Tukārām

Come to the bank of the Indrayani river, at the village of Dehu near Pune, sometime around 1640. A man in his thirties is sitting on a slab of rock by the water, and he has been sitting there for days. He is not a sādhu — no ochre robe, no matted hair. He is a grocer. Or was: the shop failed years ago, in the famine. Everyone in the village knows him; half of them owe his family money, or did, until the day he walked to this same river and threw the mortgage bonds into it.

At the bottom of the river, wrapped and weighted, lie his notebooks — every poem he has written. He did not drop them by accident. He was made to sink them with his own hands. A learned brahmin of the region, tradition says, had examined the matter and found it intolerable: a śūdra — a man of the labouring and trading castes, forbidden by orthodox rule even to hear the Vedas recited — was expounding the substance of scripture, in Marathi, in verse, to crowds. Women in the audience. Farmhands. The order was blunt: the poems go in the river. The poet obeyed. Then he sat down on the rock to fast, and asked his God a question that is really an accusation: if this is how it ends, why did you make me sing?

He waits one day. Three. Seven. The village watches him not eat. You know this man — you have seen him this very week, probably: the one whose work was rejected by every gatekeeper who mattered, sitting with the thing he made and the question of whether it was ever worth making. Most such stories end quietly, and nobody writes them down.

On the thirteenth day — so the tradition says, and we will weigh that word tradition carefully — the notebooks came back. Floating. Dry, in the pious telling. The river returned what the orthodoxy had drowned, and the crowd on the bank understood the verdict at once, because the verdict was theirs.

The man on the rock was Tukārām — Tukobā to the people who loved him — a bankrupt village shopkeeper who became the greatest devotional poet in the Marathi language, and, by the tradition's own architecture, the golden pinnacle of a temple that three earlier chapters of this book have been building. This chapter is about how a man loses everything, writes it all down, is sunk, and floats.

The Life

Honesty about sources first. Tukārām is unusually knowable for a Bhakti saint, because his poetry is unusually autobiographical: he tells you himself, in verse, about his shop, his debts, his dead wife, his living wife's temper, his despair. But poems are testimony, not records; the earliest full biographies were compiled by the hagiographer Mahīpati in the eighteenth century, a hundred years after the events, from oral tradition; and the standard printed corpus rests on manuscripts that later hands demonstrably "corrected" and rearranged — more on that below. So: dates are approximate, miracles are tradition, and the voice — the extraordinary voice — is the closest thing we have to the man.

He was born in Dehu, on the Indrayani about twenty-five kilometres from Pune, most likely in 1608 — some traditions say 1598, and scholars have proposed other years; nothing settles it. The Deccan around him was a chessboard of Muslim sultanates with the Mughal empire pressing down from the north; within his lifetime Shivaji would begin carving a Maratha state out of these same hills (chapter 149). Marathi had been a language of God since Jñāneśvar wrote his commentary in 1290 (chapter 112), and for three centuries the Varkari tradition — the "pilgrim" path whose whole discipline is the recurring walk, the wārī, to the god Viṭṭhal at Pandharpur — had been carried by saints like Nāmdev (chapter 110) and the servant girl Janābāī (chapter 109).

Tukārām's family, surnamed More, of the Ambile lineage, sat in the middle of village society: kuṇbī-vāṇī — farmer-traders, ritually classed as śūdras, below the twice-born castes, but prosperous. They held the village grain business and petty moneylending, and they had something rarer: a hereditary devotion to Viṭṭhal, with a family shrine and the annual pilgrimage kept up for generations. Tukārām inherited both the ledger and the god.

Then the ledger destroyed him. His parents died when he was about seventeen; his gentle elder brother Sāvjī drifted into renunciation and wandered off, leaving the business on Tukārām. He was, by his own gleeful later admission, a bad businessman — too soft to squeeze debtors, too distracted to mind margins. And then came the catastrophe no skill could have survived: the great Deccan famine that broke over the region in 1629–30 and deepened, with failed rains and moving armies, into the documented horror of 1630–32 — one of the worst famines in Indian history, in which European travellers recorded roads lined with the dead and parents selling children for grain. In that famine Tukārām's first wife, Rakhumābāī, starved to death — the tradition, drawing on his own devastating verses, remembers her dying with the word for grain on her lips — and his young son Santū died too. The shop was already gone; the debts he had extended could not be collected from the dead, and the debts he owed could not be paid. He had a second wife, Jijābāī — called Āvalī — practical, sharp-tongued, and immortalized in his poems complaining, with some justice, about a husband who gave away stock and prayed through market hours. He was in his early twenties, bankrupt, publicly shamed as a defaulter, with the people he was responsible for dead of hunger.

