The first, and by far the only complete translation of Tukaramachi Gatha or The Collected Tukaram into English was done by J. Nelson Fraser and K.B. Marathe. This was published by the Christian Literature Society, Madras (1905-1915). The only other European language version of selected poems of Tukaram is G.A. Deleury's Toukaram :Psaumes du perlerin (Gallimard, Paris, 1956). Fraser and Marathe's translation comprises 3721 poems in all. Justin E. Abbott's monumental 11-volume series, Poet-Saints of Maharashtra (Scottish Mission Industries, Poona, 1926) and Nicol Macnicol's Psalms of Maratha Saints (Christian Literature Society, Calcutta, 1919) contain much fewer. Fraser and Abbot have both attempted prose paraphrases while Macnicol has superimposed a heavily stylized verse-form quite alien to the fluid colloquial folk-style of the original. Deleury's 101 poems in French translation are the only European attempt to create a poetic analogue of Tukaram's original work. The distinguished Anglo-Marathi poet, Arun Kolatkar has published 9 translations of Tukaram's poems (Poetry India, Bombay, 1966) and my own earlier versions of Tukaram have appeared in Fakir, Delos, Modern Poetry in Translation, Translation and the South-Asian Digest of Literature.

This is hardly an adequate bibliography considering Tukaram's towering stature as a poet and his pervasive influence on Marathi language and literature. He represents the vital link in the mutation of a medieval Marathi literary tradition into modern Marathi literature. His poems (nearly 5000) encompass the entire gamut of Marathi culture. The dimensions of his work are so monumental that they will keep many future generations of translators creatively occupied. In a sense, therefore, Tukaram is a poet who belongs more to the future than to a historically bound specific past.

The translators of Tukaram fall into different categories. Fraser and Abbott have rendered Tukaram into prose rather like representing a spontaneous choreography as a purposeful walk. Macnicol turns the walk into what seems like a military march. Only Deleury and Kolatkar approach it as dance and in the spirit of dance. Deleury dwells on the lyrical nuance and the emotional intensity of the original. Kolatkar concentrates on the dramatic, the quick and the abrupt, the startling and the cryptic element in Tukaram's idiom. This is hardly enough to give an idea of the range, the depth and the complexity of the source text as a whole. Tukaram forces one to face the fundamental problem of translating poetry: beneath the simple and elegant surface structure of the source text lies a richer and vastly complex deep structure that the target text must somehow suggest. This is nothing short of a project lasting an exasperating lifetime. It is much easier to play-act the role of Tukaram as a stylized vignette in whatever the prevailing etat de langue permits. The culture of poetry is more biased and partisan than the culture of translation. One would hesitate to elaborate on this point at this juncture; but it needs to be made albeit in passing.

Problems of translation can be compared to problems of instrumentation. The naked eye does not see what can be seen only through a telescope; but a radio telescope literally makes the invisible visible. An electron microscope is designed to "see" what lies beyond sight by definition.

Unfortunately, there is no equipment engineered to read beneath the surface of a specific source text. If the target text is only an attempt to create a model of the source text, then every aspect of the source text becomes equally sacrosanct and translation becomes obviously impossible.

Unless the translator presumes or directly apprehends how the source text functions, he cannot begin to look for a possible translation. Poems function in delicate, intricate and dynamic ways. Their original existence does not depend on specific audiences or the possibility of eventual translators. No translation can absolutely do away with the idea of the source text as an autonomously functioning whole in another linguistic space and time.

There is an implicit strangeness in every translated work, especially in translated poetry. A translated poem is at best, an intimate stranger among its counterparts in the target language. The stranger will retain traces of an odd accent; peculiar turns of phrase, exotic references and even a wistful homesick look. These are happy signs that poetry is born and is alive and kicking elsewhere too. That other minds do exist is a fact that should be as often celebrated as it is mourned by some puritanical critics.

Religion in Maharashtra, in Tukaram's time, was a practice that separated communities, classes and castes. Bhakti was the middle way between the extremes of Brahminism on the one hand and folk religion on the other. It was also the most democratic and egalitarian community of worshippers, sharing a way of life and caring for all life with a deep sense of compassion. The legacy of Jainism and Buddhism had not disappeared altogether in Maharashtra. It was regenerated in the form of Bhakti. Tukaram's penetrating criticism of the degenerated state of Brahminical Hinduism, and his scathing comments on bigotry and obscurantism, profiteering and profligacy in the name of religion, bear witness to his universal humanistic concerns. He had the abhorrence of a true realist for any superstitious belief or practice. He understood the nature of language well enough to understand how it can be used to bewitch, mislead and distort. He had a healthy suspicion of god-men and gurus. He believed that the individual alone was ultimately responsible for his own spiritual liberation. He was not an escapist. His mysticism was not rooted in a rejection of reality but rather in a spirited response to it after its total acceptance as a basic fact of life. Tukaram's hard common sense is not contracted by his mysticism: the two reinforce each other.

The Marathi poet-saints are an exception to the general rule that Indian devotional literature shows little awareness of the prevailing social conditions. The Marathi "saints", both implicitly and explicitly, questioned the elitist monopoly of spiritual knowledge and privilege embodied in the caste hierarchy. They were strongly egalitarian and preached universal love and compassion. They trusted their native language, Marathi, more than Sanskrit of the scriptures or the erudite commentaries thereon. They made language a form of shared religion and religion a shared language. It is they who helped to bind the Marathas together against the Mughals on the basis not of any religious ideology but a territorial cultural identity. Their egalitarian legacy continues into modern times with Jotiba Phule, Vitthal Ramji Shinde, Chattrapati Shahu, Sayaji Rao Gaekwar and B.R. Ambedkar - all outstanding social reformers and activists. The gamut of Bhakti poetry has amazing depth, width and range: it is hermitic, esoteric, cryptic, mystical; it is sensuous, lyrical, deeply emotional, devotional, it is vivid, graphic, frank, direct; it is ironic, sarcastic, critical; it is colloquial, comic, absurd; it is imaginative, inventive, experimental; it is intense, angry, assertive and full of protest. In the 4000-plus poems of Tukaram handed down to us by an unbroken oral tradition, there are poems to which all the above adjectives fit.

The tradition of the Marathi saints conceives the role of a poet in its own unique way and I am sure this has a deep ethno-poetic significance. Bhakti is founded in a spirit of universal fellowship. Its basic principle is sharing. The deity does not represent any sectarian dogma to the Bhakta but only a common object of universal love or a common spiritual focus. Poetry is another expression of the same fellowship. Tukaram may have written his poems in loneliness but he recited them to live audiences in a shrine of Vitthal. Hundreds of people gathered to listen his poetry. The poetess Bahinabai a contemporary and a devoted follower of Tukaram has described how Tukaram in a state of trance, chanted his poems while an enraptured audience rocked to their rhythm. This has been a tradition from the time of Jnanadev (1275-1296), the founder of Marathi poetry and the cult of Vithoba and Namdeo (1270-1350), the great forerunner of Tukaram.The audience consisted of common village-folk, including women and low-caste people, thrilled by the heights their own language scaled and stirred by the depths it touched.

Paul Valery defines the difference between prose and poetry as comparable to the difference between walking and dancing and Tukaram's recitation must have seemed to his audience like pure dance, turning nothingness into space.

Life, in all its aspects was the subject of such poetry. Tukaram himself believed that he was only a medium of the poetry, saying, "God speaks through me." This was said in humility and not with the pompous arrogance of a god-man or the smug egoism of a poet laureate.

The saints are perhaps inaccurately called so because the Marathi word "sant" used for them sounds so similar. The Marathi word is derived from the Sanskrit "sat" which denotes being and awareness, purity and divine spirit, wisdom and sagacity, the quality of being emancipated and of being true. The relative emphases are somewhat different in the Christian concept of sainthood, though there is an overlap.

The poet-saint fusion in Marathi gives us a unique view of poetry itself. In this view, moral integrity and spiritual greatness are critical characteristics of both poetry and the poet.

Tukaram saw himself as primarily a poet. He has explicitly written about being a poet, the responsibility of a poet, the difficulties in being a poet and so forth. He has also criticized certain kinds of poetry and poets. It is clear that he would have agreed with Heidegger that in poetry the language becomes one with the being of language. Poetry was, for him, a precise description of the human condition in its naked totality. It was certainly not an effete form of entertainment for him. Nor was it ornamental. Language was a divine gift and it had to be returned to its source, via poetry, with selfless devotion.

This would sound like a cliché, but Tukaram's genius partly lies in his ability to transform the external world into its spiritual analogue. The whole world became a sort of functional metaphor in his poetry, a text. His poems have an apparently simple surface. But beneath the simple surface lies a complex understructure and the tension between the two is always subtly suggested.

The famous "signature line" of each poem, "Says Tuka" opens the door to deeper structure. Aphoristic, witty, satirical, ironic, wry, absurd, startling or mystical, these endings of Tukaram's poems often set the entire poem into sudden reverse motion. They point to an invisible, circular or spiral continuity between the apparent and the real, between everyday language and the intricate world-image that it often innocently implies.

Thus, Tukaram sees the relationship between God and His devotee as the relationship between God and his devotee. Tukaram is not proposing the absolutely external existence of God, independent of man. He knows that it is the devotee who creates an anthropomorphic image of God. He know that in a sense it is a make-believe God entirely at the mercy of his creator-devotee using a man-made language.

Tukaram is interested in a godlike experience of being where there is no boundary between the subjective and the objective, the personal and the impersonal, the individual and cosmic. He sees his own consciousness as a cosmic event rooted in the everyday world but stretching infinitely to the deceptive limits of awareness. "Too scarce to occupy an atom," he writes, "Tuka is as vast as the sky."

One more striking aspects of Tukaram's poetry is its distinct ethno-poetics or the Marathi-ness of its conception.

Medieval Marathi poetry developed in two divergent directions. One continued from the Sanskrit classics - both religious and secular - and from the somewhat different classicism of Prakrit poetry. In either case, it followed older, established models and non-native literary sources. Imitations of Sanskrit models in a highly Sanskritized language and using Sanskrit prosody as "well as stylistic devices characterize this trend in Marathi literature. These "classicists" neglected or deliberately excluded the use of native resources of demotic, colloquial Marathi. Luckily, though this trend has continued in Marathi for the last 700 years, only minority of writers (of not too significant talent) have produced classicist literature.

Others, starting from the pioneer of Marathi Bhakti poetry, Jnanadev, took precisely the opposite course. They used the growing resources of vigorously developing Marathi language to create a new literature of their own. They fashioned out a Marathi prosody from the flexible meters of the graceful folk-songs of women at work in homes and devotees at play in religious folk-festivals. They gave literary form to colloquial speech, drawing their vocabulary from everyday usage of ordinary people. The result was poetry far richer in body and more variegated in texture than the standardized work of the "classicists". People by many voices, made distinctive by many local and regional tonalities and enriched by spontaneous folk innovation, Bhakti poetry became a phenomenal movement bringing Marathi-speaking people together as never before. This poetry was sung and per-formed by audiences that joined poet-singers in a chorus. Musical-literary discourses or keertans that are a blend of oratory, theatre, solo and choral singing and music were the new art form spawned by this movement. Bhajan was the new form of singing poetry together and emphasizing its key elements by turning chosen lines into a refrain. These comprise a new kind of democratic literary transaction in which even illiterates are drawn to the core of a literary text in a collective realization of some poet's work. This open-ended and down-to-earth nativism found its fullest expression in Tukaram, three centuries after Jnanadev and Namdeo had broken new ground by founding demotic Marathi poetry itself.

Bhakti poetry as a whole has so profoundly shaped the very world-image of Marathi speakers that even unsuspecting moderns cannot escape its pervasive mould. But Tukaram gave Bhakti itself new existential dimensions. In this he was anticipating the spiritual anguish of modern man two centuries ahead of his time. He was also anticipating a form of personal, confessional poetry that seeks articulate liberation from the deepest traumas man experiences and represses out of fear. Tukaram's poetry expresses pain and bewilderment, fear and anxiety, exasperation and desperateness, boredom and meaninglessness - in fact all the feelings that characterize modern self-awareness. Tukaram's poetry is always apparently easy to understand and simple in its structure. But it has many hidden traps. It has a deadpan irony that is not easy to detect. It has deadly paradoxes and a savage black humour. Tukaram himself is often paradoxical: he is an image-worshipping iconoclast; he is a sensuous ascetic; he is an intense Bhakta who would not hesitate to destroy his God out of sheer love. Tukaram knows that he is in charge of his own feelings and the meaning of his poetry. This is not merely the confidence of a master craftsman; it is much more. It is his conviction that man is responsible for his own spiritual destiny as much as he is in charge of his own worldly affairs. He believes that freedom means self-determination. He sees the connection between being and making choice. His belief is a conscious choice for which he has willingly paid a price.

Tukaram is therefore not only the last great Bhakti poet in Marathi but he is also the first truly modern Marathi poet in terms of temper and thematic choice, technique and vision. He is certainly the most vital link between medieval and modern Marathi poetry.

Tukaram's stature in Marathi literature is comparable to that of Shakespeare in English or Goethe in German. He could be called the quintessential Marathi poet reflecting the genius or the language as well as its characteristic literary culture. There is no other Marathi writer who has so deeply and widely influenced Marathi literary culture since. Tukaram's poetry has shaped the Marathi language, as it is spoken by 50 million people today and not just the literary language. Perhaps one should compare his influence with that of the King James Version of the Bible upon speakers of the English language. For Tukaram's poetry is also used by illiterate millions to voice their prayers or to express their love of God.

Tukaram speaks the Marathi of the common man of rural Maharashtra and not the elite. His language is not of the Brahmin priests. It is the language of ordinary men such as farmers, traders, craftsman, labourers and also the language of the average housewife. His idiom and imagery is moulded from the everyday experience of people though it also contains special information and insights from a variety of sources and contexts. Tukaram transforms the colloquial into the classic with a universal touch. At once earthy and other-worldly, he is able to create a revealing analogue of spiritual life out of this-worldly language. He is, thus, able to prove how close to common speech the roots of great poetry lie. Yet his poetry does not yield the secret of its seamless excellence to even the most sophisticated stylistic analysis. He is so great an artist that his draughtsmanship seems to be an integral part of a prodigious instinct, a genius.

Tukaram's prolific output, by and large, consists of a single spiritual autobiography revealed in its myriad facets. It defies any classification once it is realized that common thematic strands and recurrent motifs homogenize his work as a whole. In the end what we begin to hear is a single voice - unique and unmistakable - urgent, intense, human and erasing the boundary between the private domain and the public. Tukaram is an accessible poet and yet his is a very difficult one. He keeps growing on you.

