Protest, the conned servant
Original Marathi from the Tukaram Gatha · About Sant Tukaram
मराठी मूळ
आतां तुझा भाव कळों आला देवा । ठकूनियां सेवा घेसी माझी ॥1॥
टाकूनि सांकडें आपुलिये माथां । घातला या संतावरी भार ॥ध्रु.॥
स्तुती करवूनि पिटिला डांगोरा । तें कोण दातारा साच करी ॥2॥
जातीचें वाणी मी पोटींचे कुडें । नका मजपुढें ठकाठकी ॥3॥
तुका ह्मणे नाहीं आलें अनुभवा । आधीं च मी देवा कैसें नाचों ॥4॥
Tukaram Gatha (Marathi Wikisource)
English Translation
Now I have come to know Your ways, O God. You trick me into serving You. You have placed the burden of Your own obligations upon the saints. You had me praised and the drum of my fame beaten, but who, O Generous One, will make good on those promises? I am a merchant by caste, cunning by nature; do not try Your deceptions on me. Says Tuka, I have not yet tasted the experience. How can I dance for You, O God, without that?.
We ask forgiveness for any inaccuracies in rendering Tukaram ji’s original Marathi.
In Plain Words
Now I have learned Your ways, God. You trick me into serving You. You take Your own troubles and lay them on my head; You load the burden onto the saints. You had me praised, You had the drum of my fame beaten through the town. But who, generous one, will make those promises come true? I am a merchant by caste, crooked at the core. Do not play Your cheating games on me. Tuka says: the real thing has not yet come to my experience. So how can I dance for You, God, before that?
What it means
Tukaram is half complaining, half catching God in the act. He sees that the call to serve was itself a kind of clever trap: God shifts His own obligations onto the saints, has Tukaram celebrated in public, and then leaves the deeper promise unpaid. Tukaram answers in the voice of his own trade, a merchant who knows a bad bargain when he sees one, and refuses to be taken in by mere reputation and noise. The honest stakes are at the end: he has not yet tasted the real experience of God, and without that taste he will not perform a hollow ecstasy. The protest is really a demand to be given the genuine thing, not its publicity.
Devotion to Vitthal
Poems of praise, invocation, and intimate address to Lord Vitthal at Pandharpur.
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