Tukaram

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In the famine that fell on the Deccan around 1629, a grain-dealer of Dehu on the Indrayani watched his trade collapse, his cattle die, and his elder wife and a son starve. He was a Kunbi, a cultivator caste counted among the shudras, the fourth and lowest of the old fourfold order, and so by the reckoning of the learned a man with no standing to handle the Veda or to mediate the sacred. What was left to him was the family god — Vithoba of Pandharpur, the dark standing image with hands on hips and feet on a brick — and a tongue. Out of that loss Tukaram began to speak to the god in Marathi, in the short singable stanza called the abhanga, and the speaking did not stop until there were thousands of them. The verses of a ruined grocer outlasted the Sanskrit learning that held him beneath notice; this is the whole shape of his life, and he knew it, and said so.

An 1832 image of Tukaram, among the earliest surviving depictions of the Varkari poet-saint. — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The man and the dates

The documentary Tukaram is thin and the devotional Tukaram is vast, and the two should not be confused at the outset. The traditional dates are roughly 1608 to 1649 or 1650, and the place is fixed: Dehu, a village on the Indrayani, a tributary of the Bhima, in what is now the Pune district of Maharashtra. His caste position is the one fact on which biography and verse agree, because he returns to it constantly — a Kunbi householder, a petty merchant in grain and a small moneylender, not a renunciate, not a brahmin, not a man of letters in any formal sense. The standard nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century reconstructions, gathered most fully in the posthumous Life and Teaching of Tukārām (1922) that J. F. Edwards assembled from J. Nelson Fraser’s papers, draw on the abhangs themselves and on a hagiographic tradition that grew quickly after his death, so that the line between recoverable fact and pious narrative is faint by the time it reaches us.

The site at Dehu, on the Indrayani in Maharashtra’s Pune district, marked as the birthplace and residence of Tukaram. — QueerEcofeminist, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The famine is the hinge. The traditional account makes the loss of his first wife and a child, and the failure of the business he had inherited, the event that turned him from a tradesman who happened to be a devotee into a man for whom the god was the only remaining capital. He kept the householder’s life — a second marriage, children, the running of what was left of the shop — but the center of gravity had shifted. The image at Pandharpur, two hundred kilometers to the southeast, became the addressee of a continuous interior speech that he set down in verse, and the walk to that image, the vari, the discipline that gives the Varkari tradition its name, became the rhythm of his year.

The abhanga and the gatha

The abhanga is a short Marathi devotional lyric, traditionally in the ovi and abhanga meters, built for the voice rather than the page — direct, unornamented, made to be sung in kirtan, the communal performance in which a lead singer carries a verse and the gathering answers. It is a sectarian Varkari form with its own liturgical place, and this matters for how the corpus has been read, because its earliest English handlers reached for a category that was not its own. The whole body of Tukaram’s abhangs is called the gatha; the tradition counts somewhere near four to four-and-a-half thousand of them, and the Gatha Mandir raised at Dehu has carved more than four thousand on its walls. The number is itself a claim, not a census: like every great vernacular bhakti corpus, the gatha grew by accretion, later verses cast in the saint’s voice and absorbed into his name, so that “the poems of Tukaram” name a corpus the kirtan kept enlarging, later verses sung in his name and kept — a condition the gatha shares with Kabir and Mirabai, whose attributed verses grew the same way in performance.

The Gatha Mandir at Dehu, the modern temple on whose walls more than four thousand of Tukaram’s abhangs are inscribed. — Shrads1984, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

What the abhangs do is hold two registers at once. The first is saguna bhakti — love directed at a god with qualities, a god who has a face, a name, a temple, a story. Vithoba (also Vitthal, also Pandurang) is identified by the tradition with Vishnu in his Krishna form, and Tukaram addresses him as a real presence: scolds him, pleads him, begs him, accuses him of neglect, tells him he is the only wealth a poor man has. The intimacy is total and frequently domestic. But the second register cuts against the first. Again and again the verses press toward an apophatic edge — the sense that the god finally exceeds the form through which he is loved, that words run out, that the seeker who reaches the end of seeking finds nothing he can hold and is undone by the finding. Tukaram is a saguna poet whose saguna devotion keeps opening onto the formless; the personal god is the door, and the door does not close on a furnished room. This tension — the named Vithoba shot through with negation — is what distinguishes him from a merely affectionate devotionalism, and it is why he sits comfortably beside the philosophical traditions without ever becoming a philosopher.

