Social criticism, the cruel idol-monger
Original Marathi from the Tukaram Gatha · About Sant Tukaram
मराठी मूळ
आणिकांच्या कापिती माना । निष्ठपणा पार नाहीं ॥१॥
करिती बेटे उसणवारी । यमपुरी भोगावया ॥ध्रु.॥
सेंदराचें दैवत केलें । नवस बोले तयासि ॥२॥
तुका म्हणे नाचति पोरें । खोडितां येरें अंग दुखे ॥३॥
Tukaram Gatha (Marathi Wikisource)
English Translation
They sever the heads of others and know no limit to their cruelty. These wretches borrow sins on credit only to suffer in the city of Yama. They have made a god of a smear of vermilion and make vows to it. Says Tuka, while the children dance in foolish worship, they cry out in pain when someone scratches them.
We ask forgiveness for any inaccuracies in rendering Tukaram ji’s original Marathi.
In Plain Words
They cut off the heads of others, and there is no end to their hardness. These wretches borrow sins on credit, only to pay for it in the city of Yama. They take a smear of vermilion and make a god of it, and they speak their vows to that. Tuka says: the children dance in their foolish worship, but when someone scratches the idol, it is their own bodies that ache.
What it means
Tukaram is attacking a hollow, cruel kind of religion, not the worshipers' helplessness. He sees people who are merciless toward others while running up a debt of sin they imagine they can defer, as if the reckoning in Yama's realm were on credit. He mocks the manufactured god: a smudge of vermilion turned into a deity, vowed to as if it could deliver. The closing image cuts deepest: the worshipers behave like children playing at devotion, so identified with their lump of an idol that an injury to it is felt as a hurt in their own flesh. The point is the emptiness of worship aimed at a thing of one's own making.
Social Criticism
Rebuke of hypocrisy, caste pride, false teachers, greed, and religious pretence.
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