Tukaram was a poet saint with a very great stature in the Bhakti movement of Maharashtra, so much so that in the popular mind he is the very peak of that centuries long outbreak of love for god. The days of his life are contentious with scholars assigning various dates to his birth. The four most popular options are 1568, 1577 1608 and 1598 AD, so we do have a wide choice. There is lesser dispute that he died in 1650 AD, a public event wherein he was supposed to have bodily been lifted up to salvation by his favorite deity, Vithobha of Pandharpur, who was a variant of Krishna. As to the rest his poetry did the talking and it still does. He was born in Dehu, very close to modern Pune city in Maharashtra. His father was a small trader or peddler and he was barely literate all his life. He was married early on in life as was the custom, but the girl was sickly and they married him off again so that he could have somebody to look after both of them. The second wife had a keen sense of the unkind fate she was experiencing and was not reticent in fluently expressing this conviction. Men have turned to god for less but the tongue of a termagant is keen inducement for those who are not combative by nature. Tukaram tried to make a living but it constantly distracted him from the inner life and he was naturally hopelessly inept at all his business ventures. His first wife and son died soon and he withdrew even more into himself. When he was twenty-one years old he had a crisis of the spirit and almost died with the agony but a fortuitous dream occurred, in which he was initiated into the spiritual path by one Babaji Chaitanya. This may have been the famous deathless yogi Babaji but there is no indication either way. Once he had the initiation he had illumination almost on its heels. “Maran majhe maran gele” he sang, “My death has gone to die!” He cared not a fig for the opinions of the world or his wife’s taunts who finally gave up in despair and understood her husband was not like other men and made the best of her lot. He took to wandering around many towns and performing devotional songs, the kirtans, at Dehu, Loehgaon and Poona. These were strongholds of the Brahmans who were particularly rigid about the rules and regulations of caste and scripture at the time as they were under serious attack from the Mughal Aurangzeb who was in a frenzy of piety over his faith and demonstrating it by attacking the religious places and forbidding the practices of the faiths of others. It is instinctive to huddle together and hold ever more tightly to the rules that define a community at such times and here was this lower caste upstart coming along and singing that the rules and caste did not matter only love for god did. He grimly sang, Sainthood is not available in the bazaar, It is gained by paying one’s life All else is bragging. He was naturally subject to every form of persecution. Tukaram did not care; he was too busy singing about his beloved Vithobha to notice. He choose a particular verse form called the abhanga, a run on couplet with three and a half feet with the first three rhyming. In the use of this poetic device he was unrivalled, and others have practically left it alone after him in tacit acknowledgment there is nothing more that can be done with it. There is also an element of some exaggeration in these persecutions as the Indian mind loves, in its narratives, to see saints persecuted beyond endurance and rescued at the very last moment by divine intervention. When their calumnies and higher caste sneering could not sway the common people from love of his compositions or from love of the man himself, one Mambaji Gosavi accused Tukaram of plagiarizing his poems, as obviously an unlettered man could not compose so beautifully. This was only too obvious to the educated, none of whom could compose a single verse in the style of Tukaram but they did not let a little matter like that stop them. They flung his Gatha, a manuscript of over three thousand poems into the river Indrayani, but the river goddess refused to be a cat’s-paw in such games and the manuscript defiantly refused to sink, floating on the surface of the water until sheer embarrassment forced them to concede the point. No doubt it was the occasional understandable spurt of anger at such treatment that caused him to sing, "Like pipes carved out of carrots are these newly wise men They cram but accumulate only the Ego Their knowledge is as limited as their pride is great Tuka says, such hypocrites should be beaten with shoes." Not that he was by nature an angry man, quite the contrary. Another more plausible story contains a measure of his character and perhaps explains his boundary melting influence in a society that has always been more than necessarily conscious of caste limits. A young man took it upon himself to ‘disgrace’ this audacious flouter of convention and spat upon Tukaram as he was coming back up the steps after bathing in the river. Spittle is very polluting so the saint had no option but to silently go back and bathe all over again in ritual ablution. When he came back up the steps the young ruffian spat on him again. Wordlessly the saint descended the steps to bathe yet again. This incredible struggle was kept up for most of the morning. Word spread through the town as to what was happening with the speed that gossip can travel only in India and practically the entire populace was assembled to see the outcome of this tussle. The young man kept going in sheer desperation, it had become a matter of saving face, until finally he ran out of spittle. By which time Tukaram had made the silent trip down the steps an astonishing seventy times in succession without saying a single word. The young man fell at the saint’s feet in remorse but Tukaram had only one comment to make. “ It is for me to thank you. Because of you I had the merit of bathing in a holy river seventy times. I am infinitely the gainer here. Such spirit could not be combated and Tukaram rose to become an acknowledged spiritual giant all over Maharashtra so much so that even Shivaji, the great rebel against Aurangzeb and founder of the first Hindu Kingdom in centuries was supposed to have come to meet him for a blessing. As mentioned earlier he is credited to have ascended bodily to heaven so there is no memorial at the where the body is buried or cremated, as is the usual practice with dead saints. In any case he is one of those rare people who really leave an immortal legacy, his abhangas being sung to this very day by millions of people. - Rohit Arya Archive