I attempted my first translation of a Tukaram abhang in 1956 or , more than thirty years ago. It was the famous abhang describing the image of Vitthal - sundar te dhyan ubha vitevari. For some reason, at that time I found it comparable to Rainer Maria Rilke's Archaic Torso of Apollo and felt that the difference between Vitthal and Apollo described the difference between two artistic cultures. I was only eighteen then and should therefore be forgiven my immature and rash cross-comparison. But the fact is that the comparison persisted in my mind. Through Rilke's poem I reached back to Nietzsche's brilliant early work, Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music. This is where Nietzsche first proposed the opposition between Dionysius and Apollo and the resolution of this opposition in Attic Tragedy. I began to look at the iconography of Vitthal to contemplate its secret meaning for Varkari Bhakta poets and it was worth paying attention to the unique stance of V

The reason I recall this here is because I kept translating the same abhang periodically and my most recent version of it was done last year. Each of these versions derive from and point to the same source text. The same translator has attempted them. But can one say that anyone of them is more valid or correct or true than any other? Do these translations exist independently of the source text? Do they exist independently of one another? Or do they belong to a vast and growing body of Tukaram literature that now includes many other things in many languages besides the source text of Tukaram's collected poetry? These issues are fundamental to literary theory and to the theory of literary translation, if such a theory were po

In this connection, I would like to quote somewhat extensively from my Ajneya Memorial Lecture delivered at the South Asia Institute of the University of Heidelberg in November 1988. The theme of my lecture was the life of a translator and more specifically my life as a translator of Tukaram into a modern European language. Here are some relevant ex

"Someone has said (and I wish it was me who first said it) that when we deal with the greatest of writers, the proper question to ask is not I what we think of them but what they would have thought of us. What a contemporary European reader thinks of Tukaram is thus a less proper question to ask than what Tukaram would have thought of a contemporary European reader. Part of my almost impossible task is to make the reader of my translations aware that my translations faced a challenge I was unable to m

". ..Bhakti, the practice of devoted awareness, lies in mirroring God here and now. Tukaram was a Bhakta-poet. To understand God's being, to translate His presence, he mirrored Him. First, he thought of God, tried to picture Him in various worldly and other-worldly situations. Then he pined for Him. And finally, "possessed" by Him, He acted, through language, like God. To read Tukaram's poetry is to understand this ritual choreography as a whole; for its form is shaped by its function. Thus, in translating Tukaram, we are not merely transposing poetry but recreating a dramatic ritual of "possessed" language. This is the only aspect of Tukaram's work which is multifaceted. But it is a culture-specific aspect of his idea of the role of poetry in life as B

"This imposes comprehensive constraints upon any would-be translator of Tukaram into any modern European language. He has to be thoroughly aware of the phenomenon of Tukaram at source, not only the text but the context as well. For the text is a total cultural performance which embodies a specific tradition and an individual notion of poetry, the poet and his audience. When Tukaram claims to be a poet he is also claiming that his kind of utterance is poetry as distinct from other kinds of Marathi utterances. He and his tradition in the seventeenth century are innocent of Europe and its poetry. The source language and its literature, in this case, have no actual historical nexus with the target language. This does not rule out, however, an imaginative manipulation of the resources of the target language and literature, as available in the twentieth century, to put Tukaram's work across. In fact, our contemporary translation of Tukaram must make his work appear here and now, yet suggesting also that it is really out there. The translation must subtly contain its own perspective and imagined laws of projected perception, so that Tukaram remains a seventeenth century Marathi Bhakta-poet in English translation, and not a jeans-and-jacket-clad European talking of mystical illumination in Indi

More than three decades of translating Tukaram have helped me to learn to live with problems that can only be understood by people who often live in a no-man's land between two linguistic cultures belonging to two distinct civiliz

As I have said earlier, traditional editions of Tukaram's collected works have been compiled from later devotees' versions of orally preserved and transmitted verses. Some of them are copies of still older copies but what we have in supposedly Tukaram's own hand- writing is the remaining 250 abhangs from the hallowed heirloom of a copy in the temple at Dehu. As I have remarked, this manuscript has been gradually depleting. As a result, there is no canonical text of Tukaram's collected works. The nearest thing to an authorized version that we have access to is Tukarambavachya Abhanganchi Gatha collated and critically edited by Vishnu Parshuram Shastri Pandit with the assistance of Shankar Pandurang Pandit in 1873. It is significant to note that one of the four manuscripts used by the Pandits for their critically collated edition was the "Dehu manuscript obtained from Tukaram's own family and continuing in it as an heirloom". But according to the editors, "It is said to be in the hand-writing of Mahadevabava, the eldest son of Tukaram, and so appears to be more than two hundred years old." However, the present oldest direct lineal descendent of Tukaram, Mr. Shridharbuva More (Dehukar) informs me that the Dehu manuscript is in Tukaram's own handwriting and is referred to as the "Bhijki Vahi" or the "Soaked Not

Whether the Dehu manuscript is in Tukaram's own handwriting or not, its antiquity is not in question. Tukaram's descendants have proudly preserved this copy as an heirloom. The three other copies consulted by the Pandits for their critical edition are the Talegava manuscript of Trimbak Kasar, the Pandharpur manuscript, and the Kadusa manuscript of Gangadhar Mavala. Despite the vigilance of the editors, interpolations may have gone unnoticed in this otherwise excellent and most reliable edition. This is the principal source text I have used although I have occasionally used other Varkari editors' versions such as Jog's, Sakhare's, and Neoorgao

What struck me, as a regular reader of the collected poems of Tukaram in various editions, was not textual variations as such but the widely divergent sequencing of the abhangs. Although there are many distinct groups of abhangs that are linked by narrative or thematic connections or have subjects and topics that are clearly spelt out, there is no clue to the chronology of Tukaram's works. They appear in a random sequence and are often a rather jumbled collection of poems without individual titles. In short, what the Gatha lacks is a coherent order or an editorial plan, whether thematic or chronological. Since the Gatha as a whole is largely an autobiographical work occasionally containing narrative poems, topical poems, poems on specific themes, odes, epistolary poetry, aphoristic verses, prayers, poetry using the personae of various characters, allegories and many other types of poetry, it is difficult to understand it in to

Yet I, for one, feel compelled to have a holistic grasp of Tukaramachi Gatha. Since I perceive it as an autobiography, even if I cannot suggest a chronological order for the more than 4000 poems before me, I should be able to relate a majority of these poems to Tukaram's personality and his concerns, the key events that shaped his life and his development as a spiritual person through the various transformations his poetry goes through. This book makes an effort to understand Tukaram as a whole being with certain characteristic aspects: it is an introduction to Tukaram, the poet, and his poetry as facets of his being. I have made the same attempt in my Marathi book, Punha Tukaram, in which I present an identical selection of abhangs in the original Marathi of Tukaram with an introduction, a sort of running commentary, and an epilogue. But the Marathi book is addressed to the insider and is meant to be a critique of Marathi culture, among other things. In the present book, my bilingualism functions on an altogether different level though the two aspects are not mutually exclusive. I have tried to introduce my reader in English to the greatest of Marathi poets, assuming that they are unacquainted with works in Marathi. One of the greatest rewards of knowing this language is access to Tukaram's work in the or

This book has been divided into ten sections:

1. Being A Poet;
2. Being Human;
3. Being A Devotee;
4. Being In Turmoil;
5. Being A Saint;
6. Being A Sage;
7. Being In Time And Place;
8. Being Blessed;
9. Absolutely Being;
10. A Farewell To Being.

These ten aspects or dimensions of Tukaram's personality are integral to his being as a whole. None of them exists to the exclusion of any other. None of them can be emphasized at the expense of another. These aspects cannot be seen in any linear or serial order, whether chronological or psychological. They are perceived distinctly only because most of his personal and autobiographical poetry falls into place if grouped according to these aspects.

Perceived according to this design, Tukaram's aspects are his inner needs as well as his capabilities. They indicate his sensitivity. They point to his ethics. They imply an entire world-view. These ten aspects cover the universe of Tukaram's awareness.

Once I became aware of these ten facets of Tukaram's life and his poetry, the poems in this book selected themselves. If I have left out some very well-known abhang from this selection, the reason could be my self-imposed constraints. I have so far finalized the translation of about 600 abhangs of Tukaram. In selecting poems for this book, my guiding principle was the idea of presenting a poetic self-portrait by Tukaram. There are other ways of looking at his work that is oceanic in its immensity and this is only one of many possible beginnings.

Tukaram is part of a great tradition in Marathi literature that started with Jnanadev. Broadly speaking, it is part of the pan-Indian phenomenon of Bhakti. In Maharashtra, Bhakti took the form of the cult of Vithoba, the Pandharpur-based deity worshipped by Varkari pilgrims who make regular journeys to Pandharpur from all over the region. Jnanadev gave the Varkari movement its own sacred texts in Marathi in the form of Jnanadevi or Bhavarthadeepika (now better known as Jnaneshwari) Anubhavamrita and Changdev Pasashti, as well as several lyrical prayers and hymns. His contemporaries included Namdeo, another great Marathi poet and saint, and a whole galaxy of brilliant poets and poetesses. These poet-Bhaktas of Vithoba composed and sang songs on their regular trips to Pandharpur and back from all parts of Maharashtra. ,In the sixteenth century, the Varkari tradition produced its next great poet, Eknath and he was followed in the seventeenth century by Tukaram.

Tukaram's younger contemporary, Bahinabai Sioorkar, has used the metaphor of a temple to describe the Varkari tradition of Bhakti. She says that Jnanadev laid its foundation, Namdeo built its walls, Eknath gave it a central pillar, and Tukaram became its "crown" or "spire". As visualized by Bahinabai, the Varkari tradition was a single architectural masterpiece produced collectively by these four great poets and their several talented followers. She rightly views it as a collective work of art in which parts created in different centuries by different individuals are integrated into a whole that only the genius of a common tradition could produce.

The achievement of the Marathi Varkari poets is paralleled by only one example I can think of and that too, incidentally, is from Maharashtra. The frescoes of Ajanta and the sculptures and architecture of Ellora comprise similar continuous collective work of superbly integrated art. These were produced by a creative culture that does not lay too great a stress on individual authorship. It is a community of the imagination and a synergy of creative inspiration that sustains such work over several generations.

The secret appears to be the ethos of Bhakti.

The roots of Bhakti lie more in folk-traditions of worship than in classical Hindu philosophy. As for the Varkaris, their only philosopher was Jnanadev. Jnanadev was an ordained member of the esoteric Shaivaite Natha sect. It was novel, to say the least, for him to embrace the cult of Vithoba and to give it a philosophical basis on the lines of the Kashmir Shaivagama Acharyas' teachings. Jnanadev's mind was as brilliant and original as Abhinavgupta's. In Anubhavamrita - his seminal work in religious philosophy - Jnanadev describes Bhakti as chidvilasa or "the spontaneous play of creative consciousness". Tukaram celebrates the legacy of Jnanadev in his poetic world-view. But Tukaram reaches the ecstatic state of liberated life only after extreme suffering and an anguished search of a lifetime.

No Marathi reader can read Tukaram except in the larger context of the tradition of Varkari poetics and practice of poetry. If readers of Tukaram in translation find him rewarding then they should go deeper into the Varkari poetic tradition. They will not be disappointed. They will even discover richer resonances in the same work of Tukaram that they may have started with.

It may be worthwhile to ask what I myself have been doing with Tukaram all these years and try to give a candid answer.In retrospect, I have just gone through the vast body of Tukaram's work again and again, marked its leitmotifs, followed its major thematic strands and the often invisible but always palpable autobiographical thread. Each time, I have discovered something new. Some abhang or another that I had not noticed earlier has regularly exploded in my face. Tukaram's exquisite mastery of his medium has stunned me again and again.

This is the way I view my source-text with absolute and unashamed reverence. These are the bases of my present selection and presentation of translations. No reference to the source-text or to any other works is necessary for the reader of this book. Quite simply, these are poems in English worked out by a twentieth century poet who is no relation of Tukaram. Tukaram himself did not write any of these poems in English, a language he did not know of in all probability. Translations of poetry are speculations about missing poets and lost poetry. They are done with dowsing-rods and non-scientific instruments. But their existence as entities in their own right cannot be disputed or denied.

A large number of friends and well-wishers have supported my Tukaram "project" since 1956. I would recall them in a chronological order, as far as possible, and also name the places where I worked then. The "support" came in various forms: discussion, advice, suggestions, references, books, information, criticism, encouragement, and even financial help whenever I had no income but was working full time on my translations.

In the first phase between 1956 and 1960 in Bombay, Bandu Vaze and Arun Kolatkar.

In the second phase between 1960 and 1963, Graham Tayar, Tom Bloor, and George Smythe in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

In the third phase between 1963 and 1970, Damodar Prabhu, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Sadanand Rege, K. Shri Kumar, A.B. Shah, and G. V. Karandikar, in Bombay.

In the fourth phase between 1970 and 1975 in Bombay, Adil Jussawala, who continued to back me all the way, all the time, ever since.

Between 1975 and the end of 1977 in Iowa City and other parts of the U.S.A., Daniel Weissbort, Burt Blume, Skip and Bonny O'Connell, William Brown, Angela Elston, A.K Ramanujan, Eleanor Zelliott, Margaret Case, Jayanta Mahapatra.

Between 1978 and 1983 in Bombay and parts of Europe, Gunther D. Sontheimer, Lothar Lutze, Orban Otto, Guy Deleruy.

Between 1983 and 1985, Ashok Vajpeyi, Shrikant Varma in Bhopal and New Delhi.

Between 1985 and 1990, mostly in Pune except for two visits to Europe, I brought this book into its present shape with significant and sustained help from Adil Jussawala, Anne Feldhaus, Gunther D. Sontheimer, Lothar Lutze, G.M. Pawar, A.V. Datar, Prakash Deshpande, Chandrashekhar Jahagirdar, Rajan Padval, Namdeo Dhasal, Anil and Meena Kinikar, Philip Engblom, Shridharbuva More, and Sadanand More in different ways.

I would like to recall here that it was my maternal grandfather, Kashinath Martand Gupte, who impressed upon my mind the greatness of Tukaram when I was only a child. My paternal grandmother, Sitabai Atmaram Chitre, gave me my first insight into Bhakti. My parents my father in particular, regularly gave me books that were relevant to my work on Tukaram.

My greatest gratitude is towards my wife Viju, the first critical listener of my ideas as they evolve and of my poetry or translations. She is also the keeper of all that I possess or produce. Considering that the smallest scraps of paper with scribbled notes, scrawled messages, or intriguing squiggles have all been miraculously preserved by her in a nomadic life spent in three different continents during the last three decades, she deserves the world's greatest honour that I can personally bestow upon anyone.

This book is the product of the collective goodwill of all these people. All I own is the errors of omission and commission.

Dilip Chitre, Pune

July 1991

Abhang:

Literally, 1. Absolute; eternal, immutable, ceaseless, unbroken; impeccable, etc.

2. immortal, primordial; another name for Brahman; inviolable, etc.