What he did next made the poet. He began disappearing into the hills above Dehu — Bhāmnāth and Bhaṇḍārā — for days of solitude. And he went to the river with the family's loan papers, the bonds by which the Mores held their neighbours' debts, and drowned them: whatever was owed to him, he cancelled. Remember that gesture; the river will repeat it. Tradition then supplies the commission. In a dream a guru he had never met, Bābājī Chaitanya, gave him the mantra Rāma-Kṛṣṇa-Hari; and in another dream — this one paying a promise this book made in chapter 110 — the saint Nāmdev appeared with Viṭṭhal himself and told him of Nāmdev's old vow to compose a billion verses in the god's praise, and charged Tukārām with completing the remainder. Label it plainly: this is devotional tradition, first written down generations later. But notice what the tradition is claiming — not that Tukārām invented something, but that he was hired to finish the Varkari line's unfinished work. The lineage understood itself as one long poem.

So the bankrupt began to sing. He restored the family's crumbling Viṭṭhal temple and held kīrtans — night-long sessions of song, story and preaching, the Varkari's public classroom — and composed abhaṅgas by the hundred. A following grew: farmers, artisans, women, people the orthodox order had ruled out of scripture entirely. That was the offence. A brahmin of nearby Wāghōlī, Rāmeshwar Bhatt, ruled that a śūdra expounding the matter of the Vedas in the people's tongue was a violation, and ordered the poems destroyed; the river test followed, as the hook told it and The Great Work will weigh it. The vindication did not end the harassment — the hagiographies record further persecutions, humiliations and at least one attempt to break up his kīrtans — but it broke the siege. Rāmeshwar Bhatt himself, tradition says, was converted by the episode (in one telling, cured of a burning affliction by a verse Tukārām sent him) and ended as a devoted admirer — the censor turned disciple.

The last decade was the famous one: the kīrtans that drew crowds from across Maharashtra; the traditions — told and weighed below — that link him with the young Shivaji; and the disciples, including, astonishingly for the age, a brahmin woman, Bahiṇābāī, whose own story is five chapters away (chapter 148). Then, in 1650 — tradition marks the day as Tukārām Bīj, in the month of Phālgun, February–March — he vanished. The Varkari faith holds that he was taken bodily to Vaikuṇṭha, Viṣṇu's heaven, mid-devotion, in a celestial vimāna; sceptical historians, noting that he had powerful enemies and that no body was ever produced, have suspected murder. His brother Kanhobā's grieving abhaṅgas, demanding that Viṭṭhal give his brother back, are among the tradition's most raw documents. This book's rule holds: both versions named, no verdict — the record contains a disappearance, and the rest is faith or suspicion.

The Great Work

What survives is the Gāthā — the collected abhaṅgas, about 4,600 in the standard editions — and it is unlike any other body of devotional poetry in India: a complete human being, ruin and all, arguing with God in the language of the vegetable market.

The ledgers in the river. Begin where he began: with failure, owned in public. Most religious poetry edits the poet; Tukārām itemizes himself. He wrote about the famine, the deaths, the bankruptcy — and then wrote the most shocking thanksgiving in Marathi, which we render from the Gāthā: "It is well, God, that I went bankrupt; well that the famine ground me down. It burned the household world to ash, and in remorse I turned to you. It is well, God, that my wife is a scold; well this disgrace in the eyes of men." Read that slowly. It is not masochism; it is accounting. The man who drowned his neighbours' debt-bonds in the Indrayani is running the same audit on his own life: everything the world called loss, reclassified as the price of the turn. The famine was real — date-anchored, documented, millions dead — and his gratitude for it is the hardest, least sentimental sentence in Bhakti literature. The drowned ledgers matter for another reason too: when the orthodox later forced his poems into the same river, the symmetry was already written. He had cancelled what the village owed him; the question was whether heaven would cancel what he owed.

