Worldly life, calamity upon calamity
Original Marathi from the Tukaram Gatha · About Sant Tukaram
मराठी मूळ
करील आबाळी । माझ्या दांताची कसाळी ॥1॥
जासी एखादा मरोन । पाठी लागेल हें जन ॥ध्रु.॥
घरीं लागे कळहे। नाहीं जात तो शीतळ ॥2॥
तुका ह्मणे पोरवडे । मज येतील रोकडे ॥3॥
Tukaram Gatha (Marathi Wikisource)
English Translation
Troubles will crush me like a sugarcane mill. If someone dies, the world will come chasing after. Quarrels break out at home; nothing feels cool anymore. Says Tuka, calamities come rushing to me one after another.
We ask forgiveness for any inaccuracies in rendering Tukaram ji’s original Marathi.
In Plain Words
Troubles will crush me, the way a mill crushes the cane. Should anyone die, the world comes chasing after me. Quarrels break out at home; nothing stays cool. Tuka says: misfortunes come at me one after another, here and now.
What it means
Tukaram lays bare the grinding pressure of ordinary household life, with no consolation added. He sees himself crushed like sugarcane fed into the press, the juice squeezed out under endless weight. Death in the family does not bring peace but a swarm of demands as the world descends on him, and his own home gives no shelter, only fresh quarrels with nothing left cool or settled. The poem is honest about the texture of worldly existence: the calamities do not arrive once but keep coming, cash in hand, one after another, which is itself the case for looking past this life to God.
Worldly Life
The perplexities of action, karma, and navigating life in the world.
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