The wall was clear. The rules were clear. The saint Chokhamela — born into the Mahar caste, the lowest of the low by the calculations of the time — was not permitted to cross the threshold of the Vitthal temple at Pandharpur.
He did not try to cross it. He sat outside.
He sat outside and he sang. Not in protest — in devotion. The same devotion that the brahmin scholars sang inside the temple, Chokhamela sang outside it. If the god was real, the wall was irrelevant. If the god was not real, the wall was also irrelevant. Either way, the singing was his.
The priests inside performed the rituals. They bathed the deity, dressed the deity, offered the deity food, sang the deity to sleep. All the correct forms were observed. All the correct boundaries maintained.
One morning the priests arrived for the dawn ritual and found the sanctum empty. The deity was not in his place.
They searched. They found Vitthal sitting outside the temple wall, in the dust, beside Chokhamela. The god had left the ceremony to sit with the singer who was not permitted to attend the ceremony.
The Bhakti tradition's most radical theological claim is this one: the divine is not located where the institution places it. The institution creates the container. The divine overflows it. Every tradition that has understood this has produced its most powerful work outside the official structures — Kabir at his loom, Mirabai singing in the street, Tukaram at the riverbank, Chokhamela outside the wall. The god who leaves the temple is not abandoning the tradition. He is reminding it what the temple was built for. The singing outside the wall was the reason there was a wall to sit outside of. Without the devotion, the wall is simply a wall.
Chokhamela was eventually given a place inside the temple precinct — a small shrine outside the main sanctum, which exists to this day at Pandharpur. His abhangas are sung in the same breath as those of the brahmin saints of the Varkari tradition.
The wall is still there. The shrine is on the outside of it. This is considered a distinction, not a concession. Chokhamela's position — outside, where the god came to sit — is where his devotion located him. The temple came to acknowledge it. These things take time.
You have been excluded from rooms that the divine has also been excluded from. This is information about the rooms. It is not information about you.