Words are the only jewels. His credo abhaṅga, quoted at the head of this chapter, deserves its full weight: the only wealth in our house is words — jewels of words, weapons of words; words are the life of our life; with words we deal out riches to the people; Tukā says: the word itself is God. A bankrupt shopkeeper declaring his inventory: nothing left but language — and language, it turns out, is the one commodity the famine could not touch and the creditors could not seize. The form he perfected for it, the abhaṅga ("unbroken"), is a short Marathi stanza of paired lines built for singing — typically four little units, three carrying the thought and the last snapping it shut — designed not for the page but for the kīrtan, where a lead singer throws the line and the crowd throws it back. His imagery is the village's own: the poems reach for grindstones and cooking pots, cattle and creditors, the road to Pandharpur, the sugar that cannot taste itself. And each one is sealed Tukā mhaṇe — "Tukā says" — the poet signing every stanza like a shopkeeper signing a receipt, so that no one could later pretend the low-caste name off the poems. Four hundred years on, "Tukā mhaṇe" is simply how Marathi says "as the proverb goes."

The debt-collector's prayers. Now the registers the roster promised: furious and funny, usually at once. Tukārām's relationship with Viṭṭhal is not supplication; it is litigation. He addresses God as a defaulting business partner: I have paid in full — the devotion, the ruin, the singing — where is the delivery? Why do you sleep? Are you deaf, or bankrupt yourself? He threatens, in effect, to sit in his creditor's doorway until payment. No poet anywhere has scolded his God with more relish, and the fury is inseparable from intimacy — you dun a partner, not a stranger. The same blade turns on the pious: his lashings of hypocrite gurus, fee-collecting priests, pilgrimage-mongers and fake ascetics are as savage as anything of Kabīr's. And the blade turns on himself most of all. He jokes about his business sense, his cowardice, his wife's entirely reasonable rage at feeding a saint; his self-portraits run to the unhinged — in Dilip Chitre's famous modern rendering, Tukā describes himself as "stark raving mad." The comedy is doctrine, not decoration: a man with no dignity left to protect is the one man who can afford the truth.

The river test. The central scene, told as the tradition tells it. On Rāmeshwar Bhatt's order, Tukārām sank his manuscripts in the Indrayani and sat on the rock at Dehu, fasting, for thirteen days, putting the question to Viṭṭhal directly. On the thirteenth day the bundles rose and floated back, unspoiled; the god had countersigned the poems. That is the devotional telling, and this book will not pretend to certify a miracle. But read the story's meaning, which needs no miracle at all: by the time the notebooks went under, the poems were no longer in the notebooks. They were in the mouths of farmers and grinding-women and pilgrims across the countryside — memorized, sung nightly, loved. A community that knows a poem by heart cannot be censored by drowning the paper. Whatever happened on the water, the abhaṅgas demonstrably survived their own execution, which is to say: the villagers fished them out. The tradition then adds its perfect coda — the censor himself converted, the man who ordered the drowning spending the rest of his days defending what he had tried to sink. Institutions, take note: this happens to you roughly once a generation.

The saint who stayed home. Under the comedy sits a theology, and it is a counter-model this book's readers have now seen argued both ways. Indian tradition offered the serious seeker a standard exit: sannyāsa, renunciation — leave the house, the spouse, the ledger, and go. Tukārām refused the exit. He remained a married householder in Dehu to the end — poor by choice after the bankruptcy, but in the marriage, in the village, in the world, insisting that the road to God runs through an ordinary life and not around it. His practice was the Varkari's radically simple kit: the divine Name repeated, the kīrtan sung, the wārī walked, the saints' company kept — no Sanskrit required, no priest as middleman, no ritual fee. And he was consciously the heir of a lineage: his homages to Jñāneśvar, Nāmdev and Eknāth — the sixteenth-century householder-saint of Paithan who had edited Jñāneśvar's text and translated the Bhāgavata into Marathi — show a poet who knew exactly whose unfinished billion he was working off.