3. a Marathi metre; also, any metrical composition in this metre. The abhang is the favourite metre of all Varkari poets since the thirteenth century and unlike classical Sanskrit-based metres it is native to Marathi speech and its colloquial forms. It is extremely flexible. It consists of four lines and each line contains three to eight syllables. It has a fluid symmetry maintained by internal or end-rhymes and is often designed to be sung. It originates most probably in oral folk-poetry. Poets such as Jnanadev, Namdev and Tukaram have given it a classic status in Marathi poetry. Most of Tukaram's compositions are in this metre and even when they are not, in exceptional cases, the term abhang is popularly used for practically all of Tukaram's metrical compositions. originates most probably in oral folk-poetry. Poets such as Jnanadev, Namdev, and Tukaram.

Avataras, (the ten)

"the Fish, the Tortoise, the Boar, the Man-Lion, the Dwarf Man, Parashu Rama, Rama, Krishna, the Buddha, and Kalki are the Ten Avataras" according to a verse in the Geeta. These, in the same order, are the incarnations (avataras) of Vishnu.

Ananta : literally,

1. endless, infinite, boundless, etc.

2. name of Vishnu.

3. name of Shesha, the serpent upon whom Vishnu sleeps.

4. the sky; space, etc.

5. used for time, eternity, etc.

6. used for Brahman, or absolute and infinite being; infinity in any sense.

Tukaram uses Ananta as both a name and an attribute of Vitthal who, to the Varkaris, is synonymous with Vishnu and Narayana, both of whom are known by many other names. Since each of these names has a unique significance, Tukaram often uses a specific name in a specific context, literally, metaphorically, or suggestively.

Bahinabai Sioorkar :

(1629-1700) is remarkable among the Marathi poet-saints not just because she is a woman; so were Muktabai and Janabai long before her; Bahinabai is unique because she was an orthodox, married Brahmin and yet was attracted to Bhakti and particularly to the poetry of Tukaram about whom she heard in distant Kolhapur from a keertan-performer called Jayaramaswami; she was obsessed by the idea of meeting Tukaram in person and dreamt that Tukaram blessed her and became her guru; this resulted in her husband beating her up in jealous fury; he was horrified that his wife, a Brahmin, should want to make a Shudra who had no scriptural knowledge her guru; however, the husband changed his mind when persuaded by another Brahmin and accompanied Bahinabai to Dehu; there they saw Tukaram and attended his keertans; Bahinabai's vivid account of Dehu and Tukaram are like a poetic journal that vividly recreates scenes in evocative detail; this is the only contemporary eyewitness account of Tukaram available to us; Bahinabai's autobiography and verses are translated into English prose by Justin E.Abbott and have been recently republished with a perceptive foreword by Anne Feldhaus.

Bhagawadgeeta:

often also referred to in the abbreviated form "the Geeta"; "The Song of the Lord" depicting the celebrated dialogue between -Arjuna and Krishna during the Mahabharata war and a section of the Bheeshmapa1Va, a chapter of the Hindu epic, Mahabharata; regarded by many Hindus as the essence of all scriptures and the revelation by Lord Vishnu of his own nature and cosmic role that explains karma, man's duty in this world and the laws that govern his behaviour, the design of human destiny, and the divine, cyclic design by which Vishnu Himself!! assumes different avatar as or incarnations in the human world to remove the specific form of evil that afflicts each Age or Epoch; this is also seen as a dialogue between the individual human ego and the Divine Self or the Whole Being of which the human individual is only a part; Jnanadev produced the first poetic transcreation of the

Bhagawadgeeta in Marathi in the thirteenth century; these acts of translation into the language of the masses must have been viewed by the Brahmin orthodoxy as acts of heresy.

Bhakta:

literally means a worshipper, a devotee, a votary, an adorer, etc.; it is useful to remember that the original Sanskrit word also means:

1. (a share) allotted, distributed, assigned; as such a Bhakta is given "his lot" or "his share of the Divine";

2. divided; applied to a Bhakta, this may assume a spiritual significance;

3. served, worshipped;

4. engaged in, attentive to;

5. attached or devoted to; loyal, faithful.

Bhakti:

devotion, loyalty, faithfulness; engagement, commitment; dedication; reverence, service, homage; the condition of the whole being of a Bhakta whose mind and body are totally absorbed in the object of his worship and remain continually directed or oriented towards it; the object of such worship can be an anthropomorphic deity, a symbol, a name, an image, a concept, an abstraction, or the non-discursive or inconceivable "Whole Being" itself.

Bhakti-Marga:

derives from the above; literally, "the way of devotion" or "devotion as the path by which God is realized (by individuals or by a community of devotees)". In reading Tukaram, Bhakti should be usually read as the Bhakti of Vishnu by any of his one thousand names that are also his epithets but specifically in the form of Vitthal, or Vithoba; see Varkari, Vitthal, Pandharpur, "the Brick",etc.

Bhakti Rasa:

would literally mean "the juice of Bhakti" or "(the uninterrupted flow of) the feeling of devotion"; "rasa" in classical Sanskrit poetics is active feeling, emotion, something akin to "juice" in a physiological sense, thus a somatic action or effect; but the poetics itself is diversely linked and interpreted in terms of religious esotericism, yoga, and mysticism; the cryptic precept, "Raso vai sah" means, "He is the very rasa" which, loosened by paraphrase would mean "God or the Whole Being is Himself that spontaneous flowing juice"; one is making this slight digression because the pioneer Marathi poet-saint Jnanadev was an initiate in the Kashmir Shaiva tradition, the same school of thought to which the great mystic philosopher and poetician, Abhinavagupta belonged; Jnanadev was a yogi of the Natha Sect; how he came to worship the deity Vithoba, seen as a form of Vishnu, and became a founder of the Varkari Bhakti movement is a perennial mystery; but the "rasa" or "feeling" part of Bhakti, the sensuous and palpable form of worshipping God as a devotee, focused on a specific image and a "name", begins with Jnanadev and his contemporaries; poetry and music, singing songs and chanting, were believed to produce a distinct "rasa" or "flow of feeling", of oneness with God; this is the "rasa" or "state of being in a continuous flow" that makes Varkaris sing, dance, chant the name of God, and create that "total theatre" where everybody is a part of the grand performance of worship; the pilgrimage to Pandharpur and the festival of Vithoba there have to be witnessed to get an idea of how" Bhakti-rasa" a distinct universe of feeling, envelops the "Bhaktas" with a sense of communion; Tukaram's poetry is described as a poetry of" Bhakti-rasa" which includes a wide range of emotions and different personae depicting the devotee's many-faceted relationship with God; it is useful to bear this in mind because the Varakari Bhakta may be viewing Tukaram's poetry as the poetry of Bhakti-rasa, which is not quite the same feeling that we experience ourselves in our normal life and assume that others experience; nor do we associate such a feeling with poetry and its impact.

Brahma:

the "Creator"; one of the gods in the Hindu pantheon; he is depicted in the Puranas as having sprung from a lotus rising out of the navel of Vishnu.

Brahman:

original Sanskrit form of the word which is Brahma in Marathi; neuter gender; often translated as "the Supreme Being" etc., and variously interpreted by Vedantic philosophers and commentators; it is at once the primordial as well as the ultimate condition of being, a concept of "being-in-itself' which is beyond determination, definition or description. As such, it is a paradoxical concept of the inconceivable, which is the source of all phenomena and all possible concepts thereof. It is used in the sense of "autonomous self' or "the principle of spontaneous creation, existence, and dissolution". In mystical thought, "Brahman" can be experienced as "bliss" or "beatitude" or "a sense of boundless being". It is "ecstasy" in terms of its outward signs and "ecstasy" in terms of "self- contained sense of bliss". During the last decade of his life, Tukaram unexpectedly met Babaji, a liberated yogi, who initiated him into an experience of such "beatitude". Tukaram's evolution from being a Bhakta to becoming a mystic is clearly seen in his poems. There was never a contradiction between his worship of Vithoba and his yearning to experience beatitude or "oneness with All Being". There are people, in fact, who believe that Tukaram's body simply disintegrated and returned to the state of absolute, unconditioned being, leaving no trace of its material form and identity. I have no comment to offer on this except that if true, it would be real poetic justice.

Brahmin:

the highest among the castes; considered pure and chaste; the "twice-born" priestly caste that has a privileged access to the scriptures and the sole right to recite, teach, and interpret them; they conduct religious ceremonies, perform rites, and adjudicate matters and disputes concerning dharma of all Hindus; in Tukaram's time, Brahmins in Maharashtra considered all the other castes as either "non-caste" or "outside the sacred circle" or as Shudras: causing pollution in varying degrees; Tukaram describes himself as a Shudra and a Yatiheen, which means Jatiheen, or low-born, and pointedly mentions that the Brahmins would not even concede him the right to read and write, let alone discuss spiritual matters; he also attacks depravity among Brahmins and holds them responsible for corruption of religion as well as ethics in personal and social life; Tukaram propounds that anyone who is pure in spirit is a true Brahmin and accidents of birth have nothing to do with it; in Tukaram's view any individual who is God-oriented or tuned to "the Whole Being" is a Brahmin or the Brahman-oriented person, because "caste" is a quality of mind determined by purity of awareness rather than by any physical or material property or criterion

Brick, the:

this has been used as a proper noun because it refers to "the Brick" on which the image of Vitthal at Pandharpur stands and is an integral part of the iconography of Vitthal; the Marathi word for brick is "veet", and some folk-etymologists would derive the word Vitthal itself from it; the mythological significance of "the Brick" , is the following story: Pundalik, a resident of Pandharpur and a devotee of Vishnu-Vitthal was visited by God Himself, who had heard of Pundalik's total dedication; Pundalik was so absorbed in his own work that he threw a brick that was handy in the direction of his divine visitor, asking him to stand; after that, Pundalik forgot all about God whom he had kept waiting, while he remained absorbed in his own work; God would not leave without Pundalik's permission; he has remained standing on the brick ever since; twenty-eight eons are said to have elapsed since Pundalik asked God to wait on the brick; this is how God is found in Pandharpur where his devotees can visit Him; "the Brick" may mean Vitthal Himself in Tukaram's poetry; Tukaram worships Vitthal's feet, which are placed on "the Brick", in humility; because God stands on it "the Brick" itself is sacred. "the Brick" is also the "base" or "foundation" of God in this world, and as such it is a symbol of Bhakti itself, which is the foundation of the Whole Being or Brahman for the Bhakta; "the Brick" is also a symbol of God's patient, obedient, and respectful attitude towards a true Bhakta,epitomized by the story of Pundalik; the Varkari Bhakta-poets consider Pundalik as the arch-Bhakta and founder of the sacred site and image at Pandharpur.

Chandal:

another term designating a low-caste, a Shudra; originally, a mixed caste of illegitimate progeny of Shudra male and Brahmin female parents; as such, bastards born of prohibited intercaste liasons; a derogatory term used for the lowest born, for the unscrupulous, the sinful, the wicked, the corrupt, and the criminal-minded.

Colour:

the colour of Vishnu is dark blue, the colour of the sky itself, which is the colour of his avatara, Krishna; Krishna literally means "the dark one" or even "the black one"; sometimes, in poetry, the colour of Krishna is compared to "a dark blue rain cloud", a monsoonal association with its evocative effect on the Indian mind and its pastoral significance for herdsmen; Krishna was a herdsman, too; the colour of the image of Vitthal is black; the dhotar or loin-garment of Vitthal is yellow silk; the name Pandurang, used for Vithoba or Vitthal was first used in 1270 according to Deleury: its origin is obscure; but Pandurang is close to the Sanskrit word "pandura", which means "yellowish-white" or "fawn-coloured"; in both Sanskrit and Marathi, "anga" means body, Another significance of colour needs to be pointed out in the context of Tukaram's visual imagery, especially when he is describing his experience of beatitude: when Tukaram meditates on Vitthal's form, the image becomes a formless expanse of luminous blue that turns into an intense incandescence; but when he describes the effect of his initiation into the state of beatitude induced by his Guru Babaji, Tukaram describes a state of ecstasy in which he begins to see luminous ripples in five colours: red, yellow, blue, white, and black: these colours vibrate, pulsate, and keep changing from one into the other in a rhythmic manner.

One more thing to remember is that in Marathi the verb "rangane" which means "to be coloured" also refers to the experience of being absorbed in any activity in such a way that one's very appearance is "coloured" by it; this applies to devotion, worship, the act of singing and dancing, the act of chanting the names of God, and in Tukaram's case, the act of creating poetry or "speaking" in that special sense; in all these, "one is coloured by what one thinks of and does" or "one's very being is coloured by one's awareness"; any performance that becomes increasingly exciting or absorbing is described in Marathi, literally, as something "that is becoming more and more colourful" or "is gaining colour"; "getting coloured by Bhakti- rasa" is another typical expression.

Dehu:

Tukaram's native village; this is situated on the banks of the river Indrayani; it is part of the earliest or one of the earliest-known agricultural belts in Maharashtra, it is accessible by rail from Bombay or Pune via the Dehu Road Railway Station; by road, it is just an hour's drive from Pune; Tukaram's ancestral house with its shrine is still here and his descendants live there; it also has another temple of Vithoba and several smaller shrines; "the pool" in the river Indrayani where Tukaram's manuscripts were sunk and then miraculously restored is one of the landmarks; another landmark is the place at which Vishnu's chariot of light is believed to have descended to lift Tukaram bodily off to heaven; Dehu, along with Pandharpur and Alandi, is one of the three sacred places Varkari pilgrims regularly visit; the Bhamachandra hill, where Tukaram meditated for fifteen days and received enlightenment, is also near Dehu and so is the Bhandara Hill where Tukaram wrote his poems; the landscape and the people Tukaram has described belong to Dehu, which still retains recognizable traces of its features as they must have been in Tukaram's time.

Deva:

also "dev" in Marathi; God; also god or gods; Tukaram employs this word in different senses; often, it is a form of address to the image of Vitthal, but to Tukaram Vitthal not only contains the specific form in which Vishnu visited Pandharpur and stood on "the Brick" at Pundalik's instance but also Vishnu in all his avataras, including that of the Buddha to whom Tukaram makes a reference in a poem not translated here; the mythology of Vishnu and the lore of Krishna are both included in Tukaram's frame of reference; but Tukaram's God is also the Supreme Being in a monotheistic sense, the Creator and the Ruler, not dissimilar from the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic "Father"; but Tukaram uses all three genders for God; at the highest level, he conceives God as a form of total being, the Whole Being or the Cosmic Self of which the human individual is a part; Tukaram's mysticism had both native Marathi and traditional Hindu origins but it was also influenced "by Sufi thought, and Buddhism; the traces of these influences are subtly diffused over his work; one has found an existentialist current in Tukaram's thought that is constant and growing; though he obviously began as 'a simple devotee, he evolved into a monotheistic mystic, and finally into a mystic who went beyond theism itself; in some poems, Tukaram has described his whole relationship with God as a game of "make-believe" or as "play-acting", assigning roles that are mutually reversible. In each poem, God has a specific image and role; there are no fixed rules or definitions that Tukaram follows; it is worth bearing in mind that in many poems, Tukaram sees himself as an irreverent atheist or as one making fun of an anthropomorphic idea of God.

