|
-: Gurus, Sants :-
Ramakrishna |
Buddha |
Vivekananda |
Mahavira |
Guru Nanak |
Tukaram | Mirabai
Little is known of the life of Tukaram, who was
born in 1608 in the village of Dehu on the banks
of the river Indrayani into a low-caste Sudra
family. Since it was common in Maharashtra at
that time for the Brahmins to refer to all
non-Brahmins as "Sudras", it is not commonly
realized that Tukarams family were landowners,
and that they made their living by selling the
produce of the land. Tukarams father had
inherited the position of mahajan, or collector
of revenue from traders, from his father, and
Tukaram in turn was the mahajan of his village
Dehu. At a relatively young age, owing to the
death of his parents, Tukaram took charge of the
family, and before he was twenty-one years old
Tukaram had fathered six children. The
devastating famine of 1629 carried away
Tukarams first wife and some of his children,
and Tukaram henceforth lost interest in the life
of the householder. Though he did not quite
forsake his family, he was unable to maintain
his second wife or children, and was ultimately
reduced to penury and bankruptcy, besides being
stripped by the village of his position as
mahajan.
In the meantime, Tukaram turned to poetic
compositions [abhangs], inspired by his devotion
for Lord Vithoba [Vitthal], the family deity. He
is said to have been visited in a dream by
Namdeo, a great poet-saint of the thirteenth
century, and Lord Vitthal himself, and
apparently was informed that it was his mission
to compose abhangs. In so doing, Tukaram
incurred the wrath of the Brahmins: not only had
he dared to impinge upon the prereogatives of
the Brahmins, who believed themselves to be the
only true custodians, interpreters, and
spokesmen of religion, he compounded the offence
by writing in Marathi rather than Sanskrit.
According to legend, the local Brahmins
compelled him to throw the manuscripts of his
poems into the river Indrayani, and taunted him
with the observation tht if he were a true
devotee of God, the manuscripts would reappear.
It is said that Tukaram then commenced a
fast-unto-death, invoking the name of God; and
after thirteen days of his fast, the manuscripts
of Tukarams poems reappeared. Some of his
detractors turned into his followers; and over
the course of the few remaining years of his
life, Tukaram even acquired a reputation as a
saint. In the forty-eighth year of his life, in
1649, Tukaram disappeared: his most devout
followers believed that Vitthal himself carried
Tukaram away, while some others were inclined to
the view that he had been assassinated, though
no one has ever offered an iota of evidence to
justify the latter interpretation.
It is uncertain how many poems Tukaram composed,
but the standard and most frequently used
Marathi edition of his poetry, which first
appeared in 1873 from the Indu Prakash Press
with funding by the Bombay Government, and has
often been reprinted, brings together 4,607
poems. Several manuscripts in Marathi exist of
his poems, but some poems are found in only one
manuscript version; often poems found in several
manuscripts show variations; and there is no
single mansucript in Tukarams own handwriting
with all the poems that are attributed to him.
Though Tukarams place in the history of the
development of Marathi is deemed to be
inestimable, and he has been credited with being
the single most influential figure in the
history of Marathi literature, the body of
scholarship on Tukaram outside Marathi is rather
small, and translations of his work are woefully
inadequate. The only nearly complete translation
of Tukaram into English, entitled The Collected
Tukaram, was attempted by J. Nelson Fraser and
K. B. Marathe, and published in Madras by the
Christian Literature Society (1909-1915). A more
recent translation of a selection of Tukarams
poetry by Dilip Chitre has been published as
Says Tuka (Delhi: Penguin, 1991). |