Beneath the learning

The caste critique is not an addition to Tukaram’s devotion; it is built into its logic, and he states it plainly. If the god can be reached by anyone with a name to say and a heart to break, then the apparatus that gatekeeps the sacred — the Sanskrit the shudra may not learn, the priestly mediation the low-born must purchase, the scriptural authority that ranks souls by birth — is not so much wrong as beside the point. He writes as a man told he has no right to speak of God, and the verses answer by speaking of God so well that the prohibition collapses under its own weight. The point is structural: the abhang is in Marathi, the speech of the unlettered, addressed directly to the god, requiring no intermediary, and that directness is itself the leveling argument. This places him in the wider bhakti current that ran the caste critique as doctrine rather than aside — the nirguna sants of the north, the Kannada Virashaiva poets of an earlier century — though each carried it in its own grammar and toward its own god.

The hagiographic tradition dramatizes the conflict as a personal one. The best-known legend has a learned brahmin antagonist, scandalized that an unschooled shudra should compose on sacred themes, force the destruction of Tukaram’s manuscripts by having them sunk in the Indrayani; after days of fasting and prayer at the riverbank the notebooks rise undamaged from the water, the god himself vindicating the verses the learning had condemned. The story is told as fact within the tradition and is best understood as the tradition’s own commentary on what it values: not the survival of paper but the verdict that the despised man’s words carried a sanction the orthodox could not revoke. It belongs to legend, not to the documentary record, and it says exactly what the documentary record cannot — that the community read Tukaram’s standing as divinely confirmed against the scholars who outranked him by birth.

The Varkari line

Tukaram is the late peak of a long Marathi lineage, not its founder, and he wrote with the predecessors in view. The Varkari tradition traces itself to Jnaneshwar in the thirteenth century, whose Jnaneshwari — a vast Marathi verse exposition of the Bhagavad Gita — carried Sanskrit metaphysics into the spoken tongue and gave the movement its foundational book. After him came Namdev the calico-printer, some of whose Hindi verses traveled north and entered the Sikh scripture; then, in the sixteenth century, the brahmin Eknath, who edited Jnaneshwar’s text and wrote his own commentaries. Tukaram stands at the end of this descent, and where Jnaneshwar reasons toward a nondualism close to Vedanta, Tukaram for the most part simply talks to his god — the lineage holding the philosophical and the affective poles together across four centuries. The tradition that came after him made the bridge explicit: the twice-yearly pilgrimages to Pandharpur carry palanquins bearing the sandals of the sants, Jnaneshwar’s from Alandi and Tukaram’s from Dehu, the thirteenth-century forerunner and the seventeenth-century summit walking the same road in the hands of the same crowds.

His relation to the political and ascetic currents of his own day is more contested than the hagiography allows. He was a contemporary of the rise of Shivaji, the Maratha king, and of Ramdas, the militant Shaiva ascetic and devotee of Rama whose teaching pointed toward worldly action; later tradition wove the three together into a tidy national tableau, but the documentary basis for the links is slight, and the householder-devotee of Dehu fits awkwardly into a story of swords and statecraft. His was a path of the loom and the shop and the road, not of the renunciant’s forest or the king’s court — a distinction worth keeping against the pull of asceticism as the assumed shape of the holy life. The Varkari discipline is a householder’s throughout: a vegetarian diet, the necklace of tulsi beads, the steady repetition of the divine name, the singing of the abhangs, and the walk — sanctity carried in ordinary life rather than withdrawn from it.

The disputed end

The close of his life is given by the tradition as a translation rather than a death. The standard account has Tukaram, around 1649 or 1650, taken up bodily into Vaikuntha, the heaven of Vishnu, carried off in the flesh so that no body remained to burn — a departure, not a corpse. Like the recovered manuscripts, the ascension is hagiography and is rightly read as such: the tradition’s refusal to let its greatest voice end in something as ordinary as a death, and its insistence that the god who had been addressed for a lifetime answered at the last by taking the addresser home. What the documentary record holds is silence after about 1650; what the tradition holds is an assumption into heaven witnessed and sung. The two coexist, held apart — the verses stop, and the community tells why.