Ekadashi:

literally, "the eleventh (day)"; Maharashtra follows the Hindu lunar calendar in which one half of the month is the part of the waxing moon and the other is the phase of the waning moon; thus the month is divided into "the bright fortnight" and "the dark fortnight"; Ekadashi is the eleventh day of the bright fortnight of the month; the Varkaris regard this as Vitthal's day, and fast on it; the Ekadashi days in the months of Ashadha and Kartika are the days of the festival of Vitthal in Pandharpur and a Varkari has to make a pilgrimage to the sacred city on these days; of the two, Ashadhi Ekadashi is the bigger festival; hundreds of thousands of Varkaris march to Pandharpur from allover Maharashtra to take part in the festival; many of them carry their own rumba-like string instruments and cymbals made of brass, and chiplyas or veenas; singing and dancing all the way to Pandharpur; they chant bhajans or witness keel1an performances and play games or perform dances which are all "enactments of devotion"; this is a form of a "total theatre" in a ritual event in which everybody participates and the poetry of saints is sung from memory as a part of the performance; Ekadashi, even in months other than Ashadha and Kartika, is a holy day; Tukaram refers to his own performance of keel1an on every Ekadashi in his own shrine of Vitthal in Dehu; he also makes a pointed reference in another poem to his fasting and keeping awake when he was facing a total financial disaster after the famine, thus serving Vitthal even in times of personal adversity.

Eknath:

was born in 1533 and died in 1599; he lived in Paithan; he is one of the "Great Quartet" of Vithoba's Poets-Jnanadev, Namdeo, Eknath and Tukaram; to paraphrase Bahinabai, a younger poetess and contemporary of Tukaram, the temple of the Varkari Bhakti movement was founded by Jnanadev, its walls were built by Namdeo, Eknath built its pillars, and Tukaram was its spire; a prolific poet, Eknath produced work in many genres; he also produced a carefully researched and corrected edition of the Jnaneshwari.

Garuda:

"the devourer", "the bird of fire", or "the bird of the sun"; Vishnu's vehicle; this could be the "chariot of fire" or "chariot of light" in which Vishnu carried Tukaram away to Vaikuntha, his heavenly residence, according to the Varkari tradition.

Gopala:

"cow-raiser" or "cow-protector", a name of Krishna used for Vitthal by Tukaram in many poems; the name is also used for Krishna's boyhood playmates who were herdsmen like him; the self that protects them; likewise, the "cows" are the milkmaids or "gopis" with whom Krishna flirted and had clandestine affairs; Tukaram's allegorical sequences of poems "in the manner of an adulteress" and "Krishna and his playmates playing hide-and-seek using black blankets" are based on these aspects of Krishna lore.

Gopichandan:

white clay used in traditional medicine and also in rites and rituals in the form of a paste applied to parts of the body; the Vaishnav Varkaris of Maharashtra wear this as a mark of their cult, sect or faith especially on ceremonial occasions or during the rites of worship.

Govinda:

literally, "cow-finder" or "cow-gatherer"; another name for Krishna; like the name "Gopala", Tukaram uses this name too for Vitthal, making similar allegorical use of the lore of Krishna.

Hari:

another name for Vishnu, Hari literally means "fawn coloured" and in this sense is perhaps synonymous with "Pandurang"; used as another name for Vitthal by Tukaram and other Marathi poet-saints; the various meanings of Hari in Sanskrit are: 1. Green, greenish-yellow; tawny, bay, reddish-brown etc.; 2. It is a name not only for Vishnu but also for Indra, Shiva, Brahman and Yama; it is connected with "Hara" which means to take away, to remove, to relieve of, to seize, to captivate etc. and so may mean "the one who takes away", "the one who robs", "the one who relieves", "the one who seizes", "the one who attracts" etc.; thus it is a name that can be used in both positive and negative senses and therefore it has been applied to the protective Vishnu, the ascetic Shiva, to the conqueror Indra, and to Yama who takes away life, but this is only what one presumes.

Hero-stones:

"viraga/a" is the original Kannada word for these commemorative stones erected at the place of a warrior's or a saint's death to mark his martyrdom. Gunther D. Sontheimer gives an illuminating ac- count of these; since the image of Vitthal is strikingly unique in Hindu iconography, Deleury was prompted to observe that among the four other types of similar images are "the personages on the viragalas or hero-stones"; since the etymology of the name Vitthal is also contested, one of the suggestions put forward is that it is a compound word made by fusing "vir" (hero) and "sthala" (place).

Hrishikesha:

literally, "Lord of the senses", another name for Vishnu; also used for Vitthal by Tukaram; another name for Krishna; "Hrishika" means an organ of sense and "Isha" means Lord, God, master, or governor.

lndrayani:

the river on whose banks Tukaram's village, Dehu, is situated; the same river also flows through the town of Alandi, sacred to all Varkaris because Jnanadev entered the state of samadhi there; the Indrayani at Dehu is associated with major events in Tukaram's life as recorded in his poetry; the most important of these is the water-ordeal his notebooks were subjected to and the sequence of poems in which Tukaram poignantly describes his state of mind before and after their miraculous recovery after thirteen days; it is possible that his lyrical poems such as the one about "the pool of bliss" with its "ripples of bliss" and the one in which "water turns into sky" are transformations of actual images of the river by the side of which Tukaram might have spent much time reflecting on his experience of life.

Jnanadev:

(1275-1296) one of the founders of the Varkari sect and also the first major poet in the Marathi language; he was also a philosopher and a saint; author of Jnaneshwari, Anubhavamrita, and several short poems; the first work is a long poetic discourse embodying a Marathi translation of the Bhagawadgeeta and the author's own commentary / interpretation; the second work is a long poem describing the descent of human awareness from a primordial cosmic being that produces the material world and all phenomena, and how an individual human being attains a state of oneness with the Cosmic Being by the grace of a guru, becoming a liberated "self'; in poetry as well as in the Varkari sect, Tukaram is a lineal, spiritual descendant of Jnanadev; Namdeo, who initiated Tukaram into poetry by appearing in his dream-like trance, was a spiritual disciple of Jnanadev, though Jnanadev was five years younger.

Jnaneshwari:

see Jnaneshwar or Jnanadev above; Jnanadev composed this work in 1290 when he was fifteen.

Kali-Yuga:

V.S. Apte's Sanskrit-English Dictionary defines Kali- Yuga as "the fourth age of the world, the iron age (consisting of 432,000 years of men and beginning from 8 February 3102 B.C.)"; however, "Kali" literally means dispute, dissension, quarrel, strife, contention; "Yuga" means "Age" or "Epoch"; in actual usage, mythical, epic, and poetic descriptions of Kali- Yuga are varied; it can be called the Age of Chaos, Age of Disorder, Age of Conflict, Age of Evil, Age of Sin, Age of Infidelity, Age of Dissipation, Age of Decadence, Age of Misrule, etc.; it is believed that the last avatara of Vishnu, Kalkin, will "descend to destroy the wickedness of this Age and liberate the world"; Kali-Yuga is our present Age, and it is the last and the worst of the Four Epochs; incidentally, "kalka" from which the name "Kalkin" derives, means grime, dirt, shit, filth, and also deceit, hypocrisy, meanness, wickedness, perversity, corruption, etc.; the thrust of the meaning is clear from this.

Karma:

"karman"; action or its consequences; seen in the context of the concept of reincarnation and the belief that a human being is liberated from the cycle of death and suffering only when the action and reaction produced by "karma" ceases, "karma" is a torture some process of learning by trial and error, going through many births and deaths; Tukaram refers to the traditional belief that man has to pass through 840,000 experiences of birth, suffering, and death unless he sheds his bestial nature and sublimates himself; Tukaram believes, along with the tradition, that if a person's performance in the present life is faultless and fully meritorious, such a person will not have to be born again and go through the painful grind of transmigration; in Tukaram's view, Bhakti is the path of immediate salvation because the Bhakta spends his entire life in the worship of God; he is selfless and compassionate to all forms of life; he helps fellow human beings; he is saintly and godlike in his kindness; the Bhakta is therefore already liberated, in this very life, from the clutches of karma.

Kartika:

eighth lunar month of the Hindu calendar.

Kartiki:

the eleventh day of the bright half of the month of Kartika; see Ekadashi above.

Kaustubha:

the legendary gem-stone or jewel obtained when the ocean was churned by gods and demons for its secret gifts; the Kaustubha was placed on Vishnu's breast; Tukaram describes Vitthal's image as the image of Vishnu, and the Kaustubha comprises the pendant in Vishnu's necklace in this image.

Keshava:

"long-haired" another name for Vishnu, used for Vitthal by Tukaram.

Krishna:

"the dark one"; one of the three (Rama, Krishna, and the Buddha) human avataras of Vishnu so far as "a son of man"; the divine charioteer and guru of Arjuna who helped him recover his nerve and overcome his self-conflict in the battlefield in the Mahabharata war; divine author of the Bhagawadgeeta; earlier, the fun-loving herdsman of Gokul and the lover of many milkmaids; the slayer of wicked men and demons; the performer of many miracles; Tukaram alludes to many of these contexts in his poems; for Tukaram, Vitthal and Krishna are synonymous; therefore Vitthal's wife, Rakhumai, is the same as Krishna's wife, Rukmini, and Vishnu's wife, Lakshmi.

Mahar:

is one of low castes, in the Shudra category; in Maharashtra, the Shudras were divided into different classes of village-servants known as balutedars, these are distinct from government servants and are sort of a servant sub-community entitled, for their services, to be paid a fixed share of the agricultural produce; there are twelve to eighteen kinds of balutedars, further subdivided into classes or orders known as kas or val; the mahars belong to the first division; but in derogatory usage the word is similar to "nigger", "wog" and other racist or communal terms of contempt.

Maya:

literally,

1. a phantom image, an illusion, an apparition, a hallucination, an appearance, a dream, an unreality.

2. deceit, fraud, trick etc.

3. in Vedantic philosophy it is the mistaking of an ephemeral world for the Absoloute Being that is the true form of the immutable Supreme Spirit; in Samkhya philosophy, it is "nature" or the original source of the material world, consisting of the three

elemental properties-sattva, raja, and lama;

4. compassion, pity, mercy, kindness; However, the word "maya" is related to the word "ma" which means, variously "to measure" "to limit" "to compare" "to be in", "to find room in", "to be contained in": it can thus be related to "mother" and "womb" and by extension to "the world that contains us", "the space in which we are", "the dimensions that contain and confine us".

Tukaram is much more subtle and sophisticated than meets the eye because his sub-texts range from the Bhagawadgeeta to various philosophies current in India; he uses a simple, everyday language only occasionally using words like "maya" with their full charge of multiple significance. In one poem, he has used the colloquial Marathi word "mav" meaning "maya" in the sense of both "compassion" and "conjuror's trick", both "nature" and "the unreal world mistaken for Absolute Being": he deliberately uses the tensions between conflicting significance to create deliberate reversals of meaning or to produce, from one set of words, fully separated diverse images.

Moksha:

final liberation or salvation or emancipation from the cycle of karma, the wheel of death and suffering, or from a confined sense of self/individuality/ego; freedom from desire, attachment, memory, hope, anxiety, anguish and boredom which comprise the experience of this-worldly life.

Namdeo:

(1270-1350) one of the "Great Quartet" of "The Poets ofVithoba" (see Jnanadev, Eknath); one of the greatest poets in the Marathi language; author of a large body of lyrical, narrative, descriptive,autobiographical, didactic, incantatory, and ode-like abhangs;Namdeo had made an impulsive pledge, according to one of his own poems, that he would write one billion poems in praise of Vitthal, just like the monumental epic that Valmiki had written; Namdeo informs us that Vitthal himself tried to dissuade him from this unrealistic pledge pointing out that in the present age, human life was too short for a poet to be able to write one billion poems; in Tukaram's dream of initiation into poetry, Namdeo made a reference to this pledge and ~sked Tukaram to "write those I've left unwritten from the one:billion I pledged"; there is gentle humour and irony in this aspect of an otherwise revelatory and solemn dream when we remember the context of Namdeo's original poem about his pledge and Vitthal's wry remark about the brevity of human life; a later poet, Niloba, who regarded Tukaram as his guru, thought that Tukaram was an avatara of Namdeo; indeed, there is a striking resemblance between some of the poetry of Namdeo and Tukaram, though Tukaram is distinguished by his horror of the human condition, personal anguish and will to transcend even Bhakti to achieve absolute enlightenment.

Name, the:

sometimes, this word has been treated as a proper noun because it refers specifically to one or more of the personal names by which the Bhakta knows, remembers, worships, and evokes his God; in the case of Tukaram this does not only refer to the name/s of Vitthal/Vishnu/ Krishna but also to the mantra (or device for meditative, inner recitation) given by Babaji, his guru: "Rama Krishna Hari", which again are names of Vishnu; the V arkaris sing, chant, or mentally recite by rote the various names of Vitthal Vishnu; "JaiJai Rama Krishna Hari" has now become a slogan for them to raise at bhajans and keertans; most poet-saints have a sequence of poems that describe the power of "the Name"; each "name" is the evocation of a specific image of the deity since each name has its special aspect, allusion, association, mythical or legendary context; the poetry of proper nouns is inevitably lost in translation like the poetry of any culture-specific nouns-whether proper, common, personal, pronouns, or collective nouns; in folk, bardic and women's poetry this loss is crucial; Tukaram's poetry has roots in all three.

Narayana:

another name for Vishnu that means "son of man" or "son of the waters"; Tukaram uses this as another name for Vitthal; in the poems that refer to the ordeal-by-water to which Tukaram's notebooks were subjected, the radical, literal meaning assumes special significance; Vishnu or Narayana resides in the depths of a primordial ocean, stretched on his couch, the serpent of infinity; Narayana is thus one who resides in water; and it was from water that Tukaram's poems were returned undamaged after thirteen days.

Pandharpur:

Pandharpur lies to the south-east of Bombay, about 480 kilometers away,on the Deccan plateau; the river Bheema, which at this point is given the poetic name "Chandrabhaga" or "crescent moon", flows through the sacred city housing the premier shrine ofVitthal;it is an ancient settlement on a busy junction of old trade routes passing through a river valley; for the last seven hundred years Varkari pilgrims have been gathering here twice every year to attend the festival of Vitthal; the Varkaris believe that Vitthal is the form in which Vishnu himself landed on the Earth to visit his great devotee, Pundalik, and has been standing since on the "the Brick" on which Pundalik asked him "to wait for a while"; the cult of Vithoba or Vitthal is thus centred in Pandharpur as its sacred geographical nucleus; a Maharashtra-wide network of pilgrim routes meets at this centre; Pandharpur is also the city where the poet-saints and devotees of Vithoba gave a shape to the Marathi language and its literary culture by assimilating the dialects of various pilgrims and disseminated a sense of equality, brotherhood, and spiritual community; Tukaram has several poems about Pandharpur and its sacred importance; he also addresses Vitthal quite often as the "Lord of Pandharpur"; Tukaram has stressed the importance of the pilgrimage and the Varkari way of life; but it is not clear whether Tukaram regularly visited Pandharpur himself; he has an epistolatory poem to Vitthal "sent" with Varkari pilgrims; in another poem he describes himself as waiting anxiously for news from Pandharpur and news about Vitthal's welfare; Varkaris symbolically carry the "spirit of Tukaram" from Dehu to Pandharpur on their regular pilgrimage; this custom is followed till this day; all their beloved saints from Jnanadev to Tukaram are believed to be present in spirit at every festival in Pandharpur; traditions of the poetry of the saints are maintained in an oral form and as performed songs through the living medium of the pilgrimage and the festival in which it culminates.

