The Hand That Blessed My Head

The striving stops. Every other effort has been given up. Keshava, I have taken hold of your feet. This is the verse of sharanagati, self-surrender, although the word itself is not in the Marathi. The act is. Tukaram names it in two motions. First, the interior: khuntale sayasa anika ya jiva, all the other strivings of this soul have come to a halt. Then the bodily gesture: dharile keshava paya tujhe, I have taken hold of, Keshava, your feet. The soul has stopped trying. The hand has reached for the feet. The whole act of devotion contracts into a single gripping of the feet of the Lord.

If you have been striving, this is your verse. Tukaram does not report a serene ascent into stillness. He reports a stopping. The efforts ran out. The schemes stopped working. The soul discovered that it had arrived, after all its seeking, at a pair of feet, and the only thing left to do was to hold on. The Warkari tradition treats this verse as the climax of the whole abhanga. The refrain's stroking hand, the standing form at the riverbank, the saints who entrusted him, all of these converge on one gesture: the disciple's own hand grasping the Lord's feet. After this, there is nothing more to do except tell the saints that the honor is now theirs.

The Living Words

Khuntale sayasa anika ya jiva. Stopped, the strivings, the other ones, of this soul. Khuntale is past passive: they were halted, they came to rest, they were brought to a standstill. The verb does not say I stopped them. It says they stopped. The soul did not perform the cessation. The cessation arrived. Sayasa is effort, strain, the labor of trying to fix oneself. Anika is other, additional, the rest of them. Ya jiva is of this soul, this living being. The whole half-line carries the exhaustion of a life that has tried everything else.

Dharile keshava paya tujhe. I took hold of, Keshava, your feet. Dharile is past: I seized, I grasped, I took firm hold of. The verb is not the verb for a gentle touch. It is the verb for a grip that does not intend to let go. Keshava is the vocative address: O Keshava, the long-haired one, Krishna in his beauty. Paya tujhe is the objects of the grasping: your feet. The Marathi puts the grasping first, names the one whose feet are being grasped in the middle, and names the feet last. The line ends on the feet. The whole song has been walking toward these feet. Now the hand has closed on them.

Scripture References

The Heart of It

Read this line slowly. Every other striving has stopped. I have taken hold of your feet. This is the posture toward which the abhanga has been moving since the first line. Tukaram did not begin with this. He began with the burden laid down, the saints handing him over, the hand on his head, the form on the riverbank. Only here, in verse three, does his own body enter the scene as an actor. And the action is not spectacular. The action is grasping a pair of feet.

Khuntale sayasa. The strivings have stopped. Notice what kind of stopping this is. It is not a triumphant arrival at mastery. It is not the moment when the meditator has finally silenced the mind. It is the moment when the soul simply runs out of tricks. Tukaram has tried other things. He has, by the testimony of his own corpus, tried many other things. He has argued with the caste gatekeepers who told him he had no right to sing Vedanta. He has wept when his manuscripts were thrown in the Indrayani. He has starved through famine. He has fought his own mind. And at some point, all of this stopped. Not because he won. Because it stopped. The sayasa exhausted itself. And when it did, he found himself reaching for the feet.

This is the Warkari reading of sharanagati, self-surrender, and it differs in register from some of the more heroic presentations in the tradition. Ramanuja, the great Vaishnava theologian five centuries before Tukaram, taught prapatti as a deliberate act, a conscious relinquishing of all other means of salvation. Tukaram, in this verse, does not quite describe a deliberate act. He describes a halt. The strivings came to a stop, and the hand reached for the feet. Whether the hand's reaching was also a deliberate act, or whether it, too, was something that happened to him, the Marathi does not fully resolve. The passivity is retained. The doing is muted. What remains, at the end of the line, is the grip.

And the grip is on the feet. This is not accidental. The feet of the Lord are the lowest part of his body, the part closest to the ground on which the devotee stands, the part that can be reached without presumption. You do not grasp the crown of the Lord. You do not grasp the shoulders. You reach for what is nearest. The feet are what is nearest. The Warkari devotional grammar has always honored this detail. The whole liturgy of Pandharpur culminates in paya padane, the placing of the devotee's head on the Lord's feet. The feet are the point of contact. The feet are where the transaction happens.

The Bhagavata's theology of the feet runs through several of its most famous passages. The feet of the Lord are called charana, the moving parts, and also kamala, the lotus, because they are held to be soft, cool, fragrant. The devotee who takes hold of the feet takes hold of the lotus. The Bhagavata records Uddhava, Krishna's cousin and disciple, embracing Krishna's feet at the end of the Gita-like Uddhava Gita, weeping, and finding in the embrace the answer to questions that doctrine could not resolve. Tukaram, in this verse, is doing what Uddhava did. The strivings had stopped. The feet were reached for. The grip was taken. The doctrine was completed not by a further teaching but by a body's contact.

