Taking God by Storm: Tukaram versus Vithoba

Dilip Chitre

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Tukaram was born four hundred years ago and vanished into thin air forty one years later. Legends
surround his life and ‘death’. Traditional hagiographers maintain that Lord Vishnu, flying his vehicle
Garuda---the eagle---personally took Tuka to Vaikunth, his heavenly abode. Sceptics say that Tuka’s
enemies, afraid of his growing popularity, assasinated him and spread the canard of his bodily ascent
to heaven to cover up their crime.

I read Tuka primarily as a poet and I know of his life through his astonishingly detailed
autobiographical poetry that I have been translating since over five decades. His work appeals to me
because of its existential spirit, his relentless inquiry into the nature of his own self, and his
compassionate response to human misery surrounding his life and times. It is a fascinating process by
which Tukaram erases the notional frontier between the subjective and the objective, the self and the
world, confronting the truth on either side.

Tukaram’s family were Varkari devotees of Vitthal or Vithoba, and made regular pilgrimages to the
sacred city of Pandharpur. Tukaram, too, was brought up in this tradition in a prosperous family of
traders and farmers in the village of Dehu near the modern city of Pune. Tukaram never doubted or
questioned the existence of God---in the form of his deity Pandurang or Vithoba----until a series of
family tragedies and a catastrophic famine plunged him into a crisis of faith.

The outcome of this crisis was Tukaram’s gradual discovery that his mission in life was ‘to make
poems’. Interested readers will find more about this in my book Says Tuka ( Penguin Books, 1991;
second edition, Sontheimer Cultural Association, 2003 ).

God in all theistic religions ( the only non-theistic major religion being Buddhism that replaces God
with Nirvana or absolute self-withdrawal ) is seen as the Parent of the universe who brings the world
into being, nurtures it, guides it to its destiny, and finally dissolves it. In most religions, God is a male
patriarch though in India we have some matriarchal religions as well. In the Judeo-Christian-Islamic
religious traditions, God cannot be imaged by man and He can only be invoked or evoked through
hymns and prayers. He works through His prophets on earth who show confused humans the way
back to Him.

Tukaram’s personal agenda was to ‘realize’ God to ascertain His existence. He addressed many songs
and sequences of verse to Vithoba/Pandurang/Hari/Narayana/Ananta ( Vishnu has one thousand
names and the Marathi Bhakta poets created many intimate nicknames for him, sometimes changing
his gender to feminine).

One of my favourite Tukaram poems is the following:

“When He comes
Out of the blue
A meteorite
Shattering your home
Be sure
God is visiting you

When a catastrophe
Wipes you out
And nothing remains
But God and you
God is visiting you

When your language

Is stripped naked
Never to be clothed
In falsehood again
Be sure
God is visiting you

When your humanness

Is rent and riven
Never to be pieced
Together again
Be sure
God is visiting you

When you are

Beyond all hope
When you call
Nothing your own
Be sure
God is visiting you

When you are robbed

Of the whole world
And your voice
Becomes eloquent
Be sure
God is visiting you

See how God has

Grabbed the whole of him!
Tuka is raging
Like God Himself.”

For me, imagining Tukaram is as difficult as imagining God. Yet I do not ever fail to see that a certain
notion of God and a certain belief in His fair play were the driving force behind Tukaram’s best
poems; and of the nearly four thousand poems contained in Tukaram’s collected songs a substantial
number are poetry of the highest order by any standards.

From his own account we learn of a succession of tragedies in Tukaram’s life since he was a teenager.
His first marriage was arranged by his parents when he was a teenager. His wife gave birth to a son
but was bedridden thereafter. He lost his parents soon after they made him take another wife to look
after household work. He lost his parents soon thereafter. Then came the three-year drought and one of
the worst famines the region had suffered. Plants, animals, and human beings died of hunger and
thirst on a massive scale.

Tukaram opened his granary and distributed cereals among the needy. His family were moneylenders
as well and Tukaram cancelled the debts of all his borrowers becoming bankrupt in the process. The
village council humiliated him. He became a loner going away to a cave in the nearby Bhandara Hill
where he contemplated the meaning of human life and composed songs that he performed at his family
temple in Dehu and wherever he was invited.

He was in his early twenties when Tukaram, in a dreamlike trance, was ‘visited’ by his deity Vithoba in
the company of the earlier poet-saint Namdev. It was in this dream that he was told that making poems
was his given work in life, and Tukaram took this vision seriously.

He vowed to compose verses dedicated to God. But that became his first dilemma as well. He had not
‘experienced God’. As a hard headed former businessman who believed in a fair deal, Tukaram found
his assignment unfair. God eluded him even though it was God who had made him his appointed poet-
messenger. Tukaram did not want to be a false prophet or a God-man conning gullible people. He
sought to empirically authenticate every experience that he wrote about as a poet.

“ Where does one begin with you ?

O Lord, you have no opening line
It’s so hard to get you started,

Everything I tried went wrong.

You’ve used up all my faculties.

What I just said vanished in the sky

And I’ve fallen to the ground again.

Says Tuka my mind is stunned

I can’t find a word to say. “

Tukaram was an earthy person. He was upright and believed in abiding by every pledge he made
provided that the other did not play foul. He went through a phase in which he thought that God had
tricked him into an unfair, one-sided deal. He expressed his indignant protest and invited God to a
fight, as in the following poem:

“ I’ll fight
You
And I’m sure
I’ll hit you
In the tenderest spot.

Lord
You’re a lizard
A toad
And a tiger
Too

And at times
You are
A coward
Frantically
Covering
Your own arse

When you face

A stronger-willed
Assault
You just
Turn tail
You attack
Only the weak
Who
Try to run away

Says Tuka
Get
Out of my way
You are
Neither man
Nor woman
You aren’t even
A thing. “

Whether it was a self-conflict or a struggle to transcend himself through his chosen medium of poetry,
Tukaram covers every emotion and all shades of feeling in his depiction of his spiritual battle. He is
puzzled, outraged, humiliated, spurned----but does not give up his agenda of ‘realizing’ his deity, his
object of devotion, ever.

After several such storms of emotion that became footnotes to his worldly life, Tukaram arrived at an
exquisite tranquillity. It was his self-realization that he was the centre and expanse of his universe:

“ Too scarce to occupy an atom

Tuka is vast as the sky.

I swallowed my death, gave up the corpse,

I gave up the world of fantasy.

I have dissolved God, the self, and the world

To become one luminous being.

Says Tuka, I remain here

Only to oblige. “

As for the legend of the miracle of his bodily ascent to Vaikunth, it is perhaps just a popular
interpretation of one a of his last songs:

“ Tuka has descended into Tuka :

Heaven, Hell, Earth watch in wonder.

My only performance of penance

Is my singing of his praises.

Tuka sits in heaven’s vehicle

All the saints bear witness.

God starves after pure devotion

So much, He lifts Tuka to heaven ! “

_(ENDS)________________________________________________________________