Pandurang:

another name for Vitthal, used for the first time in the thirteenth century according to Deleury.

Pundalik:

also "Pundarika" and "Paundarika". See "Brick, the".

Puranas:

medieval compilations of myths concerning various deities of the Hindu pantheon; they are regarded as part of the scriptures.

Rebirth:

also "reincarnation"; traditional Hindu belief that man is successively born and dies until his individual spiritual evolution is complete; see karma.

Rukmini:

Krishna's principal wife; Tukaram considers her synonymous with Vitthal's wife, Rakhuma, also referring to her as Rakhumai (Mother Rakhuma), Rakhumadevi (Goddess Rakhuma), Rakhumabai (Lady Rakhuma) etc., Vitthal-Rakhuma, Krishna-Rukmini, and Lakshmi- Vishnu are synonymous couples and are often iconographically shown together or close to each other.

Santaji Teli Jagnade:

a devoted companion of Tukaram; his notebooks contain the only contemporary copies of some of Tukaram's work.

Tukaram:

"Tuka" is the dimunitive as well as abbreviated form of the full name "Tukaram"; Tukaram's family name is "More", a Maratha clan-name; his father's name was Bolhoba and mother's Kanakai; Tukaram describes himself as a Shudra kunbi or a non-caste peasant. The name Tukaram is somewhat obscure; there is a goddess named Tukai, sometimes the name is used for the Goddess Arnba at Tuljapur in Maharashtra; it is clear that this word is "Tuka plus aai" and "aai" means mother in Marathi; but Tuka remains unexplained; however, there is the Marathi noun "tuk" which means importance; weighing; measuring; sizing up; balancing; weighing in a balance; the verb "tukane" has similar meanings; it also means to be equal to something in weight, size, or importance and also to appreciate, to assess, to evaluate; or to balance, equalize, to make symmetrical, to make poised, to counterbalance; and it also means to reflect, to consider, to reconcile, to square up; finally, it means to nod, to give assent to, to acquiesce etc. "Rama" of course is the name of an avatara of Vishnu. Tukaram has used the abstract noun "tuk" as well as the verb "tukane" in various places in the proximity of his signature-line, "Says Tuka"; one line goes as follows: "Tuka tuki tukala"; there are several puns in these three words; Tuka' the proper noun, is the subject, followed by the locative form of the same noun used as the object, and lastly the verb "tukane" used in the simple past tense, third person singular; read in the context of the above meanings, the line becomes a translator's nightmare.

Tulsi:

the sweet basil or the black basil, a plant sacred to Vitthal and to Vishnu; all Vaishnavs (devotees of Vishnu or children of Vishnu) worship the plant itself; it is grown in the courtyard of their houses in a little squarish-shaped clay-tower or pot called vrindavan;Vitthal and Vishnu both are supposed to wear a necklace or a rosary-like garland of luisi-wood beads; the images of Vitthal and Vishnu are offered luisi-leaves during the performance of rites of worship; a Varkari wears a luisi-bead necklace or rosary when he takes his initial vow; and whenever he goes on a pilgrimage to Pandharpur he wears it; some of them wear it all the time.

Varkari:

is one who makes a "vari", which in Marathi means, "round trip" or "pilgrimage" or "regular visit to a place and return from it"; a Varkari is vowed and committed to undertake, twice every year, a pilgrimage to Pandharpur to attend the Ashadhi and the Kartiki festivals of Vitthal; this is scrupulously observed by every Varkari, Varkaris also avoid eating meat, refrain from intoxicants and stimulants, and follow certain other regulations and codes of conduct; see also,Ashadhi, Kartiki, Vitthal, Dehu, Alandi, Pandharpur, etc.

Vedas:

the four earliest Hindu scriptures; Rigveda, Yajurveda, Samaveda,and Atharvaveda; the fourth Veda is a later addition and the first three are still known as "the sacred triad"; they are believed to have been the self-revelation of the Absolute/Supreme/Whole Being or Brahman Itself, and therefore not man-made; for this reason they are also known as shrntis or "revealed and heard sound" as distinct from the man-made compositions of sages that are known as smritis or "recollections"; "revelations" and "recollections" could be a short way of naming them; Tukaram often alludes to the Vedas and he seems to have had a sophisticated acquaintance with them though he points, often with mock humility, to his non-caste status and "ignorance"; Tukaram's Brahmin detractors, according to his own account as well as Bahinabai's autobiography, considered him an ignorant upstart because as a Shudra, access to the Vedas was forbidden to him; when he sheds his feigned self-derogation, Tukaram talks equally confidently of knowing the secret teachings of the Vedas; Tukaram perceives his own poetry as "revealed by God"; he says, "God -speaks through me"; he goes to the extent of denying all credit for authorship, owning only ignorance and lack of eloquence as his personal flaws but asserting that the truth he is expressing is "not man-made" but "divine"; this is exactly the claim that is made on behalf of the "revelations" of the shrntis; to Tukaram, all genuine poetry is revelatory as much as the shrntis are; this gives us two fundamental categories of poetry, like the two applied to the scriptures themselves: "revealed poetry" and "recollected poetry"; if the Vedas are poetry, Tukaram's poetry is often Veda-like; if religion itself is poetry like the Vedas, Tukaram's poetry is religion; Tukaram's non-dualism is so radical that he makes no difference between poetry and religion, perceiving both as revelations of Absolute Being; his mysticism itself is a radical, revolutionary stance; this is the poetics of Tukaram's spirituality; when Tukaram says, "We alone know the meaning of the Vedas", he is saying that both poetry and the Vedas are revealed language or recollected language pointing to a vast non-discursiVe truth: their validity lies in what they are pointing to: like painted arrows, they only signify and direct attention.

Vishnu:

"the pervader"; originally a solar god, then the supreme god, for which position he vies with Shiva; see Vitthal, Ananta, Narayana, Govinda, Gopala, Hrishikesha, Keshava, Rama, Krishna, Hari, etc.-all these are synonymous in Tukaram's poetry with God,Lord, Master, Maker, Creator, Brahman, Absolute Being, Whole Being. Primordial Being, Being, Bliss, Beatitude, etc. each specific name, however, signifies a specific aspect or perception of "the One" or the "all-inclusive Being"; Tukaram is a Vaishnava monotheist but as an enlightened mystic, his monotheism transcends names.

Vitthal:

also, in Tukaram, Vithoba (Father Vitthal), Vithu (Vitthal addressed with the familiarity of a close friend), Vithabai ("Lady Vitthal" a feminized form of the masculine noun; Tukaram some times drops the formality and uses the word in the sense of Mother). The origin of the name Vitthal is obscure, uncertain, and contested; one is not sure when this name was used first but, like Pandurang, it seems to have emerged into literary usage some time in the thirteenth century. The native "region" of the name Vitthal radiates from Pandharpur throughout Maharashtra, parts of Karnataka, and parts of Andhra Pradesh which were often one large political unit in the history of the Deccan; the name Vitthal does not seem to have any roots in Sanskrit and it could be of Dravidian origin; in Jnanadev's time, when the name Vitthal started gaining wide currency, Marathi vocabulary already had a significant content of Kannada and Telugu and some distinct traces of Tamil, so this may not be as far-fetched as it seems.The iconography of Vitthal is unique and intriguing; the best way to begin to approach it is by trying to describe the image and its stance, treating the Pandharpur image as central.In brief, Vitthal's image at Pandharpur is a male figure, stoneblack in colour, and standing erect on a raised slab known as "the Brick"; arms akimbo and hands on hips, the figure is perfectly symmetrical; in terms of proportions, it is a stocky figure of medium build; the feet are placed e.venly together, as though standing to attention, and the eyes seem to be looking straight ahead; the crown is cylindrical though in some images it is also conical; there are fish-shaped rings in both the ears; the image is adorned with sweet basil beads turned into a necklace; the left hand holds a sea-conch and the right hand holds the stalk of a lotus though in some images it makes the gesture of blessing as traditionally understood; the cloth that covers the loins is skin-tight and the shape of the genitals shows through the garment; sometimes,Vitthal's image is accompanied by the image of his wife, Rakhuma. The image and the stance of Vitthal have been read in many different ways that amplify or go beyond the actual visual appearance. Scholars contest both the image and the name of Vitthal, offering diverse hypotheses about their origin; briefly, Vitthal has been connected variously with Vishnu, or a cattle-god, or a hero-stone,and even with the Buddha; the worshippers of Vitthal have seen him, for the last seven hundred years, only as a form of Vishnu. The poetic "iconography" of Vitthal, or Vitthal as described by poets in their own words since Jnanadev and Namdeo, follows a core of conventions and joint-stock phraseology, though each poet has added his own unique flourishes to the description. Tukaram's poem describing the image and the stance ofVitthal, apparently simple and elegant, contains an enigmatic element that

may crucially influence one's reading; he begins the poem literally with the following three words: "sundar te dhyana" or in the same literal order and word-for-word "beautiful that..." the third word is the enigmatic one; while "beautiful" can be rendered with a choice of synonyms with some family-resemblance among them, "dhyana"-the third word-can mean "(that) character" in a colloquial sense, or "(that) meditating (figure)" which are very diverse in their meaning; the word is a forked sign; Tukaram refers to the mythology of Vishnu by pointing to the "Kaustubha", a fabulous gem-stone obtained when the gods and the demons churned the ocean to receive its legendary secret gifts; this gem-stone was placed on the breast of Vishnu; the fish-shaped or crocodile-shaped earrings also belong to the mythological description of Vishnu; the conch-shell and the tulsi-bead necklace are of course obvious and not imagined or finely perceived; Tukaram is not merely a worshipper of Vishnu; he has a mythopoetic imagination, the need to create a legend to satisfy in the process of worship; he also has an emotional need to find the exact words; and finally, he has the urge to explore the many sub-texts in which a literary or poetic image of Vishnu is rooted; he has to be faithful to the physical precision of the sculptured image that is so well-known and seen by almost his entire audience; yet he also has to grace it with poetic creativity.

Translated from the Marathi by Vijay Lele WHEREAS God’s biography is referred to as ‘nectar supreme’, that of the devotee is called ‘nectar of religion’. Though the saints related and sang stories of the gods so effectively, it is difficult for us to narrate tales of the saints themselves; for they are not what they seem to be and they do not look like what they really are. Besides, as Jnanadev (1275-1296) aptly puts it in Amrutanubhav, our verbal equipment too has its own limitations. If we were to ask them: Who art thou? Where have thou come from? Where art thou going? What is thy name? What is thy form? -- They will simply reply “Nothing.”

Despite these limitations we have attempted to present, in brief, the life and work of the great saint-poet, Tukaram (1609-1650).

1. BIRTH AND ANCESTORS

‘Praise be to village Dehu, for Lord Vithoba Himself dwells there’

Village Dehu (‘Dehu Gaon’ in Marathi), near Pune, is considered a blessed place for it was here that Tukaram was born and performed his divine deeds. Dehu also wears a halo because it is considered a jagrut sthaan, “an abode of live divinity”, for Lord Vithoba Himself is believed to reside there. A temple of Lord Vithoba adorns the beautiful bank of the river Indrayani. The Creator of the Universe stands here with his hands resting on his waist. Rakhumai (Rukmini) stands to His left. Just opposite stands the Holy Fig Tree (ficus religiosa). Garuda (the eagle), the Lord’s vehicle, stands with his hands folded. At the entrance is Lord Vighnaraj (Ganesha). Just outside are Lord Bhairav (Shiva) and Lord Hanuman. To the south is the temple of Lord Hareshwar and close by is the Ballalvan (woods). It is supposed to be the seat of Lord Siddheshwar. Blessed are the inhabitants of this place, they are very fortunate indeed, reciting as they do the name of the Lord God. Thus goes the description of village Dehu at the time Tukaram lived there.

About hundred years before Tukaram, his ancestor, Vishwambhar, was living at Dehu. The whole family owed its religious allegiance to Lord Vithoba. The Pandharpur wari (pilgrimage) during the holy months of Aashadh and Kartik had been a long tradition in the family of Vishwambhar since his forebears. It was his unwavering and steadfast devotion that compelled, as it were, the Lord to rush from Pandharpur to Dehu just as the exemplary devotion of Pundalik had earlier attracted Him over from Vaikunth to Pandharpur.

It was on Aashadh (fourth month of the Hindu lunar calendar) shudh Dashmi (the tenth day of the bright/waxing moon) the Lord appeared in Vishwambhar’s dream and told him of His existence there and went to retire in a mango grove. The very next morning Vishwambhar went into the grove along with fellow villagers and found the idols of Lord Vithoba and Rakhumai. He then brought those over to his wada (house) and installed them in his place of worship there. People soon came to know of this divine miracle and started coming in droves to pay obeisance. An annual festival soon became a regular feature and a tract of land was bequeathed upon Vishwambhar to take care of the festival expenditure.

A pilgrimage would be held on shudh Ekadashi (the 11th day of the bright/waxing moon) of each month.

However, after the demise of Vishwambhar, his sons, Hari and Mukund, showed no religious inclination and turned towards their original vocation: the armed services. They sought royal patronage along with their families and became officers of the royal army of that time. Their mother, Amabai, frowned upon this. The Lord was also displeased with their decision. He once appeared in Amabai’s dream and told her of His unhappiness over the state of affairs. ‘I left Pandharpur and came to Dehu for you, but you chose to leave me and seek royal patronage. This is not fair. You should return to Dehu,’ He said. Amabai spoke to her sons about the Lord’s admonition and tried to persuade them to return to Dehu. The sons, however, paid no heed.

As fate would have it, the state was soon invaded by an alien power and both the brothers laid down their lives in the ensuing battle with the foe. Mukund’s wife preferred to go sati following her husband’s demise. Hari’s wife was pregnant at the time of his death on the battlefield. Therefore, Amabai returned to Dehu with her. Soon the daughter-in-law was sent to her parents for delivery and Amabai devoted herself to the Lord’s service. Hari’s widow gave birth to a son, who was named Vitthal. Vitthal’s son was Padaji, Padaji’s son Shankar, Shankar’s son Kanhoba and Kanhoba’s son was Bolhoba. Bolhoba had three sons: Savji was the eldest, followed by Tukaram and Kanhoba, the youngest.