The pinnacle of the temple. Last, the honesty the corpus demands, and the payoff three chapters have waited for. The Gāthā as printed — the government-sponsored Indu Prakash edition of 1869 and its successors, running to about 4,600 abhaṅgas — rests on manuscripts that editors described, in their own words, as "corrected" and "arranged"; the corpus grew and shifted for two centuries after the poet's death, and no one can now draw a hard line around the authentic verses. This is the fifth time this book has met the pattern — a beloved voice, a corpus swollen by the tradition that loved it — and the response is the same: the voice is unmistakable at the core, and the growth is itself evidence of love. Dehu's temple tradition treasures a manuscript held to be in Tukārām's own hand — the relic Marathi memory calls the Bhijkī Vahī, "the notebook that got wet" — a claim scholarship can neither confirm nor bring itself to spoil. And the tradition's own verdict on where Tukārām stands was delivered by his own disciple. Bahiṇābāī, the brahmin woman who defied her caste and her husband to take a śūdra grocer as guru, mapped the whole Varkari line as a building — we render her verse: "By the saints' grace the structure bore fruit: Jñānadev laid the foundation and raised the temple; Nāmā his servant built out its walls; Eknāth raised the pillar of the Bhāgavata; Tukā became its kalash — now sing, at your ease." The kalash is the gilded finial that crowns a temple spire — the last piece placed, the first thing the pilgrim sees from the road. Foundation, walls, pillar, pinnacle: chapters 112, 110, and this one, drawn by the tradition's own architect — who is herself five chapters ahead.

Before & After

Backward, the debts are explicit, because he declared them. Jñāneśvar (chapter 112) built the philosophical foundation — Vedānta in Marathi — that made a śūdra's theology possible; Nāmdev (chapter 110) invented the job Tukārām held, the abhaṅga-singing saint of Pandharpur, and the dream-commission tradition makes Tukārām literally his subcontractor; Janābāī (chapter 109) proved the kitchen could be scripture before Tukārām proved the shop could; Chokhāmelā (chapter 113), the "untouchable" saint kept outside the temple door, is the standing reminder that the tradition Tukārām crowned still had walls his own verses raged against. The wider kinships are real but distinct: Basavaṇṇa's vachana movement (chapter 97) had sanctified work itself in Kannada five centuries earlier; and Kabīr (chapter 123) is the comparison everyone reaches for — plain speech, priest-scorching fury, low-caste authority — but the temperature differs: Kabīr's fury faces outward, an iconoclast dismantling both mosque and temple, while Tukā's faces inward and upward, a devotee who never doubts Viṭṭhal, only dunns him. Mīrābāī (chapter 135) chose God over the household; Tukārām is the great counter-case — God in the household.

Forward, three wires, all planted. His disciple Bahiṇābāī (chapter 148) carries the steepest one: a brahmin woman who wanted scripture and was refused it, taking initiation — in a dream, across caste and gender at once — from the grocer of Dehu; her chapter completes his, and was deliberately kept separate, because her claim is precisely that she is no appendix to a male guru. His contemporary Shivaji (chapter 149), born 1630 a few hills away, meets him in tradition: Mahīpati recounts the young chief sending torches, horses and treasure to honour the poet, and the poet returning the lot with verses on the uselessness of wealth; other traditions have Shivaji slipping into his kīrtans, once escaping Mughal pursuers there by the god's grace. Scholars caution that none of this is contemporary record — but the wire is the point: the saint and the state-builder in the same Maharashtra decade, the culture's soul and its sword sharing an audience. And Gandhi (chapter 193), jailed at Yeravda in 1930 an afternoon's walk from Dehu, translated Tukārām's abhaṅgas into English there — published in Songs from Prison — while Ambedkar (chapter 212) and the Dalit movement read the śūdra poet, and his rage at priestcraft, as evidence in a harder indictment. Like Vidyāpati sung at Maithil weddings (chapter 117) and Habba Khatoon in Kashmiri fields (chapter 143), Tukārām lives less in books than in a language's bloodstream.

