More on Thuka's life....

A brief survey of Thukaram's life and his circumstances give us an idea of the universality of his experience at this-worldly level which, in his poetry, acquires other worldly dimensions.

Thukaram was the second son of his parents, Bolhoba Ambile ( or More) and Kankai. Bolhoba had inherited the office of the village Mahajan from his forefathers. Mahajans were a reputed family of traders in a village, kasba or city appointed to supervise certain classes of traders and collect revenue from them. Thukaram's family owned a comparatively large piece of prime agricultural land on the bank of the river Indrayani in Dehu.

Several generations of Thukaram's ancestors had farmed this land and sold its produce as merchant-farmers.Though, technically regarded as Shudras by Brahmins, they were by no means socially or culturally backward. being traders by profession, they learned to read and write as to maintain accounts of financial transactions. This was presumably the kind of education Thukaram had. The rest was his own learning from whatever sources he had access to. Considering the situation of the small village of Dehu, it is exciting to speculate on the sources of Thukaram's wealth of information and the depth of his learning.The early death of his parents and the renunciation of worldly life by his elder brother thrust upon Thukaram the role of the head of his extended Hindu family at a fairly young age.

As mentioned earlier in another context, Thukaram was married a second time as his first wife was chronically ill. He had six children and had to raise a younger brother as well. Before he was twenty-one, Thukaram had to witness a series of deaths from amongst his loved ones including his mother, his father, his first wife, and children. The famine of 1629, during which he lost his wife, was a devastating experience for Thukaram. The horror of the human condition that Thukaram speaks of comes from this experience. After the famine, Thukaram lost all urge to lead a householder's life. He showed no interest in farming or the family's trade. Presumably the famine, but also some other circumstance of which we have no details, seems to have reduced Thukaram first to penury and then to final humiliation of bankruptcy. He was unable to repay debts he had incurred and the village council stripped him of his position as Mahajan and passed strictures against him. He incurred the displeasure of the village Patil(Headman).

Thukaram became totally withdrawn. He started to shun the company of the people. He began to sit alone in a corner and brood.Soon, he started going off into wilderness for long spells. Meanwhile, his wife had to fend for herself and the children as Thukaram paid little attention to his household responsibilities. The Ambiles (Mores) of Dehu had been devoted Varkaris for several generations before Thukaram. Lord Vithoba of Pandharpur was their family deity. There was a shrine of Vitthal built by an ancestor of Thukaram on land owned by the family in Dehu. A series of traumatic events in his personal life not only made Thukaram introspective but also made him turn his attention to the deity in whom his forefathers had placed their unswerving faith. Their ancestral shrine of Vitthal happened to be in a state of disrepair at this time and Thukaram restored this shrine even though his immediate family was reduced to abject misery.

He now began to spend most of his time in the shrine of Vitthal or its precincts, singing songs composed by earlier poet-saints in praise of the deity. He totally disregarded the pleas of his wife and the counsel of his friends and virtually stopped working for a living. He became a dropout and perhaps an object of pity or contempt among many of his fellow-villagers. His wife and some of his fellow-villagers saw this as a form of madness because Tukaram was lost to the world and had broken away from its routines and practical bonds. However, his total devotion to Vitthal and his compassion for everybody and all forms of life slowly won him the admiration of people.

Some time at this juncture, Thukaram had a revelatory dream in which the great saint-poet Namdeo and Tukaram's deity Vitthal appeared and initiated Thukaram into poetry, informing Tukaram that his mission in life was "to make poems". "Poems" of course meant "abhangs" to be sung in praise of Vithoba as Namdeo himself had done. The dream made reference to a pledge made by Namdeo to Vitthal that he would compose "one billion abhangs" in His praise. Namdeo had obviously been unable to achieve this steep target in his lifetime and he therefore asked Thukaram to complete the task. This dream or revelation which he saw while in state of trance was so vivid that Thukaram was convinced of its "reality". This changed his life. He had found his true vocation.

The divine revelation that he was a poet did not cause Thukaram to go into ecstasy. Instead, he began to suffer from anxiety, doubt and pangs of conscience. One of Thukaram's characteristics was his absolute honesty and accountability to himself. He would not tell a lie even in a poem. The knowledge that his task in life was to write poems in praise of Vitthal made Thukaram a restless and troubled soul. He had never experienced God. How was he going to praise some –thing he had never experienced himself? He had been a honest trader. He vouched for the quality of every item he sold. He bought goods only after critically testing them. He did not cheat anyone in any transaction. Nor would he allow himself to be cheated. Thukaram treated poetry as a serious business from the outset. To him, all poetry was empirical and so was religion. Experience or "realization" was the crucial test. In one of his poems, presumably written at this juncture, Thukaram says in effect, "Whereof I have no experience, thereof I cannot sing. How can I write of You, O Vitthal, when I have not personally experienced Your being?"