The family in which Tukaram was born was indeed a very pious one.

‘Venerable are the families and venerable the land in which God’s disciples are born.’

Tukaram’s family belonged to the Kshatriya (warrior) caste. His forefathers had embraced martyrdom while fighting the enemy on the battlefield. The family was also very cultured and religious. Worship of Lord Vithoba had been its hallmark for generations together and so was the annual pilgrimage to Pandharpur. The family also had the distinction of being mahajans (money-lenders). It owned farmland engaged in money-lending and trade. The family owned two wadas (houses) at Dehu: one for residence and the other, in the marketplace, for trade and business. It enjoyed the respect of the villagers and also of those living in the immediate environs. They were called kunbis (farming community), because they engaged in agriculture and vanis (trading community) because of trading. However, Tukaram abjured all these, because of which he came to called gosavi (someone like a fakir). Nevertheless, ‘Gosavi’ was never the surname of the family. It was ‘More’ and ‘Gosavi’ was an honorific.

The vaishya (trader) community had come to be included among the shudras (the lowest in the social scale) about the time of the Bhagawad-geeta and during Jnanadev’s time, the Kshatriyas were also being counted among the shudras. Only two castes (Varna) had remained: the Brahmins and the shudras. Thus Tukaram also came to be called a shudra.

The Muslim reign was firmly entrenched in the south at that time. The Portuguese ruled Goa. The three main Muslim rulers – Adilshah of Bijapur, Nizamshah of Ahmednagar and Kutubshah of Golconda – were perpetually at loggerheads with each other, the upshot being that villages were being looted recklessly and rendered barren while the rulers themselves were enjoying to the hilt all the perquisites of royalty. The subjects were living in abject conditions.

‘The Brahmins had given up their pious deportment, the Kshatriyas were bleeding the Vaishyas and forcible conversions were the rule of the day,’ noted Tukaram. Anarchy prevailed in every sphere. The undesirable had usurped the place of the desirable and the saints had been robbed of their place of honour. The society had become split at many levels. Religion held no attraction for anybody and ignorance ruled the roost. People were looking forward to a new sunrise and such a sunrise was witnessed at Dehu.

Tukaram was born to a great devotee, Bolhoba, and his wife, Kanakai, in 1609. His childhood was spent in great comfort and luxury, because the family was prosperous. He was initiated into education by the pantoji (the non-formal village teacher). The alphabet was learnt with the help of pebbles that gave form to each letter.

So far as his initiation into the temporal and spiritual life was concerned, Tukaram did so at the knee of his father, Bolhoba. When Savji refused to take up the family business and money-lending, Tukaram was asked by his father to take upon him the responsibility. He received lessons in business while working under the guidance of his father at the mahajan’s wada (shop) in the marketplace. Marriage came about at the age of 13 and soon Tukaram began looking after the family business independently. He became successful both in trade and money-lending. Plaudits came his way from the general public. Everyone praised him. He successfully transferred the atmosphere of piety prevailing at home to his workplace. Since Tukaram’s first wife was chronically afflicted by asthma, a second wedding was arranged with Jijabai (alias Awali), the daughter of Appaji Gulwe, a famous money-lender in Pune. It was an alliance between two affluent families that marked the pinnacle of prosperity for Tukaram’s family. The house was always well-stocked with grains, there were affectionate parents and brothers and Tukaram himself enjoyed good health. There was not a single thing to complain about. Days went by in a perpetual state of happiness and well-being. As they say, sorrow follows happiness in a cyclical manner. A demonstration of this was in store.

Tukaram was only seventeen when his father and spiritual mentor, Bolhoba, passed away. It was the loss of a veritable protective shield and Tukaram was crestfallen on account of that.

No sooner had he managed to overcome this grief than his mother, Kanakai, departed from the world the very next year. Tukaram was thrown into a bottomless pit of bereavement.

Soon thereafter, when Tukaram was still eighteen, the wife of his elder brother, Savji, passed away. As it was, Savji had shown little interest in matters temporal. He left home for pilgrimage after his wife’s death and never came back. That meant that the family was suddenly bereft of four of its important members. His life, which was replete with everything desirable, was suddenly robbed of its mainstay. Nevertheless, Tukaram summoned all the reserves of fortitude at his disposal and began, at the age of twenty, re-building his life afresh. Alas, it was not to be.

Tukaram was just twenty-one when the whole region found itself in the grip of an unprecedented famine. There was belated rainfall in 1629 and ultimately, crops were lost due to a surfeit of rain. However, people still held on to their hopes. The next year, 1630, was one of drought. Now people became desperate. The prices of essential commodities went up sky-high. Cattle perished by the hundred in the absence of feed and many people died of sheer starvation. Even well-to-do families became impoverished. The cup of people’s woes began overflowing, the next year (1631), which marked the culmination of natural calamity. It was a year of tremendously excessive rainfall, because of which all crops were washed away. Life everywhere was thrown into disarray.

The family of Tukaram suffered very much in this time of great adversity. He lost all his cattle. The money-lending business was lost. Tukaram’s first wife, Rakhumabai, and his beloved, only son, Santoba, fell prey to the famine.

It is common knowledge that the people to take the greatest undue advantage of a famine are merchants and money-lenders. Even today we see such people, who achieve their nefarious objects by creating a situation of artificial scarcity.

However, Tukaram was not a heartless businessman to insist on repayment when people were suffering untold misery. On the contrary, keeping aside his personal grief, he came forward to help the famine-hit population generously. ‘Much had been spent. There was some left, which was given away to Brahmins and alms-seekers,’ he says in a couplet. This, however, should not be construed to mean (as is generally done) that Tukaram allowed himself to become bankrupt. ‘I put a zero in the name of the family, but did this charitable work,’ he says. It was renunciation by choice.

It was with great courage and resilience that Tukaram faced the bereavement of his near and dear ones and the blows dealt by natural calamities and the family’s dwindling fortunes. He faced them all, did not run away from them. He never was an escapist. He was desirous of conquest in the work-a-day life and also wanted to cull the elixir of it all. All these disasters had made him evaluate money, the human situation and human relationships. The futility of it all had amply been borne in upon him. His quest now was directed towards the permanent values. He began thinking in terms of sailing through all these to reach the shore yonder. He set out for the Bhamnath Mountain in search of truth. No coming back till he found the immortal truth. That was his determination. Wild animals attacked him and reptiles troubled him, but Tukaram remained undeterred. His perseverance reached fruition on the fifteenth day when he encountered Eternal Truth.

‘I lived on the Bhamgiri Mountain and concentrated all my faculties on Him

Snakes, scorpions and tigers attacked me, there was trouble everywhere,

It was on the fifteenth day that Revelation came, when I met Vithoba.’

It was an encounter void of form or figure (niraakaar). The Lord God gave his benediction to the disciple and gave him much courage.

Kanhoba, the younger brother of Tukaram, had set out in search of his elder brother ever since Tukaram left home. He had scoured all the hills, valleys and jungles in the vicinity of Dehu. His search eventually led him to the cave on the Bhamnath Mountain and was taken aback by the spectacle that he saw there. The whole body of Tukaram was covered with ants, scorpions and snakes and the Lord God had appeared before him! Kanhoba was spellbound! It was the most memorable day of his life. Both the brothers embraced each other. Kanhoba then arranged a few stones at the place, to mark the spot where his elder brother had the divine visitation and both then returned to the confluence of the Rivers Sudha-Indrayani and bathed there. Tukaram then broke his fifteen day long fast.

He now asked Kanhoba to bring over all the documents pledged to them by their borrowers. These were the promissory notes taken from the borrowers. Tukaram divided these into two. Half of them he gave back to Kanhoba and consigned the remaining half to the waters of the Indrayani. This was an act of supreme sacrifice on the part of this money-lender, who, by destroying the promissory notes, absolved his borrowers of their bounden responsibility at a time when his own monetary affairs were in great disarray! He showed the world that he had renounced the business of money-lending. It was true socialism!

Instead of attending to his worldly affairs, Tukaram decided to renovate the temple that had suffered the ravages of famine, thus proclaiming to the world that he had now definitely taken the metaphysical path. The small temple in their residential wada (house) proved insufficient to cope with the rising number of pilgrims during the time of his father, Bolhoba. He had, therefore, built a new temple on the beautiful bank of the Indrayani and shifted the idols there. That temple was now in need of renovation and Tukaram undertook the task himself.

‘The temple was in bad disrepair, which inspired me towards renovation,

So that religious the programme could be held there for the benefit of one and all.’

Thus, his principal motive in renovating the temple was purely altruistic. He wanted to offer the people a place where religious programmes such as keertan, Harijagaran could be held for all the people, thus paving the way for their salvation.

‘I then memorised the (spiritual) answers given by the saints of yore,

Having first placed my implicit faith in them.’

Tukaram re-built the temple to do keertan and began going up the Bhandara Mountain to prepare for these discourses in an atmosphere of complete solitude. He would get up early in the morning, offer prayers to Vithoba- Rakhumai, the family deity, and set out for Bhandara.

‘In order to master the art of doing keertan, Tuka undertook the study,

Tuka would study in such a manner as the ocean would welcome the river,

Whatever was heard was committed to memory and books were also read.’

He perused in right earnest the Jnanadevi and Amrutanubhav of Jnanadev, Eknath’s criticism of the Bhagawat, Bhavartha Ramayan, Swatmanubhav and the religious compositions of Namdev and Kabir. He memorised the sayings of all these great saints.

Tukaram partook of this saintly offering, which had given a figure and form to the Eternal Principle essentially devoid of both. He also had recourse to the ancient Puranas and ancient sciences.

Tukaram was very fond of this atmosphere of solitude, for it offered him a whole new range of near and dear ones in the form of trees, creepers and birds. Hence his famous abhang: Vrikshavalli amha soyare vanachare.

Tukaram’s wife, Jijabai, would take his lunch to the Bhandara after finishing all her domestic chores in the morning. She would have her own lunch there after Tukaram had his. Jijabai looked after Tukaram with great solicitude during this period of his spiritual quest and therefore, she had an important share in that as well. It was while Tukaram was completely immersed in this spiritual pursuit that Lord Vithoba appeared in his dream along with Namdev and exhorted Tukaram to undertake versification, so that people could be edified. The message was clear: Tukaram had attained salvation himself, now it was time to disseminate this divine benediction among one and all. He was inspired towards versification.

‘I was then inspired to versify and in my mind, I put my hands around Lord Vithoba’s feet.’

Verses (abhang) began gushing forth from his mouth and the fortunate among the people began listening to him. His abhangs encapsulated the essence of ancient shrutis and shastras in a very lucid manner. Tukaram used to do keertan at the gate of Jnanadev’s abode at Alandi. The great scholar Rameshwar Bhat happened to listen to those sweet compositions. He was surprised to find the essence of the Bhagawad-geeta and the Bhagawat in the Prakrit language and with such lucidity! He was scandalised and denounced this novel happening. He said, ‘You are a shudra. Your abhangs elucidate the essence of the Vedas, which is not your right. It is sacrilegious to listen to it from your mouth. Who incited you to undertake such an enterprise?’ Tukaram said, ‘It is not my own speech, it is God speaking through me.’

‘You might think these are my verses; but no, this is not my own language,

Nor is it my own skill; it is God, who makes me talk.’

‘It was Namdev and Lord Vithoba Himself, who ordered me to versify,’ he said.

However, Rameshwar Bhat was far from mollified. He ordered Tukaram to sink his verses in the river. If indeed these were the outcome of a divine order, God would save them from perishing, he said. He also appraised the village head (Patil) of this ‘misdemeanour’ of Tukaram. The Patil became angry. The people at large also took umbrage.

‘Angry is the Patil and angry the villagers, where should I go now and where live?’

Tukaram collected all his abhang books, tied a heavy stone to the bundle and consigned it to the Indrayani, in much the same manner as he had sunk his borrowers’ promissory notes earlier. That was a matter temporal, this time it was matter spiritual.

Tukaram was now woebegone. People began heaping derision on him, saying there was no divine order or benediction in the first place. It was all a sham! Tukaram then launched a protest in front of the temple with great determination. The do-or-die spirit in him had been fully aroused. Thirteen days passed and yet nothing happened.

In the meantime, Rameshwar Bhat, who had started from Alandi, having denounced Tukaram, came to the source of the Nagzari (stream) and entered its waters for a bath. While he was bathing, a fakir came there to fetch water. Encountering a stranger in Rameshwar Bhat, he asked the latter who he was and whence he had come. However, Rameshwar Bhat, unwilling to hear the Yavan’s (Muslim) language, put his fingers into his ears and took a deep dip into the water. The fakir was enraged by this. The result was that as soon as Rameshwar Bhat emerged from the water-body, his whole body began smarting with heat. He then draped himself in wet clothes and returned to Alandi to seek expiation from the fakir’s curse.

Here at Dehu the Lord God paid a visit to Tukaram in a child’s garb on the thirteenth night and told him that He had safeguarded Tukaram’s abhang books underwater for thirteen days and that these would re-surface the very next day. Some of the devout at Dehu also received similar divine messages and accordingly, went to the bank of the Indrayani the next day. Lo and behold, all the books of Tukaram’s verses were seen floating on the water surface! The good swimmers among them immediately plunged into the river and brought all the books ashore. The surprising fact was that all the books were completely untouched by water!

Tukaram felt that the Lord God was put too much trouble on his account and expressed his regret in an abhang.

At Alandi, Jnanadev said to Rameshwar Bhat, ‘Your suffering is all due to your denunciation of Tukaram. There is only one way to atone for it. Go to Dehu and meet him.’ Accordingly, Rameshwar Bhat set out for Dehu. When Tukaram came to know of this, he wrote an abhang especially for the scholar and sent it to him with one of his disciples. All his suffering ceased as soon as Rameshwar Bhat read that.

‘Even foes become friends if the mind is clean, even wild animals and serpents cannot do anything to such a soul, it is from grief that happiness ensues, even flames become soothing balm.’

Rameshwar Bhat then came to Dehu to meet Tukaram and stayed on there to listen to the latter’s keertan.

Angadshah came to know of how Rameshwar Bhat had been rid of his trouble by Tukaram. He was dismayed. He came to Dehu with the intention of harassing Tukaram. He went to Tukaram’s house and asked for alms. Tukaram’s daughter put only a pinch of flour into his bowl, but it enlarged itself within the bowl, which soon overflowed. He realised the spiritual power of Tukaram and called on Tukaram with a sense of devotion. He then stayed on at Dehu to listen to Tukaram’s discourses and keertan.

Thus it was that knowledge and scholarship bowed their heads before devotion. The news of Tukaram’s books being retrieved unscathed from the river soon spread everywhere. Public disgrace was averted for Tukaram. True to their original meaning, the abhangs proved to be indestructible. The Lord God was seen in his visible form. Tukaram was now free to continue with his discourses and keertan.