Keshava. The vocative name is placed inside the line for a reason. Tukaram could have said dharile paya tujhe, I have taken hold of your feet, without naming the one whose feet they are. He names him. And the name he chooses is Keshava, the long-haired one, the name of Krishna in his beauty. Not Vitthala. Not Panduranga. Not Vithoba. Keshava. The Warkari tradition reads the form at Pandharpur as all of these at once: Vitthal, Panduranga, Vithoba, Keshava. Tukaram, at the climax of his surrender, chooses the most classically Vaishnava of the names. He is reaching for the feet of the Krishna of the Gita, the Krishna of the Bhagavata, and he is making sure the whole Vaishnava horizon is inside the gesture. The feet are Vithoba's feet, and they are also Krishna's feet, and they are also the feet of the Lord Narada sings about in the Bhakti Sutras. All the names converge at the feet.

Narada's Bhakti Sutras, distributed across their eighty-four aphorisms, return again and again to the act of surrender as the substance of bhakti itself. Bhakti is described not as knowledge and not as action but as love, and the love is made concrete as the handing of the whole self to the Beloved. The feet, in Narada's reading, are the particular geography where this handing happens. Tukaram's dharile keshava paya tujhe is the Marathi instantiation of Narada's teaching. The love has become the grip. The grip is on the feet. Nothing more is being held back.

There is one more thing to notice. The verse does not say what happens after the feet are grasped. It does not say the Lord smiled. It does not say a voice was heard. It does not say the disciple was liberated. The grasping is the end of the line. The song moves on in the next verse to the address to the saints, but this verse leaves the disciple with his hand closed on the Lord's feet and nothing else reported. This is the posture. This is the final posture of the one who has come to rest. The abhanga does not decorate the gesture. It simply records it and stops. The reader, singing the verse, is being invited into the same posture. If you have been striving, let the strivings stop. If you have run out of sayasa, let the hand reach. If you find yourself at the feet, close your grip and do not let go.

The Saints Who Walked This Road

The gesture of grasping the feet runs through every major bhakti tradition of the subcontinent, and the Warkari fold has treasured it in a particular way. Tradition holds that Pundalik himself, the founder-figure of Pandharpur, was first found by the Lord because of his selfless service to his parents, and that when the Lord finally stepped onto the brick, Pundalik eventually came out and placed his head on the Lord's feet. The whole Pandharpur theology descends from that founding gesture. Every pilgrim who arrives at the temple and places their head on the Vithoba murti's feet is repeating what Pundalik first did. Tukaram's verse sings the same act from the inside: from the grip of the devotee's own hand.

Dnyaneshwar, three centuries before Tukaram, treats the feet of the Lord across the Dnyaneshwari as the highest refuge available to a human being. His commentary on Gita 18.66, the verse about abandoning all dharmas and taking shelter, returns repeatedly to the image of the feet as the actual site of the shelter. The Marathi philosophical tradition, in his hands, becomes a theology of the feet. Tukaram is writing inside this Dnyaneshwari reading. The feet are the refuge Dnyaneshwar had already identified. The grip of verse three is the grip Dnyaneshwar had already sung about.

Namdev, centuries before Tukaram, had his own famous verse on the feet of Vitthal. His abhangas record that he sometimes could not tell whether his whole body was at the Lord's feet or whether the Lord's feet had come down into his own heart. The boundary between the devotee's grip and the Lord's descent into the devotee blurred in Namdev's experience, and the Warkari tradition has treasured this blurring as a high teaching. Tukaram's dharile keshava paya tujhe, in this reading, is not only the devotee's grip. It is the moment in which the grip and the feet become hard to distinguish.

Mirabai, the Rajasthani saint who lived a century before Tukaram, sang in Hindi of holding the charana-kamala, the lotus feet of her Girdhar. Her abhangas are not in Marathi, but the Warkari tradition has always recognized her as part of the wider sant-mandali, the fellowship of bhakti saints across languages. Her grip on the feet was the same grip Tukaram describes here. The vocabulary differs. The gesture is shared. Bhakti, across the whole subcontinent and across linguistic boundaries, has always understood itself as the posture of a hand closed on the Lord's feet.

Bahinabai, a generation after Tukaram, accepted him as her Guru though she never met him in body. She records in her own abhangas that her whole devotional life was the attempt to take hold of Tukaram's feet, and through his feet, of the Lord's feet. The gesture moves through the lineage. The feet of the Lord become the feet of the Guru, which become the feet of the saints, which become the feet of those who follow. The grip Tukaram describes is the grip that the whole Warkari fold has been teaching its members ever since. When a Warkari bows at the feet of an elder today, the gesture is a direct descendant of the dharile keshava paya tujhe of this verse.

And the tradition has not missed the theological weight of the specific word Tukaram chooses for the Lord here. Keshava is the name of the Lord in his most intimate Krishna-form. By naming Keshava at the moment of taking hold of the feet, Tukaram places the whole Krishna-bhakti tradition inside the Warkari surrender. The Vithoba of Pandharpur is Keshava. The form at the riverbank is Krishna. The feet the hand has closed on are the same feet that the gopis of Vrindavan, the milkmaids of the Bhagavata, held in their own bhakti centuries before. The Warkari fold, in Tukaram's verse, is drawing the whole Krishna-tradition into its own posture of surrender.