Buddhism in India

The Bhakti Movements 205

the good is slave, the evil is king.

Leaving righteousness

vile Brahmans have become thieves.

They hide the tilakon their forehead

and wear Muslim pants and leather shoes.

They sit on seats of power oppressing

and keep the people starving.

They keep the kitchen accounts

Living on oil and butter.

They are servants of the base

and get beatings for their mistakes.

The ruler oppresses the people,

the holy places nourish evil.

The Vaisya, Sudra

all are naturally so low.

These are all the outer colours

the green inside is masked by sham.

Tuka says, O God,

don’t sleep but run to help (#267).

At the same time he could condemn caste with much more harshness

than either of the Dalit saints we have discussed:

He is not a Brahman who abhors the touch of a Mahar.

Refrain: What retribution can he pay? He won’t throw his life away!

A Chandala drives him wild, it’s his heart that’s defiled

Tuka says, his caste’s defined by what fills his mind (#55).

And he could be ferocious against all forms of religious deception,

condemning Brahmanic rituals, maths, preachers of the Vedanta, prac-

titioners of Shakta or the ‘goddess’ cults; magicians and hypocrites

of all kinds.

Tukaram’s life and writings are a subject of intense debate. His

career as a poet and devotee of Vithoba began after a major famine

and traumas such as the death of his wife, when he is said to have

lost all urge to lead a normal householder’s life, showing no inter-

est in farming and drowning the records of debts of his father. It

was after this that he took up the worship of Vithoba, a traditional

family deity. The orthodox interpretation sees him as a failure in

business, just as Kabir is characterised as a mild person who often

messed up his weaving by falling into trances, even though this

‘mildness’ hardly fits the sarcastic and challenging tone of so much

ironic; it is an attack on Brahman hypocrisy. His status as a Shudra
was something he rebelled against throughout his life.
Tukaram was from a well-to-do family of farmer-moneylender
in a village not too far from present-day Pune. However, the
Kunbis (later called Marathas, and considered to be the ‘dominant
caste’ in Maharashtra) were considered Shudras and thus, accord-
ing to Brahmanic orthodoxy were without any rights to learning or
priestly functions. He lived during the regime of the Bijapur state,
which was as willing as any Muslim state to enforce varnashrama
laws, though his last years coincided with the early ones of the
hero-king Shivaji, the founder of an independent Maratha state. It
was a fairly prosperous and commercialised agricultural society,
though without the high surplus-production of the irrigated agri-
culture of the Kaveri delta area of Tamil Nadu or the Gangetic
valley. Nevertheless, it was vulnerable to famine, which also struck
in the early years of Tukaram’s life.
There is an impressively large collection of his songs, mainly in
the abhangform—numbering 4607 in the government-published
collection. This vast outpouring includes, on the one hand, powerful
and emotional devotional songs, a whiplash of emotions in which
Tukaram seems to have been hurled from the heights to the depths
and back again, and on the other some simple and beautifully written
praise of Vithoba:

How are you a lord, not showing yourself to my eyes?

beautiful, fair, profuse.

Refrain: Four-armed; with a rosary and musk traced on your brow,

holding a conch-shell, a discuss, a mace,

Wearing the Vaijayanti necklace;

rings gleaming in both ears.

Tuka says, Lord, run, show me your feet,

Pandurang, mother, by your grace (#4333).

Along with these are poems of fierce social criticism, include
scathing attacks on caste, religious superstition and Brahman
pretensions in some of the harshest language imaginable. He
bitterly characterised the decadence of his time:

Grabbing gold they show their girls,

taking wombs as things on sale...

Refrain: This is the dharma of our time:

204 Buddhism in India