Saint Tukaram

 Saint Tukaram

The great Indian Saint Tukaram Born  on Dehu village eighteen miles away from Pune, Tuka or Tukaram (c. 1598-1649 A.D.) is the most popular saint of Maharashtra. His parents were poor agriculturists of Maratha community but of pious and charitable nature. Their family deity was Vithoba of Pandarpur. Married at the age of  fifteen, Tukaram lost his wife and son who died of starvation in a famine. His second wife Jeejabai was a capable but worldly woman who could not understand or appreciate her husband's spiritual aspirations, and took to nagging. They had two children. 

As a petty farmer and trader, Tukaram innocent of worldly ways, and was cheated and humiliated in dealings. His life is a favorite topic for Keertankars (reciters and story tellers in praise of God) as it is full of dramatic incidents of misadventures of an unworldly man. He spent much of his spare time in contemplation and studying works of Jananeswar,Namdev and Ekanth, other famous saints of his native land. One guru, Raghava Chaitanya provided spiritual guidance in dream. After a period of contemplation in isolation and sadhana of severe kind, poetry dawned on him. His abhangs reveal the great inner struggle he had to undergo. But they also provide 

insight into stages of God-realization through the medium of Bhakti or devotion. The separation of the soul from the God gives intense pain to the devotee. This is known as Viraha  to Hindu mystics and "Dark night of the soul" to Christian mystics. Tukaram expresses this condition in his abhang:

How can I know the right

So helpless am I

Since thou Thy face hast hid from me

O Thou most high! I call again and again at thy high gate None hears me, empty is the house, and desolate. He goes to the Lord as a beggar for alms--alms of divine love. He wanted to "taste sugar, did not want to become sugar". He wanted "bliss of communion with God; did not want to become one with him". This is the simplest interpretation of dualism in Bhakti cult.Tukaram was a great saint and devotee of Krishna, who raised the dead and fed the multitudes. Thousands of worshipers from distant villages journeyed to join Tukaram during his ecstatic religious celebrations. Before his death, in 1648, Tukaram exhibited dramatic signs of bodily transfiguration: on one occasion, 

when the gathering became so absorbed in devotional singing that the unattended oil lamps went out and plunged the celebrants into darkness, Tukaram's body glowed with a supernatural brilliance that filled the room with light. Soon thereafter he received foreknowledge of his pending death in a vision in which he was instructed to gather his devotees together. Tukaram sang late into the night, "I have seen my own death with my own eye. It was incomparably holy!" At the peak of their ecstasy a blazing pillar of light descended on Tukaram, temporarily blinding his followers. When they opened their eyes, he was gone. He lived for 41 years and left to heavenly abode in 1650. It is historic truth that saint Tukaram was taken, with his same body, to God’s abode on Heavenly Palanquin. Saint Tukaram has indelible place in the history of Maharashtra.