Yearning for an experience of God became the chief theme of poetry for Thukaram in his first major phase of work. Meanwhile, he continued to record his poems the human conditions as witnessed by him and also his experiences just prior to his realization that he was to be a poet of God. Having become a poet, Thukaram continued to go off for long periods of time, away from the hub of human life and society, to meditate and seek enlightenment.

Two hills in the vicinity of Dehu were his favourite retreats. The first is the Bhandara hill, where, in a small cave which is a relic of Buddhist times, he composed many of his abhangs. The second is the Bhamchandra hill, where, some years later, he meditated for a full fifteen days before experiencing mystical illumination and beatitude. This event is distinct from another instance of initiation by a guru during a trance that Tukaram has described elsewhere.

In this latter event, Thukaram was dream-ing that he was going to a river for a dip when he was suddenly confronted by a holy man who placed his hand on Thukaram's head and gave him the mantra, "Ram Krishna Hari" to chant. This holy man told Thukaram that his name was "Babaji" and that he was a lineal spiritual descendant of the gurus Raghav Chaitanya and Keshav Chaitanya. When Thukaram was given this mantra, he felt his entire being come alive. He experienced a fullness of being he had never before felt.

Though Thukaram was only about thirty years old at this time, he had been writing poetry for nearly ten years. In his poetry, Thukaram had depicted with great honesty his own past life and his anguished search for God. With his recent mystical enlightment, his poetry acquired a magical quality. His songs began to attract people from distant places.

The younger poetess Bahinabai came to Dehu all the way from Kolhapur just to witness Thukaram's divine performance of his poetry in front of the image of Vitthal in the shrine near his ancestral house. Though Bahinabai's account of her visit to Dehu refers to a period just a few years before Thukaram's disappearance, from her description we get some idea of the charismatic influence of Thukaram upon his contemporaries throughout Maharashtra.

The water-ordeal that has been referred to earlier had already taken place before Bahinabai's visit to Dehu. The miraculous restoration of his manu-scripts that had been consigned to the river for thirteen days was surely a major factor contributing to the legendary status which Thukaram acquired in, his lifetime. Bahinabai has described Tukaram singing his abhangs as "Lord Pandurang incarnate". "Whatever Thukaram writes is God," says Bahinabai.

Thukaram disappeared at the age of forty-one. Varkaris believe that Vitthal Himself carried Thukaram away to heaven in a "chariot of light". Some people believe that Thukaram just vanished into thin air while singing his poetry in front of an ecstatic audience on the bank of the river Indrayani in Dehu. Some others as I have said, speculate that he was murdered by his enemies. Still others think that he ended his own life by drowning himself into the very river where his poems had been sunk earlier. Reading his farewell poems, however, one is inclined to imagine that Tukaram bade a proper farewell to his close friends and fellow-devotees and left his native village for some unknown destination with no intention of returning. He asked them to return home after their having walked a certain distance with him. He told them that they would never see him again as he was "going home for good". He told them that from then on only "talk about Thuka" would remain in "this world". This, in short, is the story of Thukaram's life as it emerges from his own poems.

One can see from it that from absolutely ordinary origins and after having gone through experiences accesi-ble to average human beings anywhere. Thukaram went on an extraordinary voyage of self-discovery while continuing to record every stage of it in detail in his poetry. His poetry is a unique document in human history, impeccably centered in the fundamental problems of being and defining poetry as both the being of language and the language of being: the human truth.

Life, in all its aspects was the subject of such poetry. Thukaram himself believed that he was only a medium of the poetry, saying, "God speaks through me." This was said in humility and not with the pompous arrogance of a god-man or the smug egoism of a poet laureate. The saints are perhaps inaccurately called so because the Marathi word "sant" used for them sounds so similar. The Marathi word is derived from the Sanskrit "sat" which denotes being and awareness, purity and divine spirit, wisdom and sagacity, the quality of being emancipated and of being true.

Thukaram sees the relationship between God and His devotee as the relationship between God and his devotee. Tukaram is not proposing the absolutely external existence of God, independent of man. He knows that it is the devotee who creates an anthropo- morphic image of God. He know that in a sense it is a make-believe God entirely at the mercy of his creator-devotee using a man-made language.

Thukaram is interested in a godlike experience of being where there is no boundary bet- ween the subjective and the objective, the personal and the impersonal, the individual and cosmic. He sees his own consciousness as a cosmic event rooted in the everyday world but stretching infinitely to the deceptive limits of awareness.

"Too scarce to occupy an atom," he writes, "Thuka is as vast as the sky."

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