Chapter 8. Tukaram: the pinnacle

A life noted, not retold

Tukaram (तुकाराम, c. 1608 to 1650) was born in Dehu (देहू) on the bank of the Indrayani (इंद्रायणी), upstream from Pandharpur's road. The family were Kunbi cultivators by caste who had moved into grain trade: respectable, propertied, lay devotees of Vitthal in the mould the canonical hagiographies trace to an ancestor named Vishvambhar, who is said to have received Varkari devotion several generations earlier (the genealogy is traditional rather than independently documented, and Mahipati is the principal source). The arc, in compressed form: the grain business on credit, the famine of the late 1620s into the early 1630s in the Deccan, the deaths in his household (his first wife Rakhumabai and one of his sons starved in the famine, by the canonical hagiographies), the bankruptcy, and his withdrawal up the hillside at Bhamb-giri above Dehu to sit out an interior collapse. The second wife Jijabai (जिजाबाई) kept the household and the children that survived him; she is herself counted a sant, with her own abhangas, and her role in the Tukaram narrative has been undervalued by male hagiographers since Mahipati. The Sant Tukaram teacher page on this site carries this biography in full. The work here is not to retell it. The work is to place him.

The drowned manuscript

The story the tradition has needed most to tell about Tukaram is not the famine. It is the river. His abhangas, gathered into a vahi (वही), a manuscript book, were the proof Brahmin opponents brought to trial. A Shudra had no right to compose what answered, in Marathi, to scripture; the abhangas dared the same load the Sanskrit shloka carried. The named opponent in the canonical retellings is Rameshwar Bhatt of Wagholi; other tellings name no one. The order was that Tukaram throw the vahi into the Indrayani, and that the river's keeping or returning of it would settle whether what he had written was scripture or blasphemy. Tukaram complied. The tradition holds that for thirteen days the book sat at the river's bottom and Tukaram sat on the bank refusing food, and that on the fourteenth day the manuscript floated back intact. The story is hagiography. It is also the thing the tradition has needed to keep saying about itself: that the question of who has the right to write theology in this part of the world was settled, by a river and by a god, against the priesthood; that the abhanga is what survived the test the shloka administered. Whether the literal book floated is not the question that matters. The claim the story carries is.

Why the tradition places him at the summit

The Varkari sampradaya holds Dnyaneshwar at the foundation and Tukaram at the pinnacle. Before stating the structural reason, one calibration. Dnyaneshwar's Brahmin status was institutionally denied at the time of writing the Dnyaneshwari: the family was excommunicated, the upanayana withheld, the local Brahmin assembly at Paithan refusing reinstatement; the comparison the tradition draws when it places Tukaram opposite Dnyaneshwar is therefore to a structurally upper-caste form of authority that Dnyaneshwar himself was excluded from rather than to the practising priesthood. This calibration sharpens the Tukaram claim, it does not soften it. The structural reason the tradition places Tukaram at the summit, more than any other, is that he was not a Brahmin in caste or in inherited form, and the sampradaya's elevation of his Gatha to a status comparable with the Dnyaneshwari is its own statement about whose voice can carry what. Dnyaneshwar wrote the philosophical and liturgical foundation in Marathi as the ostracised son of a Brahmin household; the work was vernacular but executed inside a structurally upper-caste form of authority, however contested at the time. Tukaram wrote without that residue. He was a grain merchant of cultivator stock, formally unschooled, refused by the priesthood, and the tradition received what he wrote as the highest. To place him at the summit is to say what the tradition had been moving toward since the first sant of Pandharpur put bhakti above varna: that the divine name and the abhanga form do not require Brahmin legitimation in order to function, and that the most piercing voice the lineage produced did not come through the Veda.