Tukaram now began delivering his discourses and keertan with renewed vigour, for it was the means chosen by him for people’s edification and uplift.

Lord Krishna was born at Mathura, but it was the people of Gokul, who enjoyed his company. Similar was the case of Tukaram. Though he was born at Dehu, it was the people of Lohgaon (the village of Tukaram’s maternal grandparents), who benefited the most from his keertans, for Lohgaon was the place where he delivered his discourses often. Two monks (sanyasi) once came to listen to Tukaram’s keertan. They were quite surprised by what they beheld: men and women were lost in listening to Tukaram, all social and age difference were lost, Brahmins were rubbing shoulders with shudras and not a vestige of social discrimination was to be seen at this assembly. They berated Tukaram for this and censured the Brahmins. ‘You have fallen from grace. Instead of adopting the path of work, you have chosen just to recite the name of God,’ they said to the Brahmins. They left the venue of the keertan and made straight for Dadoji Konddev’s residence. There they lodged a complaint, saying, ‘The Brahmins of Lohgaon have renounced their bounden duty. They have begun revering a shudra. Religion has been defiled there. Therefore, punitive action is called for.’

Dadoji promptly dispatched a few soldiers and imposed a fine of Rs. 100 upon the Brahmins. Tukaram and the villagers of Lohgaon were summoned to Pune. Accordingly, Tukaram came to the Mula-Mutha confluence (Sangam) in Pune along with Lohgaon villagers and began a keertan there. The news of Tukaram’s arrival in Pune spread everywhere and the people of the city soon made a beeline for the darshan and keertan of Tukaram. Dadoji also came and listened to the keertan. The two monks, who had earlier lodged a complaint against Tukaram, were there among the audience. Now they were so impressed by the discourse that they fell at the feet of Tukaram. Dadoji asked them for an explanation. He said, ‘First you lodge a complaint about Brahmins falling from grace by paying obeisance to a shudra and now you too follow suit. How can this be so?’ The monks said, ‘We saw God Himself in Tukaram during the keertan.’ Thereupon Dadoji himself felicitated Tukaram and ordered the monks to leave the city at once.

The Deshpande of Beed was now an old man. He suddenly began harbouring scholarly ambitions. Since true scholarship was ruled out because of his advanced age, he came to Jnanadev at Alandi and became insistent about his demand. Jnanadev told him, ‘Look, you should go to Dehu, for the court is now held there.’ Deshpande, therefore, came to Dehu. At that time Tukaram composed thirty-one abhangs. Eleven of these contained precious counsel for the devotee. All these thirty-one compositions eloquently show Tukaram’s perceptions, his thought processes, his method of counseling and his philosophy. He first made an entreaty to Lord God, saying that since He could divine everything in one’s mind, He should now do something to appease the old man from Beed.

ADVICE TO THE DEVOTEE

Do not now have recourse to books and tomes. Do only one thing: worship God for the sake of God. Do not waste any more time since you are already an old man. Live and eat in happiness and contemplate the Creator. Harikatha is the mother of all and the very fount of all happiness. It offers shed and rest to the travel-weary.

Tukaram offered such important advice to the persistent devotee, but the fool that he was; he left those eleven abhangs at Dehu only and went back.

Tukaram’s reputation eventually reached Shivaji (1630-1680). He sent a messenger bearing valuable gifts such as lamps, horses and gems to the saint. Tukaram politely refused the gift and sent a letter containing four of his abhangs to Shivaji. To God, he complained, ‘You seem to provide me exactly the things that do not interest me.’

Shivaji was astounded by Tukaram’s attitude of renunciation and later, came to Lohgaon to meet the saint himself along with gifts of expensive clothes, jewellery and gold coins. Tukaram said, ‘What use is this treasure to us, we want only Lord Vithoba. Your gesture shows your generosity, but, to us, it is as pebbles. Wealth to us is as undesirable as cow meat.’ Even the most insignificant living being like the ant and an important personage of the land are just the same to us. For us there is no difference between gold and soil, he said. These things would not bring happiness to us, he said, and told Shivaji to recite the name of God and become a servant of Lord Vithoba.

Shivaji was so impressed by this that he gave up his ruler’s functions and devoted himself instead to the discourses of Tukaram. Therefore, the saint reminded him and his soldiers the importance of abiding by their Kshatra (warrior) way of life. ‘We should preach to the world, but you should abide by the Kshatra way of life. In case of a skirmish, the soldiers should go forward and protect ruler on the battlefield,’ he said.

Tukaram offered his blessing to Shivaji and saw him off. Later, Shivaji and his soldiers embraced the saint’s counsel, translated it into practice and became a great force to reckon with.

The mentor (guru) has a special place in the path of knowledge (jnan marga), not so in the path of devotion (bhakti marga). This was Tukaram’s philosophy. He was very much opposed to the advaita (oneness) theory. ‘I just do not allow the language of advaita to come to my ears.’ He was for that divine manifestation that had a form and a figure. Therefore, Tukaram never went in search of a guru.

Once Tukaram had a dream - he was going to the River Indrayani for a bath and coming across a Brahmin on the way paid his respects to the latter. Pleased with this gesture, the Brahmin put his hand on Tukaram’s head and offered him the chant (mantra) of ‘Ramakrishna Hari’ and explained to him the tradition. This happened on a Thursday of Magh ((tenth month of the Hindu lunar calendar) shudh Dashmi (the tenth day of the bright/waxing moon). However, Tukaram himself never asked anyone for a mantra.

No human being would ever attain happiness in life till there was a place for God in it. No happiness would be possible till mortals made God a part of their life.

‘Look at my experience. I made God my own and He gave the answers to my questions whenever and wherever I put those to Him.’

It was destiny that led Tukaram’s worldly affairs to destruction. It was through divine benediction that he attained a great spiritual height. Whereas destiny was uncontrollable, God had to abide by the restriction put by the love of the devotee.

‘The devotee’s love is like the leash, Hari goes wherever He is led.’

Such divine love is attained through perpetual remembrance of Him.

‘We should recite Your name, You should give us your love.’

Love is abundant wherever saints live. A perpetual give-and-take of love forms a part of their whole enterprise. Otherwise, no one, including even scholars and the knowledgeable, have no idea of the bliss offered by devotion. It is such love that binds the whole society together and does away with all differences and discrimination. It is such love that makes man’s life happy and prosperous. This heavenly love is obtained from remembering the Almighty and from association with the saints. It transforms unhappiness and happiness and indeed, transforms life itself.

COUNSEL

‘No point in offering advice where it goes unheeded, now the only advice henceforth is that keep your life from going waste.

For your valuable life goes waste if no thought is given to it, thus sings Tuka, thus is his advice.

Tuka says undertake that enterprise, which takes care of your interests, what more can one teach in this respect.

The one who is alive to what is good for him makes his parents extremely happy.

Even God is delighted by the pious behaviour of the sons and daughters born in such a family.Geeta and Bhagawat should be heard and meditation should centre round Lord Vithoba. For there is great benefit in contemplating Him with a clean and clear mind, says Tuka.’

BENEFITS OF SAINTLY ASSOCIATION

‘Never keep the company of bad people, strive always to be in the company of saints.

Uplift of the downtrodden is the greatness of saints, therefore, abjure the bad and hanker after the saints.

Make money through honest means only and amass it with a detached mind.’

It may be seen that the teachings of Tukaram centre round good thought, impeccable deportment and equality. He never hesitated in calling a spade a spade while disseminating messages for the benefit of human welfare.

Mention is found at many places in hagiographer Mahipati’s (1715-1790) writings that there were fourteen accompanists to Tukaram’s keertan. They used to recite the dhrupad during his keertan. They were as follows:

1. Mahadjipant Kulkarni: He was the Kulkarni of village Dehu and is also

mentioned by Bahinabai Sioorkar in her writings. He also supervised

the construction of the temple at Dehu.

2. Gangadhar Mawal: He was a resident of the neighbouring Talegaon. He also

wrote abhangs and documentary evidence is there of his being in the service of

Tukaram.

3. Santaji Teli Jagnade: He was a resident of Chakan. He also wrote abhangs of

Tukaram.

4. Kanhoba:Tukaram’s brother.

5. Malji Gade:Tukaram’s son-in-law.

6. Kondopant Lohkare: A resident of Lohgaon.

7. Gawarsheth Wani: A resident of Sudumbare.

8. Malharpant Kulkarni: A resident of Chikhli.

9. Abajipant Lohgaonkar.

10. Rameshwar Bhat Bahulkar.

11. Kondpatil of Lohgaon.

12. Navji Mali of Lohgaon.

13. Shivba Kasar of Lohgaon.

14. Sonba Thakur: He used to accompany Tukaram on the mridang.

Tukaram’s disciple, Sioorkar, had a visitation in her dream by Tukaram, who offered her counsel. She came to Dehu for Tukaram’s darshan and was inspired towards versification. She also had the fortune of listening to Tukaram’s keertans. Bahinabai Sioorkar’s eminence was next only to Tukaram’s and her compositions should be read at least once. Bahinabai Sioorkar(1629-1700) is remarkable among the Marathi poet-saints not just because she is a woman; so were Muktabai and Janabai long before her; Bahinabai is unique because she was an orthodox, married Brahmin and yet was attracted to Bhakti and particularly to the poetry of Tukaram about whom she heard in distant Kolhapur from a keertan-performer called Jayaramaswami; she was obsessed by the idea of meeting Tukaram in person and dreamt that Tukaram blessed her and became her guru; this resulted in her husband beating her up in jealous fury; he was horrified that his wife, a Brahmin, should want to make a Shudra who had no scriptural knowledge her guru; however, the husband changed his mind when persuaded by another Brahmin and accompanied Bahinabai to Dehu; there they saw Tukaram and attended his keertans; Bahinabai's vivid account of Dehu and Tukaram are like a poetic journal that vividly recreates scenes in evocative detail; this is the only contemporary eyewitness account of Tukaram available to us; Bahinabai's autobiography and verses are translated into English prose by Justin E.Abbott and have been recently republished with a perceptive foreword by Anne Feldhaus.

Shivaji was so impressed by this that he gave up his ruler’s functions and devoted himself instead to the discourses of Tukaram. Therefore, the saint reminded him and his soldiers the importance of abiding by their Kshatra (warrior) way of life. ‘We should preach to the world, but you should abide by the Kshatra way of life. In case of a skirmish, the soldiers should go forward and protect ruler on the battlefield,’ he said.

Tukaram offered his blessing to Shivaji and saw him off. Later, Shivaji and his soldiers embraced the saint’s counsel, translated it into practice and became a great force to reckon with.

The mentor (guru) has a special place in the path of knowledge (jnan marga), not so in the path of devotion (bhakti marga). This was Tukaram’s philosophy. He was very much opposed to the advaita (oneness) theory. ‘I just do not allow the language of advaita to come to my ears.’ He was for that divine manifestation that had a form and a figure. Therefore, Tukaram never went in search of a guru.

Once Tukaram had a dream - he was going to the River Indrayani for a bath and coming across a Brahmin on the way paid his respects to the latter. Pleased with this gesture, the Brahmin put his hand on Tukaram’s head and offered him the chant (mantra) of ‘Ramakrishna Hari’ and explained to him the tradition. This happened on a Thursday of Magh ((tenth month of the Hindu lunar calendar) shudh Dashmi (the tenth day of the bright/waxing moon). However, Tukaram himself never asked anyone for a mantra.

It was on the Kartik (eighth month of the Hindu lunar calendar) vadya Ekadashi (eleventh day of the dark/waning moon) that Tukaram was doing keertan at Alandi before Jnanadev’s samadhi. There was a large turnout. The topic of exposition was: can the body ever become one with the Brahma? Has anyone ever achieved it? Tukaram said that he would do it.

Once Tukaram was delivering a discourse at Lohgaon when enemy attacked the village and plundered it. Tukaram became very distressed. He appealed to God,

‘I just cannot see so much grief, my mind is distressed by witnessing others’ predicament.’

However, there was no divine response to his appeal.

One more incident. Tukaram did a great lot for Jnanadev. In a gesture of gratitude Jnanadev himself had a reincarnation as Jijai’s son. Tukaram realised that God was doing service to him. He did not relish this. He said to all, ‘I am going to Vaikunth. Come along with me.’ Nobody showed willingness. Tukaram then went to the bank of the Indrayani along with all and began a keertan there under the shed of a tree. He affectionately embraced all his fourteen accompanists. His son, Mahadev Vithoba, came forward and paid his respects to the father. Tukaram then cast a look at Jijabai and said to all,

‘Bid thee farewell to me now and each return home now. It’s high time I responded to Vithoba’s call in Vaikunth; Vithoba has been waiting for quite some time now. It’s time for me to leave now and beseech all for their blessings. Vithoba has come true for me at the end and Tuka will now disappear bodily.’

Thus Tukaram bodily disappeared while reciting the name of the Lord. A mention of this is found in historical documents. Baloji Teli Jagnade in his notes writes , ‘Tukaram attained Vaikunth in his own body.’ Santaji himself was present at the time of Tukaram’s departure.

All the people were engulfed in great grief with the disappearance of Tukaram. His children, brother and disciples stayed put at the place. On the fifth day Tukaram’s cymbals, letter and papers descended down from sky. Rameshwar Bhat said that Tukaram had bodily attained Vaikunth. Tukaram’s children and brother then had a quarrel with God. ‘God, please bring back my brother. Do not take him to Vaikunth,’ he said. God then pacified Kanhoba.

The news of Tukaram’s bodily departure for Vaikunth greatly surprised Shivaji. He made enquiries with Janoji Bhosale of Dehu about the saint’s family and directed Tukaram’s eldest son, Mahadev, to go and call on him. Janoji Bhosale then went along with Mahadev to meet the great ruler. Shivaji announced an endowment, to be paid annually, for Tukaram’s family. It consisted of food-grains and a sovereign for clothing. This was continued later even by Shivaji’s son, Sambhaji.

Narayan (1650-1723) was the posthumous son of Tukaram. Because he was a reincarnation of Jnanadev, both his elder brothers deferred to him. They all lived together till the demise of their mother. Both Vitthal and Narayan set out on a great pilgrimage after her demise to consign her mortal remains. Mahadev looked after the daily rituals of the temple. Mahadev has written Tukaram’s abhangs. Narayan then began living in a royal manner. Once Santaji Pawar came to meet him and berated him for it. He then gave away all his domestic belonging to Brahmins, undertook penance and later, built an impressive temple of Lord Vithoba.

‘Tukaram had already left for Vaikunth. Neelkanth renounced his all after many days. People then sought Narayan, the son of Tukaram, for his darshan and his association.’

Thus Niloba Gosavi Pimpalnerkar came for his darshan. Narayan narrated the whole biography of Tukaram and went on a pilgrimage with him. Niloba was determined for a glimpse of the great saint and was obliged after forty-two days by Tukaram.