Why It Still Matters

Start with the largest recurring act of remembrance on earth. Every June–July, in Āṣāḍha, the Varkari wārī converges on Pandharpur — this book walked it in chapter 112, so briefly here: on the order of a million pilgrims, 250-odd kilometres, about three weeks on foot. What matters for this chapter is the shape of the procession. Two principal pālkhīs — palanquins bearing the sandals of the saints — lead it: Jñāneśvar's, setting out from Alandi, and Tukārām's, from Dehu. The carrying of Tukārām's pādukās was begun by his youngest son, Nārāyaṇ Mahārāj, in 1685, and the processions took their modern form in the 1820s–30s; the crowd's great cry, "Jñānobā–Tukārām!", yokes the first name of the tradition to the last — foundation and pinnacle, walking to the same god by different roads that merge outside the temple town. Institutions should study it: a 700-year-old, leaderless, annually self-assembling organization, held together by songs.

Then the language. Marathi speaks Tukārām the way English speaks Shakespeare, but more so, because his lines were built for mouths, not pages. "Tukā mhaṇe" prefaces proverbs; his verse on recognizing a saint — who takes the beaten and the broken for his own: know him for a sādhu; God stands there — is quoted in Maharashtra as a definition of decency itself, by people who could not tell you they were quoting anyone. When Prabhat Studios filmed his life — Sant Tukaram, 1936, with Vishnupant Pagnis as the saint — it ran 57 weeks in a single Bombay theatre and was adjudged one of the three best films at the 1937 Venice festival: the first Indian film honoured internationally, and the story it carried abroad was this one — the poems, the river, the vindication. The Gāthā Mandir at Dehu now carries the whole corpus carved in stone on its walls — a bank vault for the treasure once sunk — and in 2022 a new shrine was inaugurated around the rock where he sat his thirteen days.

But the living argument is the river test itself. Every generation re-runs it: an establishment decides whose speech is authorized, in what language, from what rank — and drowns the rest; and sometimes the users have already memorized the work, and it floats. Banned books, sacked whistle-blowers, deleted archives mirrored overnight, songs that outlive the regimes that banned them: the Indrayani is never far. Tukārām's case adds the detail worth keeping — the community could save the poems only because he had written them in the community's own tongue, about its own hunger. Work that plain is uncensorable, because it is already distributed. The gatekeepers of Dehu learned, four centuries early, the lesson every gatekeeper since has had to relearn: you cannot drown what people know by heart.

Over to You

Tukārām thanks God for the famine and the bankruptcy that destroyed his family, because they turned him toward the divine. Is that hard-won wisdom, or a survivor's story imposed on catastrophe after the fact — and who has the right to say which?

The river test reads two ways: a miracle certifying the poems, or a community refusing to let them drown. Does explaining a miracle as social truth honour the tradition or quietly dismantle it? What is gained and lost in each reading?

Tukārām stayed in the marriage, the shop and the village; Mīrābāī and generations of renouncers walked out. Which is actually the harder spiritual discipline — leaving everything, or staying with everything? Can a tradition honestly honour both?

The Gāthā was "corrected" and enlarged for two centuries by people who loved it; we cannot now isolate the authentic Tukārām. If a community keeps a voice alive partly by adding to it, is the result more true or less true than a locked archive?

Where to Go Next

Start with the source: Dilip Chitre's Says Tuka (Penguin Classics, 1991; Sahitya Akademi Prize 1994) — the great modern English selection from the Gāthā, rendered by a major Marathi poet in flint-hard free verse; reading it feels less like scripture than like opening someone's mail to God. For a free, public-domain (and much stiffer) complete version, J. Nelson Fraser and K. B. Marathe's The Poems of Tukārām (1909–15) is online.

A modern way in: the film Sant Tukaram (Prabhat Film Company, 1936, directed by Damle and Fattelal) — the Venice-honoured classic, available online with subtitles; Vishnupant Pagnis's saint, and the river scene, show you exactly what the tradition sees. Pair it with the Tukārām chapter in Richard M. Eaton's A Social History of the Deccan, 1300–1761 (2005) for the historian's sober frame.

The thread forward: While Tukārām sang that scripture could live in the people’s Marathi, in the Punjab the quiet ninth Guru was keeping his long silence — a silence he would break, at the cost of his head, for the freedom of a faith not his own. Chapter 146: Guru Tegh Bahādur.