The tonal range

The pinnacle claim is not made by elevation alone; it is made by what the corpus is able to do. The Gatha's four thousand and more abhangas move through a tonal range no other sant of the tradition holds in single hands. There is the bridal-mystic register, in which the speaker is the soul as bride forcing her way into Govinda's house and refusing to leave: erotic, defiant, finished with prudence. There is the rage-at-hypocrisy register, in which Tukaram strips the false ascetic, the priestly fraud, the Brahmin who sells mantras for grain, the kirtankar who performs piety: the diction is stripped to bone, the line cuts. There is the famine register, the abhangas of the bankruptcy and the children's deaths, where the voice is broken open and grief is brought to Vitthal without any of the consolations the tradition usually offers. There is the rebuke register, in which Tukaram addresses Vitthal himself and is angry with him: where are you, why have you not come, this is your renown in the world and it is failing. And there is the late "I have become" register, where the seeker has crossed and the voice changes: I have eaten the dark one, I have entered the house, what was sought has been settled. The Gatha holds these registers in the same hand and the same lineage. The pinnacle is not the height of a single register; it is the breadth across which a single voice held coherent.

A specimen from before the trial

The bridal-mystic register is one of the registers the Tukaram who survived the river is known for. The following, abhanga 9 of the standard public-domain Gatha recension, is offered as a specimen, not as a summary.

हाचि नेम आतां न फिरें माघारी । बैसलें शेजारीं गोविंदाचे ॥१॥ घररिघी जालें पट्टराणी बळें । वरिलें सांवळें परब्रम्ह ॥२॥ बळियाचा अंगसंग जाला आतां । नाहीं भय चिंता तुका म्हणे ॥३॥

This is my vow now. I will not turn back. I have sat down beside Govinda. I forced my way into the house and made myself the chief queen. I have wed the dark-skinned Parabrahman. The strong one's body is against mine now. No fear remains, no worry. So Tuka says.

Tukaram, Tukaram Gatha, abhanga 9 (Marathi Wikisource public-domain recension as carried in the project's gatha.json). English freshly rendered against the Marathi for this chapter; consult Dilip Chitre, Says Tuka, for the standard English of the bridal-mystic register.

A specimen from the trial

The abhangas the tradition assigns to the days of the trial, the thirteen days the manuscript sat at the river's bottom and Tukaram sat on the bank without food, are not bridal abhangas. They are dhāvā abhangas: cries to Vitthal to come, to run, to honour his renown in the world. The following, abhanga 91 of the same recension, is one of the canonical specimens of that register. The biographical assignment is hagiographic; the register is unambiguous.

संवसारतापें तापलों मी देवा । करितां या सेवा कुटुंबाची ॥१॥ म्हणऊनी तुझे आठविले पाय । ये वो माझे माय पांडुरंगे ॥ध्रु.॥ बहुतां जन्मींचा जालों भारवाही । सुटिजे हें नाहीं वर्म ठावें ॥२॥ वेढियेलों चोरीं अंतर्बाह्यात्कारीं । कणव न करी कोणी माझी ॥३॥ बहु पांगविलों बहु नागविलों । बहु दिवस जालों कासाविस ॥४॥ तुका म्हणे आतां धांव घाली वेगीं । ब्रीद तुझें जगीं दीननाथा ॥५॥

I am scorched, O God, by the fire of worldly life, worn out from serving this household. And so I have remembered your feet. Come to me, O my mother Pandurange. Through many births I have been a beast of burden; the crux of release is still not known to me. Thieves have surrounded me inside and out. No one shows me any mercy. I have been scattered far. I have been stripped naked. For many days now I have been writhing. Tuka says: come quickly now. Your renown in the world is the refuge of the destitute.

Tukaram, Tukaram Gatha, abhanga 91 (Marathi Wikisource public-domain recension as carried in the project's gatha.json). English freshly rendered against the Marathi for this chapter.

The disappearance

The end of Tukaram's life, in the canonical Varkari account, is not a death. It is an ascent. The tradition holds that on Falgun Vadya Dwitiya in 1650 he was taken up bodily to Vaikuntha (वैकुंठ) on a vimana (विमान) sent for him; in some retellings the vehicle is a chariot, in others an eagle, in still others Garuda himself. What Jijabai found at the place of ascent, by the canonical telling, was nothing, and by some tellings only his wooden sandals and his upper cloth. This is the account the sangha sings, the account Mahipati gives in the Bhaktalilamrita, and the account on whose strength the day of the disappearance is observed at Dehu each year as Tukaram Beej. The image the kirtankars carry of him on that day is the image of one who did not die.

