Krishna's spell, forgetting the way home
Original Marathi from the Tukaram Gatha · About Sant Tukaram
मराठी मूळ
मैं भुली घरजानी बाट । गोरस बेचन आयें हाट ॥१॥
कान्हा रे मनमोहन लाल । सब ही बिसरूं देखें गोपाल ॥ध्रु.॥
काहां पग डारूं देख आनेरा । देखें तों सब वोहिन घेरा ॥२॥
हुं तों थकित भैर तुका । भागा रे सब मनका धोका ॥३॥
Tukaram Gatha (Marathi Wikisource)
English Translation
I have forgotten the way home; I came to the marketplace to sell buttermilk. O Krishna, enchanter of the mind, beautiful one: seeing Gopala, I forget everything. I cannot tell where to set my foot; everywhere I look, only he surrounds me. Says Tuka, I stand here astonished; all the mind's delusions have fled.
We ask forgiveness for any inaccuracies in rendering Tukaram ji’s original Marathi.
In Plain Words
I have forgotten the way home. I came to the market to sell buttermilk. O Krishna, enchanter of the mind, beautiful one: seeing Gopala, I forget everything. I cannot tell where to set my foot. Everywhere I look, only he surrounds me. Tuka says: I stand here astonished. All the mind's delusions have fled.
What it means
Tukaram takes the small scene of a milkmaid who went to market and lost her way home, and lets it carry the whole experience of being captured by God. She came on ordinary business, selling buttermilk, and one sight of Gopala emptied her of everything else, even the path back. The frame the poem leaves unspoken is that the world is the marketplace and the way home is the ordinary self she can no longer find. The claim it lands is double: she is so surrounded by him that she cannot move, yet in that very paralysis every delusion of the mind has fallen away. Losing the world's road is finding him.
Krishna Leela
Poems celebrating Krishna's birth, childhood, and divine play.
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