| Introduction Part II of IV ( Says
Tuka) - Dilip Chitre |
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| A brief survey of Tukaram's
life and his circumstances give us an idea of the universality
of his experience at this-worldly level which, in his poetry,
acquires other worldly dimensions. |
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Tukaram
was the second son of his parents, Bolhoba Ambile ( or
More) and Kankai. Bolhoba had inherited the office of
the village Mahajan from his forefathers. Mahajans were
a reputed family of traders in a village, kasba or city
appointed to supervise certain classes of traders and
collect revenue from them. Tukaram's family owned a comparatively
large piece of prime agricultural land on the bank of
the river Indrayani in Dehu. Several generations of Tukaram's
ancestors had farmed this land and sold its produce as
merchant-farmers. Though, technically regarded as Shudras
by Brahmins, they were by no means socially or culturally
backward. being traders by profession, they learned to
read and write as to maintain accounts of financial transactions.
This was presumably the kind of education Tukaram had.
The rest was his own learning from whatever sources he
had access to. Considering the situation of the small
village of Dehu, it is exciting to speculate on the sources
of Tukaram's wealth of information and the depth of his
learning.
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| The early death of his parents
and the renunciation of worldly life by his elder brother
thrust upon Tukaram the role of the head of his extended
Hindu family at a fairly young age. As mentioned earlier
in another context, Tukaram was married a second time as
his first wife was chronically ill. He had six children
and had to raise a younger brother as well. |
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Before
he was twenty-one, Tukaram had to witness a series of
deaths from amongst his loved ones including his mother,
his father, his first wife, and children. The famine of
1629, during which he lost his wife, was a devastating
experience for Tukaram. The horror of the human condition
that Tukaram speaks of comes from this experience. After
the famine, Tukaram lost all urge to lead a householder's
life. He showed no interest in farming or the family's
trade. Presumably the famine, but also some other circumstance
of which we have no details, seems to have reduced Tukaram
first to penury and then to final humiliation of bankruptcy.
He was unable to repay debts he had incurred and the village
council stripped him of his position as Mahajan and passed
strictures against him. He incurred the displeasure of
the village Patil(Headman).
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| Tukaram became totally withdrawn.
He started to shun the company of the people. He began to
sit alone in a corner and brood. Soon, he started going
off into wilderness for long spells. Meanwhile, his wife
had to fend for herself and the children as Tukaram paid
little attention to his household responsibilities. |
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| The Ambiles (Mores) of Dehu
had been devoted Varkaris for several generations before
Tukaram. Lord Vithoba of Pandharpur was their family deity.
There was a shrine of Vitthal built by an ancestor of Tukaram
on land owned by the family in Dehu. A series of traumatic
events in his personal life not only made Tukaram introspective
but also made him turn his attention to the deity in whom
his forefathers had placed their unswerving faith. Their
ancestral shrine of Vitthal happened to be in a state of
disrepair at this time and Tukaram restored this shrine
even though his immediate family was reduced to abject
misery. |
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| He now began to spend most
of his time in the shrine of Vitthal or its precincts, singing
songs composed by earlier poet-saints in praise of the deity.
He totally disregarded the pleas of his wife and the counsel
of his friends and virtually stopped working for a living.
He became a dropout and perhaps an object of pity or contempt
among many of his fellow-villagers. His wife and some of
his fellow-villagers saw this as a form of madness because
Tukaram was lost to the world and had broken away from its
routines and practical bonds. However, his total devotion
to Vitthal and his compassion for everybody and all forms
of life slowly won him the admiration of people. |
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| Some time at this juncture,
Tukaram had a revelatory dream in which the great saint-poet
Namdeo and Tukaram's deity Vitthal appeared and initiated
Tukaram into poetry, informing Tukaram that his mission
in life was "to make poems". "Poems"
of course meant "abhangs" |
| to be sung in praise of Vithoba
as Namdeo himself had done. The dream made reference to
a pledge made by Namdeo to Vitthal that he would compose
"one billion abhangs" in His praise. Namdeo had
obviously been unable to achieve this steep target in his
lifetime and he therefore asked Tukaram to complete the
task. This dream or revelation which he saw while in state
of trance was so vivid that Tukaram was convinced of its
"reality". This changed his life. He had found
his true vocation. |
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| The divine revelation that
he was a poet did not cause Tukaram to go into ecstasy.
Instead, he began to suffer from anxiety, doubt and pangs
of conscience. One of Tukaram's characteristics was his
absolute honesty and accountability to himself. He would
not tell a lie even in a poem. The knowledge that his task
in life was to write poems in praise of Vitthal made Tukaram
a restless and troubled soul. He had never experienced God.