Niloba was then inspired to write verses. He has written a number of abhangs. Mention of Narayan being a great spiritual personage is found in many historical documents. Many people began coming to meet him. The Tukaram Beej Festival was begun by him. He offered food to all on the occasion. Therefore, King Rajaram bequeathed village Yelwadi to him in 1691. Later on, the villages of Dehu and Kinhai were also similarly bequeathed to him by Kings Shivaji II and Shahu. King Shahu and Queen Sarvarbai greatly revered Narayan. It was Narayan who began taking Tukaram’s palkhi (palanquin) to Pandharpur during each Ashadh wari (pilgrimage). He brought fame to the Dehu temple and enlarged the sect. He prevented the exploitation of those going to Pandharpur and Shingnapur when the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb was in Maharashtra. His demise came about in the month of Shravan. Abaji, son of Mahadev, consigned his mortal remains to the Ganga following a pilgrimage to Varanasi.

Abaji came back to Dehu bearing the water of the holy Ganga. Meanwhile, Uddhav, son of Vitthal, who was with King Shahu, came back to Dehu and began looking after the affairs of the temple. He refused to hand over the reigns to Abaji, himself a great devotee of the Lord. After Abaji his son, Mahadev, also fought for the control of the temple. It was a quarrel over seniority. The ruler of the day did not pay much attention to it. Therefore, Mahadev left Dehu and went to Pandharpur for the sake of the sect. He undertook the important task of collating all the abhangs of Tukaram and made a compendium (gaatha) of them. He enriched the Dehukar tradition. His son, Vasudev Dehukar, also made noteworthy contribution to the warkari tradition, which, by now, had expanded till Karnataka.

Tukaram’s great grandson, Gopal, was also a spiritual authority. His great contribution was writing the biography of Tukaram. The Dehu Sansthan has kept alive the family’s great tradition of the “wari palkhi” (pilgrimage with palanquin). The people of Dehu have made an enormous contribution to the warkari community by performing keertans in village after village. They offered precious service to protect the clan’s deity and the warkari tradition. They are fulfilling the promise made by Tukaram :

Fruit of nectar, vine of nectar, the same tradition is carried forward by the seeds too.

Abhang : Generally consists of four couplets, of which the second couplet contains the central theme of the poem.

Dhrupad : The couplet that contains the central theme of the abhang. While singing this is repeated in chorus after each couplet is sung.

Angadshah : 17th century Sufi mystic and contemporary of Tukaram. His lineage of disciples staying at Bhavani Peth in Pune, observe a fast every year in memory of the friendship between Tukaram and Angadshah. The day-long fast is observed with reverence during the death anniversary of Angadshah’s guru, Hazrat Lakhanshah, held on the 25th day of Dhul Hijja, the Islamic calendar. Angadshah was based in the Astanpur area (now Bhavani Peth) of Pune, where he ran an Asoorkhana (guesthouse).

After his visit to Dehu, Angadshah and Tukaram became very good friends. According to historian Sadanand More, head of the Tukaram chair at Pune University. “Angadshah Baba is a folk hero. The aura around him has been passed down the generations through folklore. Descendants of Angadshah fast on Tukaram Beej (the day Tukaram was last seen in 1650).”

Writer-poet Dilip Chitre, author of the popular book, Says Tuka, says: “Mystics like Angadshah enjoyed a common chord with warkari mystics of their time. They preferred to concentrate on the spiritual aspects of religion as understood by common people. ”

Jnanadev : Jnanadev's writings became the fountainhead from which poets - Namdev, Janabai, Chokamela, Savata Mali, Eknath and Tukaram drew inspiration. Jnanadev broke away from tradition to become the first person to write commentary on Bhagawad-Geeta - Jnanadevi in Marathi and not Sanskrit, thereby opening the reservoir of knowledge to the multitude in their own mother tongue, which till then was for the privileged few. Jnanadev in the beginning of his commentary itself took cognizance of various religions present at that time and performed the great feat of bridging the gap between them.

Keertan : A performance where the keertankar (a lead singer and group leader), who could be of either gender, carrying a veena (stringed instrument) who leads the group with a series of abhangs. The group supports the keertankar in a chorus. After singing of each couplet the keertankar gives a discourse on it.

Palkhi : Narayan, the youngest son of Tukaram, started the tradition of carrying the padukas (footwear) of both Jnanadev and Tukaram in the same palkhi (palanquin) in the latter half of the 17th Century in Dehu near Pune. True to the pilgrimage's spirit of communal harmony, the Tukaram palkhi first stops at the mausoleum of Angadshah a Sufi mystic and contemporary of Tukaram, in Dehu.

Puranas : medieval compilations of myths concerning various deities of the Hindu pantheon; they are regarded as part of the scriptures.

Shivaji : The great Maratha King and founder of a nationalist tradition was contemporary of Tukaram. There is evidence to indicate that Tukaram was not just a devotional saint and mystic. Responding to the need of the times, he was equally adept at writing verses which bore the stamp of practical genius.

‘Paikiche Abhang’ is his collection of 11 long verses, expounding on the principal duties of the ‘paik’ or soldier. This is significant because Tukaram was a contemporary of Shivaji .It is no coincidence that some years after his famous verses, Shivaji made it a point to meet the poet saint. Each of the eleven verses gently guides the soldier to realise his responsibility towards his king. For instance, one ‘abhang’ invokes the soldiers that, in an emergency, they must serve as an impregnable wall to stave off the enemy assault, till their master reaches the safety of the fort. Another describes how once a ‘paik’ (foot soldier) becomes a ‘naik’ (an officer), his dedication and judgement must grow to match his new responsibility.

Santaji Teli Jagnade : a devoted companion of Tukaram; his notebooks contain the only contemporary copies of some of Tukaram's work.

Tukaram Beej : Tukaram disappeared on this day while performing keertan at Dehu. The day was Phalgun (eleventh month of the Hindu lunar calendar) vadya Beej (second day of the dark/waning moon). Legend has it that Tukaram's body simply disintegrated and returned to the state of absolute, unconditioned being, leaving no trace of its material form and identity.

Vaikunth : Lord Vithoba’s abode.

Wari : Circular pilgrimage to Pandharpur. It is usually from his/her home, in a Maharashtrian village to the Vithoba temple in Pandharpur and back. The shudh Ekadashi (the eleventh day of the bright/waxing moon) in the Hindu calendar months of Aashad (fourth month of the Hindu lunar calendar) and Kartik (eighth month of the Hindu lunar calendar) are the days of Vithoba's festival in Pandharpur, attended by pilgrims from all over Maharashtra.

Warkari : A person who makes the wari (circular pilgrimage). The Varkari follows a number of specific principles and practices, including:

1.Worship of Lord Vithoba.

2.A duty-based approach towards life.

3.Moral behavior and strict avoidance of alcohol and tobacco.

4.Strictly vegetarian diet.

5.Brahmacharya (self-restraint) during student life.

6.Rejecting discrimination based on caste or wealth.

Shreedhar More (1916-2004)
Born : 1916. At Dehu (birthplace of Saint Tukaram and a prominent pilgrimage centre).
Ninth generation descendant of Maharashtra’s renowned saint, and songs. Imbibed the ‘warkari’ tradition from his father Nathurambuwa, while still a young boy and memorised the works of Tukaram

Did his primary education at village Dehu. Joined S.P. College at Pune. Gave up college to join India’s freedom movement. Worked in close collaboration with Bhau Vishnupant Chitale, Keshavrao Jedhe, Abasaheb Joshi, Vithoba Anna Ajrekar. Took an oath to wear “khadi” all his life, as a symbol of nationalism.

Undertook an exhaustive study of all sects and sub-sects of the ‘Warkari’ tradition, and its pilgrimages. Author of searching philosophical booklets on the tale of Saint Tukaram’s ascendance to heaven , and on the origin and growth of the sacred ‘palkhi’. (A renowned pilgrimage that dates back hundreds of years and pays homage to Sant Jnanadev and Sant Tukaram, two legendary figures of the Bhakti movement).

Founded the Warkari Board / Warkari Authority, along with associates Haribhau Pataskar, Adv. G.S. Rahirkar, B.P Bahirat, Keshavrao Kabirbuwa, and Vasudevrao Warlikar. Mentor to various national and international scholars studying the ‘Warkari’ tradition. Trustee of the Dehu Devasthan (Dehu temple authority).

Govind Vināyak Karandikar (August 23, 1918 – March 14, 2010) ,was born at Dhalval village in the present-day Sindhudurg district of

Maharashtra.Better known as Vindā Karandikar, he was a well-known Marathi poet and writer. He was also an essayist, literary critic, and atranslator.Experimentation has been a feature of Karandikar's Marathi poems. He also translated his own poems in English.He translated Poetics of Aristotle and King Lear of Shakespeare in Marathi. He was conferred with 39th Jnanpith Award in 2003, which is the highest literary award in India. He also received Keshavasut Prize, Soviet Land Nehru Literary Award, Kabir Samman and the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship.

Review:

Sanjay Pendse Tukaram is to Marathi, what Shakespeare is to English, said Dilip Chitre(1938-2009). Chitre's contemporary (alias G.V.) Karandikar actually conjured up a meeting between Shakespeare and Tukaram, in a poem, “To See Tukaram, Shakespeare Came Over”.

Up above in the heavens, perhaps, Shakespeare comes calling on Tukaram, the great 17th century poet-saint.The two hug one another. Tukaram hails Shakespeare for completely capturing the earthly human experience. The Bard laments though that he missed Vitthala (or the Divine) referred to in the poem as “that which you saw, on the brick!”.

Tukaram replies in a lighter vein that there is nothing to lament for the pursuit of the Divine wrecked his own earthly experience. Words are vain after all, and each path has its own thorns, Tukaram adds. As the twain proceed again on their own paths, the Divine can’t but help wonder at the two of His greatest creations.

***

Sanjay Pendse is Pune-based freelance journalist. Sanjay wrote on cultural affairs for the Times of India, Pune, from 1997 to 2006. He also topped a nation-wide course on environmental journalism conducted by the BBC World Trust on behalf of the European Environment Commission.

To See Tukaram, Shakespeare Came Over

The Sacred Heresy: Selected poems of Vinda Karandikar ;
translated from the Marathi by G.V. Karandikar ;
edited by Dilip Chitre
by Vinda Karandikar
Sahitya Akademi Publication.
First published in 1998.

Excerpts from the Introduction - The Sacred Heresy

Vinda Karandikar is one of the major Marathi and Indian poets of the twentieth century and yet, as in the case of many other equally eminent writers of our time, it is extremely difficult to place his work in a historic perspective. The chief reason for this difficulty is the ongoing conflict between what, in cliched terms, is known as the tradition, and modernity. In the Indian situation, neither 'tradition' nor 'modernity' can be used in the singular. Since the nineteenth century, there have been ruptures in cultural continuity and explosions of mutation in our literatures that seem mind-boggling. It is not a simple case of a cultural conflict between the East and the West. For few serious and preceptive observers would consider either the East or the West monolithic. What we are looking at is a literary awakening that has no parallel in our cultural history except the emergence of the Bhakti era, at different times, from the deep South up Northwards in a wave that could compare in its trasformative sweep with the European renaissance.

Though some of his contemporaries' poetic achievement seems to outshine his, Karandikar's importance as a practitioner of poetry outweighs theirs. In Karandikar we find the best example in modern Marathi literature of a restless innovator and explorer, a conscious experimenter unafraid to use unorthodox techniques and forms. Karandikar's work is exuberant and energetic. He is the kind of artist for whom constant invention is the supreme need and basic ethos of creative work. When one looks at the sheer diversity and range of Karandikar's poetic output, one is awed by his prodigious resourcefulness.

Karandikar sums up how his intellectual passion affects his poetry : "My poetry is the poetry of an Indian who has come to terms with his heritage through modern art and modern science. The Indian and the exotic elements interpenetrate in its substance, sensibility, and form." Karandikar then proceeds to tell that he believes in 'an open view of poetry.' When questioned what he means by 'an open view of poetry', Karandikar comes out with an answer that is a very important statement of his creative as well as critical credo: "An open view of poetry believes in the possibility, the usefulness and the aesthetic significance of many kinds of moods, many kinds offorms, and many kinds of style. It doesn't equate 'purity' with certain states of emotions, 'sincerity' with self-cen tred consistency, or 'beauty' with particular attributes ofform. It doesn't belittle traditional forms and modes in its enthusiasm for experiments or dub normal moods and attitudes as essentially non-poetic. It admits ugliness, dirt and vulgarity, but refuses to worship them as new deities."

Karandikar's originality lies in his use of many voices. His poetic act is more versatile and it does not aim at projecting a single, distinctly identifiable image of the voice of the poet. Karandikar also has the rare tendency to de-form well-known poetic genres. He has created his own kind of free-verse sonnet in Marathi, and he has created rhythmic 'analogues' of the taals of North Indian classical music in poetry evoking, at the same time, images that interpret the spirit of each taal chosen by him. He has brought dramatic monologues and dialogues back into poetry, reviving the spirit of the bharud, a folk poetic form that makes wonderful theatre and of which Eknath, the great sixteenth century poet-saint was a master exponent. Karandikar's poetry is rooted in memories of kirtans, bhajans, bharuds, Dashvatar performances and other such folk and traditional elements drawn perhaps from his childhood memories of rural Konkan. All these are forms of performed poetry. Karandikar echoes them in his work giving it dimensions so different from subjective lyrical poetry that even literary critics find it difficult to describe or analyse them.

The present selection is made fron: Poems of Vinda, More Poems of Vinda , Omkar: Four Representative Poems of Vinda, and from hitherto unpublished translations of his poems by himself. Karandikar himself provides the notes. Most of Karandikar's translations acknowledge 'consultation' with the late A. K. Ramanujan, one of the finest Indian poets in English and an outstanding translator of both classic and contemporary poetry from Tamil and Kannada. Raman and his wife Molly were very close to Karandikar and the interaction between Karandikar and Raman, both of them poet-translators striving for excellence, is an exemplary instance of collaborative effort. I have also translated the poetry of Karandikar and it has been published elsewhere. However, I thought it wise to select for this volume only Karandikar's own translations and notes so that the work presented here is consistent in itself.My editorial role is limited to making a selection and writing an introduction to Karandikar's poetry in general and the poems in this volume in particular. Even though my role is thus limited, my task has been daunting. Perhaps I should confess here that I have been reading Karandikar's poetry since I was a teenager and that I reviewed his second collection of poems when I was barely out of high school and only sixteen years of age. First impressions are deeply imprinted on the mind and early first impressions become formative influences. Karandikar was also my teacher and I studied English literature under him for two years. In a sense I have been a poet of the next generation who watched Karandikar's poetic career unfold from an uncomfortably close position. To view him in perspective, from time to time, I had to distance myself critically. I have been a practising poet for forty-five years now and all these years Karandikar has been my senior contemporary, a poet whom I greatly admire and who, despite the nation-wide recognition he has won, remains somewhat neglected by literary critics.

Dilip Chitre
Pune

14 July 1998