The texts and the missionary frame {#research}

The English Tukaram has an unusually rich early apparatus, and it carries a distortion that has to be named before it can be used. The standard English text for a century was The Poems of Tukārāma, translated by J. Nelson Fraser and Kashinath Balkrishna Marathe and issued in three volumes by the Christian Literature Society for India at Madras — volume one in 1909, the second and third in 1913 and 1915 — covering the bulk of the gatha in facing-text English. It remains the most substantial public-domain rendering of any figure in the vernacular bhakti corpus, philologically careful and complete in a way nothing else of its period is. But Fraser was a Scottish Presbyterian missionary-educator in Bombay, the volumes came through a Christian press, and the translation idiom reaches for Protestant-pietist categories, rendering the abhang at points as “psalm” or “hymn.” The same move is announced in the very title of the other early gateway, Nicol Macnicol’s Psalms of Maratha Saints (1919), an anthology of Jnaneshwar, Namdev, Eknath, and Tukaram in the Heritage of India series. The abhang is not a psalm. It is not a member of a Hebraic devotional genre at all but a sectarian Varkari liturgical form with its own metrics, its own performance, and its own theology; to call it a psalm folds a living Vaishnava practice into the comparative grid of evangelical Christianity, and reads Tukaram as approximating a Christian devotional sensibility he had no part in. The early translations are indispensable and the framing is foreign, and both facts must be held at once. The wider study of how British missionary scholarship constructed an inward, anti-ritual, quasi-Protestant Hinduism — into which the bhakti saints fit almost too neatly — is set out in Geoffrey Oddie’s Imagined Hinduism (2006).

The scholarly framework that grounds the Marathi material rigorously is R. G. Bhandarkar’s Vaiṣṇavism, Śaivism and Minor Religious Systems (1913), written by an Indian Indologist for a German philological series and still a reliable survey of the regional Vaishnava traditions; R. D. Ranade’s Mysticism in Maharashtra (1933) and Justin Abbott’s Poet-Saints of Maharashtra series carried the work forward. The modern reader’s Tukaram, however, is largely Dilip Chitre’s Says Tuka (Penguin India, 1991), the translation that won the Sahitya Akademi award and that recovered the abhangs as poems — at once the love poems and the “war poems,” the tender and the savage Tukaram — out from under the missionary psalmody, and it remains the living English version against which the Fraser-Marathe text now reads as a period document. Behind all of this stands the larger historiographic question raised by John Stratton Hawley’s A Storm of Songs (Harvard, 2015): that the very idea of a single, pan-Indian “bhakti movement” flowing from the Tamil south to the Hindi north is itself a twentieth-century construction, assembled by Hindi literary historians out of a colonial scaffolding, so that Tukaram is better read as a specifically Varkari saint in a specifically Marathi tradition than as one bead on a national string. The Harvard Murty Classical Library’s ongoing Marathi series continues the work of putting the regional corpus before English readers in dual-language editions on its own terms. For the cognate vernacular corpus already held in translation, the public-domain Songs of Kabir (Tagore and Underhill, 1915) shows both the appeal and the over-assimilation that the same Edwardian moment worked on a northern sant.

The grocer’s verdict

What the abhangs keep returning to is the impossible standing of the man who made them. A Kunbi grain-dealer, told by the order of his world that the sacred was not his to touch, addressed the god in the only language he had and produced four thousand poems that the learned could neither match nor suppress. The recovered notebooks and the bodily ascension are the tradition’s way of saying what it cannot prove: that the verses were vindicated against the birth that should have silenced them. Strip the legends away and the harder fact remains, and it is the one Tukaram pressed himself — that the Sanskrit which ranked him beneath its notice is now read mostly by specialists, and the Marathi of an unlettered devotee is sung every monsoon by hundreds of thousands walking to Pandharpur. The shop failed and the family was buried and the learning shut its door, and out of exactly that the verses came; the man who had nothing left but the god turned out to have been left with the one thing that would carry his voice past the men who outranked him. He composed from the bottom of the order he was born into, and from there he reached the god directly, with no one’s leave — which was always the claim, and the abhangs are the proof of it.

→ In the library: The Bhagavadgītā (Telang, 1882) — the text the Jnaneshwari expounds · Songs of Kabir (Tagore & Underhill, 1915), a cognate vernacular bhakti corpus

→ Related: Varkari Marathi · Jnaneshwar · Bhakti Movement · Vishnu · Hinduism · Vedanta Advaita Visistadvaita Dvaita · Kabir · Mirabai · Basava · Comparative Mysticism · Asceticism