How was he going to praise some –thing he had never experienced
himself? He had been a honest trader. He vouched for the
quality of every item he sold. He bought goods only after
critically testing them. He did not cheat anyone in any
transaction. Nor would he allow himself to be cheated. Tukaram
treated poetry as a serious business from the outset. To
him, all poetry was empirical and so was religion. Experience
or "realization" was the crucial test. In one
of his poems, presumably written at this juncture, Tukaram
says in effect, "Whereof I have no experience, thereof
I cannot sing. How can I write of You, O Vitthal, when I
have not personally experienced Your being?" |
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| Yearning for an experience
of God became the chief theme of poetry for Tukaram in his
first major phase of work. Meanwhile, he continued to record
his poems the human conditions as witnessed by him and also
his experiences just prior to his realization that he was
to be a poet of God. |
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| Having become a poet, Tukaram
continued to go off for long periods of time, away from
the hub of human life and society, to meditate and seek
enlightenment. Two hills in the vicinity of Dehu were his
favourite retreats. The first is the Bhandara hill, where,
in a small cave which is a relic of Buddhist times, he composed
many of his abhangs. The second is the Bhamchandra hill,
where, some years later, he meditated for a full fifteen
days before experiencing mystical illumination and beatitude.
This event is distinct from another instance of initiation
by a guru during a trance that Tukaram has described elsewhere.
In this latter event, Tukaram was dreaming that he was
going to a river for a dip when he was suddenly confronted
by a holy man who placed his hand on Tukaram's head and
gave him the mantra, "Ram Krishna Hari" to chant.
This holy man told Tukaram that his name was "Babaji"
and that he was a lineal spiritual descendant of the gurus
Raghav Chaitanya and Keshav Chaitanya. When Tukaram was
given this mantra, he felt his entire being come alive.
He experienced a fullness of being he had never before felt.
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| Tukaram himself has described
these experiences in his poems and there is no ambiguity
about them. Unfortunately, the chronology of these events
is difficult to determine except in a broad way. Tukaram
must have been thirty years old or more by the time the
latter of these experiences occurred. A prominent modern
biographer of Tukaram, the late V.S. Bendre, has laid great
emphasis on Tukaram's dream initiation by "Babaji"
and the guru-lineage it signifies. I suspect that Bhakti
has roots in folk-religion and therefore Brahmin and caste
Hindu people always try to "upgrade" a Bhakta
by presenting him as a "yogi" or an "initiate"
of some esoteric order or another. Bendre appears to me
to have been attempting to "Brahminize" Tukaram
through "yogic" and "mantric" initiation
rites performed by a "proper" guru. This seems
to be an attempt to authenticate a natural and self-made
Bhakta. But to me the meaning of these stories is almost
the opposite: to a "Shudra" the guru can appear
only in a "dream" or a trance. |
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| Now the last and the most spectacular
decade in Tukaram's life begins. Though Tukaram was only
about thirty years old at this time, he had been writing
poetry for nearly ten years. In his poetry, Tukaram had
depicted with great honesty his own past life and his anguished
search for God. With his recent mystical enlightment, his
poetry acquired a magical quality. His songs began to attract
people from distant places. The younger poetess Bahinabai
came to Dehu all the way from Kolhapur just to witness Tukaram's
divine performance of his poetry in front of the image of
Vitthal in the shrine near his ancestral house. Though Bahinabai's
account of her visit to Dehu refers to a period just a few
years before Tukaram's disappearance, from her description
we get some idea of the charismatic influence of Tukaram
upon his contemporaries throughout Maharashtra. The water-ordeal
that has been referred to earlier had already taken place
before Bahinabai's visit to Dehu. The miraculous restoration
of his manuscripts that had been consigned to the river
for thirteen days was surely a major factor contributing
to the legendary status which Tukaram acquired in, his lifetime.
Bahinabai has described Tukaram singing his abhangs as "Lord
Pandurang incarnate". "Whatever Tukaram writes
is God," says Bahinabai. |
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| Tukaram disappeared at the
age of forty-one. Varkaris believe that Vitthal Himself
carried Tukaram away to heaven in a "chariot of light".
Some people believe that Tukaram just vanished into thin
air while singing his poetry in front of an ecstatic audience
on the bank of the river Indrayani in Dehu. Some others
as I have said, speculate that he was murdered by his enemies.
Still others think that he ended his own life by drowning
himself into the very river where his poems had been sunk
earlier. Reading his farewell poems, however, one is inclined
to imagine that Tukaram bade a proper farewell to his close
friends and fellow-devotees and left his native village
for some unknown destination with no intention of returning.
He asked them to return home after their having walked a
certain distance with him. He told them that they would
never see him again as he was "going home for good".
He told them that from then on only "talk about Tuka"
would remain in "this world". |
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| This, in short, is the story
of Tukaram's life as it emerges from his own poems. One
can see from it that from absolutely ordinary origins and
after having gone through experiences accesi-ble to average
human beings anywhere. Tukaram went on an extraordinary
voyage of self-discovery while continuing to record every
stage of it in detail in his poetry. His poetry is a unique
document in human history, impeccably centered in the fundamental
problems of being and defining poetry as both the being
of language and the language of being: the human truth.
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