The murder reading sets the historiographical counter. Its proponents read the same fact pattern as the cover story of an assassination by Brahmin opponents whose religious authority Tukaram's sangha had begun to displace. The version that has had widest circulation in modern Marathi historiography, associated with Dilip Chitre in particular and pressed by him in Punha Tukaram and the introductory essays to Says Tuka, takes the disappearance of the body, the unrecovered remains, and the consolidation of the Brahmin establishment's power in the immediate aftermath as evidence enough that what the tradition received as ascent was in fact the violent removal of a voice the priesthood could no longer answer in argument. The reading has had its own contestants within Marathi scholarship and it remains a reading, not a settled finding. It does, however, refuse to let the sangha's account stand unmarked. It names what the priestly party stood to gain.

The cautious-historical reading holds less and stands further back. S. G. Tulpule, in his Classical Marathi Literature and in the relevant entries on Tukaram's biography, holds only that Tukaram disappeared on the day the tradition names: the body was never recovered, the immediate eyewitness accounts are all hagiographical, and what happened between the singing on the bank of the Indrayani at dawn and the empty place at the next morning is not historically retrievable. The reading does not assert murder. It does not assert ascent. It marks the gap. R. D. Ranade's treatment in Mysticism in Maharashtra sits broadly in the same cautious register: the sant disappeared, the manner is contested, the tradition's account is the sangha's account and is to be received as such.

The traditional vimana account has been the account most readers have lived with for three centuries. In the canonical retelling, Tukaram had been singing the morning kirtan on the riverbank and had told those present that the time had come for him to return. The sangha watched as the vimana descended. He stepped onto it and was taken. Sandals and upper cloth remained. Jijabai arrived to find what she found. The account is held in the Bhaktalilamrita, in the abhanga material assigned by tradition to his last days, and in the collective memory the kirtan keeps. The chapter does not choose between the three readings. The murder reading names what the priestly party stood to gain and holds that the absence of a body settles the question against the tradition. The cautious-historical reading marks the gap and refuses both readings as overreach. The vimana account is what the sangha sings. Each reading is making a different kind of claim, and the chapter holds the layers without choosing. The gap is not a problem to be solved. It is a fact to be carried.

The road

Each year in Ashadha the palkhi of Tukaram leaves Dehu and walks south to Pandharpur, and each year, after the kartiki return, the road that received it walks back to Dehu, where the sant did not die. The Gatha's four thousand and more abhangas, ranging from doubt to darshan to rage at hypocrisy to the bridal-mystic registers to the dhāvā cries to the late "I have become" abhangas, are walked on the Gatha page on this site. What he wrote is what walks.

Sources

• Sant Tukaram Maharaj Sansthan recensions of the Gatha; Marathi Wikisource public-domain recension as carried in web/src/data/gatha.json.
• Dilip Chitre, Says Tuka: Selected Poetry of Tukaram, Penguin India, 1991, throughout.
• Dilip Chitre, Punha Tukaram (in Marathi), and the introductory essays in Says Tuka, on Tukaram's biography, the manuscript-in-the-river story, and the disappearance, including the assassination reading.
• Mahipati, Bhaktavijaya and Bhaktalilamrita, trans. Justin E. Abbott as Stories of Indian Saints and as Tukarama (Motilal Banarsidass reprints), for the canonical hagiographical accounts of the famine, the river, and the ascent, and for the genealogy that names the ancestor Vishvambhar.
• R. D. Ranade, Mysticism in Maharashtra: Indian Mysticism (1933; standard reprints), chapters 8 to 10 on Tukaram, including the cautious treatment of the disappearance.
• S. G. Tulpule, Classical Marathi Literature: From the Beginning to A.D. 1818 (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1979), on the cautious-historical reading of Tukaram's biography and the disappearance.
• Christian Lee Novetzke, Religion and Public Memory: A Cultural History of Saint Namdev (Columbia University Press, 2008), for the historiographical framing of how the Varkari tradition canonised its sants.
• Sri Tukaramachi Gatha, Government of Maharashtra critical edition compiled by V. S. Bendre and others, 1950 to 1973.
• The existing Satsang with Ananta site materials at /teachers/tukaram and /scripture/tukaram-gatha.

Note on transliteration. The hill above Dehu where Tukaram withdrew during the bankruptcy is named in this chapter as Bhamb-giri. The form Bhamb-girnath is also encountered in the literature; the chapter uses Bhamb-giri throughout for consistency.