Person · Marathi saint-poet
Tukārām
Also known as Tukaram, Tukoba, Sant Tukaram, Tukaram Maharaj
Seventeenth-century poet of Dehū whose roughly four thousand abhangs are the most sung Marathi verse there is. A Kunbi grain-trader ruined by famine, he wrote in ordinary speech and against ritual show, and his songs carry the Varkarī walk to Pandharpūr as much as any scripture does.
- Date
- c. 1608 – 1650
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Tradition
- Tukārām gāthā; Varkarī tradition
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
Challenged by Brahmin opponents, he is said to have sunk his manuscripts in the Indrāyani; tradition has them surface undamaged after thirteen days of fasting on the bank. His disappearance in 1650 is recorded as ascent rather than death, and Dehū still marks the spot.
Connections (3)
- Life routeDehū
Dehū is Tukārām's birthplace, his trade's ruin, and the bank of the Indrāyani where his manuscripts are said to have been sunk and recovered. The Varkarī calendar treats the town as the second of the two great palkhī origins, and his abhangs are still sung on the road out of it.
- Teaching lineageDnyāneshwar
Varkarī tradition sets Dnyāneshwar at the foundation and Tukārām at the summit — 'Dnyānadev laid the stone, Tukārām raised the spire' runs the saying. Three and a half centuries and a wide social distance separate them, but their two palkhīs walk the same road and arrive on the same day.
- Court associationSamarth Rāmdās
Tukārām and Rāmdās were contemporaries in the same country and are the two poles of Marathi devotion: one a trader who wrote that he wanted nothing and was suspicious of organisation, the other a Rāma devotee who founded hundreds of maths and wrote a manual on how to run them.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Tukaram”. The subject’s own writings where they survive, and the standard biographical literature.
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