Nyaya Sutras, c. 2nd century CE or earlier
These are on an app's website for a reason. Exact wording, a named source and room for questions are old habits in this tradition, and Mauli is built on the same three.
Dates follow current historical scholarship, and several are approximate. Some of these ideas are also found, some of them earlier, in Babylonian, Greek and Chinese mathematics.
Each point of light stands for a verse. Verses with similar meanings sit close together, which is how a question finds its answer.
Old texts, new tools.
The saints used the best technology they had, which was a language everyone spoke and a tune everyone could sing. We are using ours.
Collect
We digitise the texts from printed and public sources. Some are available only as scans, or in old font encodings that phones cannot display, so we wrote our own converters.
Correct
Machine reading makes mistakes, and old copies carry their own. Each verse is checked before it goes into the app.
Explain
Each verse gets word meanings and a plain explanation in Marathi and English.
Search
Verses can be found two ways, by their exact words and by their meaning. You can type in Roman letters and still find the Devanagari, so anand finds आनंद.
Answer
When you ask a question, the guide first retrieves the verses closest to it, then writes its answer from those verses and shows them to you. The guide explains the saints' words. It does not rewrite them or compose new ones in their name.
Still coming together.
Where we are
Mauli is not launched yet. The app will be released when the texts in it are right.
Done
Dnyaneshwari digitised, all 18 chapters, about 9,000 ovis
Tukaram Gatha digitised, 4,604 abhangs
In progress
Proofreading every verse
Writing meanings and translations in Marathi and English
Adding the lives and writings of the other Varkari saints
Tuning search and the AI guide for accuracy and speed
Next
Releasing the app, free
After that
Beyond Maharashtra. India's other languages have their own saints and their own manuals for living. Mauli starts with the Varkari tradition and will add them one language at a time.
दुरिताचें तिमिर जावो ।विश्व स्वधर्मसूर्यें पाहो । जो जें वांछील तो तें लाहो ।प्राणिजात ॥
May the darkness of wrongdoing lift. May the world see by the sun of its own dharma. May every living being receive whatever it longs for.
Dnyaneshwari 18.1796, from the Pasaydan
Dnyaneshwar ended his book by asking for this. It is the best description we have of what Mauli is for.