Legacy

In 1936, a Marathi film titled Sant Tukaram, directed by Vishnupant Govind Damle and Sheikh Fattelal, was screened at the Venice Film Festival. It became the first Indian film to be shown at an international film festival and was judged one of the three best films in the world that year. Back home, it ran for 57 consecutive weeks in a single theatre, was seen by six million people in Maharashtra alone, and established the template for the devotional film in Indian cinema. That a bankrupt grocer-poet from a village on the Indrayani could inspire what remains one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed Indian films ever made is itself a kind of miracle.

But the film merely documented what Maharashtra already knew. Tukaram's stature in Marathi culture is comparable to Shakespeare in English or Goethe in German. His abhangas are not merely literature; they are the living scripture of fifty million Marathi speakers. They are memorized by literate and illiterate alike, sung in temples and kitchens, quoted in arguments and consolations. Dilip Chitre, his greatest modern translator, called him 'the first truly modern poet in Marathi language in terms of thematic choice and poetic technique.' His 'Says Tuka' translation won the Sahitya Akademi Translation Prize in 1994, and Chitre spent more than three decades translating Tukaram, describing the work as living 'in a no-man's land between two linguistic cultures belonging to two distinct civilisations.'

The Varkari tradition recognizes four supreme poet-saints, and Tukaram is the last and highest. Bahinabai, the Brahmin poetess who was his contemporary and devotee, described the tradition as a temple built across four centuries: 'Jnanadev laid the foundation. Namdev built the walls. Eknath raised the central pillar. And Tukaram became the crown, the kalash, the finial at the very top.' In the 375 years since his departure, no comparable spiritual personality has emerged in the Varkari tradition. The kalash remains unmatched.

Today, the Gatha Mandir at Dehu preserves his legacy in stone: 4,145 abhangas are engraved on marble walls surrounding his central murti. In 2022, Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated the Jagadguru Shrisant Tukaram Maharaj Shila Mandir, dedicated to the slab of rock on which Tukaram sat during his thirteen-day fast. India's Department of Posts issued a commemorative stamp in 2002. But the truest memorial is not in stone or stamp or film. It is in the voice of every Varkari who sings 'Vitthal, Vitthal' on the road to Pandharpur, carrying forward the current that Tukaram set flowing.

His influence extends beyond Maharashtra. Scholars have compared him to Kabir, Mirabai, and other Bhakti poets, but what sets Tukaram apart is the combination of three things: the organized community (the Varkari sampradaya), the literary achievement (4,500 abhangas of astonishing range and depth), and the lived example (a householder who never renounced the world but sanctified it from within). He was, in Chitre's formulation, simultaneously 'an image-worshipping iconoclast' and 'a sensuous ascetic,' a man who contained contradictions because the truth he served was larger than any single formulation could hold.