In Tukaram’s earthly paradise

By offering two iterations of Tukaram’s 51 abhangas, Shanta Gokhale and Jerry Pinto invite readers to form their own interpretations of bhakti poetry.

Carnatic vocalist Musiri Subramanya Iyer played the bhakti poet in the film Tukaram (1938). | Photo Credit: THE HINDU ARCHIVES

“I’ll create such confusion”, the poet Arun Kolatkar wrote in a poem addressed to Tukaram, “that nobody can be sure about what you wrote and what I did”. While the translators of this wonderful new selection of Tukaram’s Marathi abhangas claim no such ambition, they offer a glimpse of the 16th century saint-poet as a bracingly contemporary and continually relevant voice. In Behold! The Word is God, Shanta Gokhale and Jerry Pinto have managed to invoke two traditions at once, the centuries-old Bhakti movement and the more contemporary lineage of modernist English language translations of its songs. The first includes an array of saint-poets such as Dnyaneshwar, Janabai, Kabir, Tukaram, and Nammalvar, while to the second we can add the likes of Arun Kolatkar, Robert Bly, Arundhati Subramaniam, A.K. Ramanujan, and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, among others.

Behold! The Word is God: Hymns of Tukaram

Shanta Gokhale and Jerry Pinto (translators) 

Speaking Tiger 

Pages: 128

Price: Rs.350

What is unique about this particular edition is that it lays bare the act of translation itself, as both translators produce their own version of each of the 51 poems included in the text. While Gokhale’s translations are meant to hew closer to the original verse, Pinto aims to recreate each composition in the light of his own personal, idiosyncratic style of expression. This format can also help the average Marathi-speaking reader to unravel some of the difficulties of Tukaram’s language. One reads the transliterated original, then Gokhale’s translation, then returns to a fuller understanding of the original, before admiring Pinto’s recasting of the same text. Yet, it is not entirely true that the two represent entirely distinct approaches to translation, for both take risks, and remake the poems in their own image.

This remaking is helped by the Bhakti poets’ view of themselves, as subversives, outcasts, or simply eccentrics. It shares a natural affinity to the contemporary view of the artist, and especially the poet, as someone who swims against the tide of worldliness. Indeed, Kolatkar saw this affinity, and embraced it, to make his Tukaram sound like a mid-century American beatnik, as an “enduring bum”, who will tell you to “Get lost, brother, if you don’t/Fancy our kind of living.” Similarly, Pinto’s Tukaram warns his listeners that the task of bhakti is not for the faint-hearted: “This is hard work/Poseurs please excuse”. We also find a hint of Ted Hughes’ reformulation of the artist as a kind of tramp, engaged in the creation of mere ephemera, not lasting or monumental works, “As my hands adore or abandon/Embody a now, erect a here”. Bhakti too can be a celebration of the fragile and the ephemeral, where the devotee does not seek “ultimate salvation”, but revels in the fact of existence itself: “They pour out their love./This is here. This is now./Mukti will take care of itself.”

Cover of Behold! The Word is God: Hymns of Tukaram | Photo Credit: By Special Arrangement

No monopoly on the sacred

The book is divided across three loosely thematic sections, about Tukaram’s relationship to poetry, life, and the object of his devotion, Vitthala, the avatar of Vishnu whose seat is the town of Pandharpur in Maharashtra. While it is sometimes helpful to interpret the poems according to these categories, they inevitably spill over into each other. God, as Tukaram concedes, is the source of much of his poetry, which is itself fully grounded in life and concrete experiences. His poems are full of simple yet forceful injunctions—to be good, to worship god, to inhabit the present moment. They are also full of cautions about the mind in particular, and its capacity to obfuscate reality rather than reveal it: “The unstill mind confounds/Objects with fleeting shadow” (SG, p. 63).

Salvation, then, takes the form of devotion to Vitthala. Yet, what is remarkable is the deep sense of kinship and intimacy that the poet espouses towards the deity (“You lead me on. I lean on you”; “Fill me up, Lord. Fill my skin”). The songs of the Bhakti saints restate, over and over again, this sense of profound, personal identification with the divine. It is what made them appear so threatening to the Brahmin orthodoxy that claimed a monopoly on the sacred. Tukaram, a shudra by birth, had to suffer incessant harassment by members of the Brahmin community in his village, Dehu. He was eventually forced to sink the manuscript containing his life’s work in the Indrayani river to avoid being ostracised for good. Legend has it that 13 days after the event, his book of poems reappeared on the waters, miraculously intact.

Whether through a miracle, or otherwise, there’s no disputing the fact that Tukaram’s songs have survived and continue to be sung daily across Maharashtra, centuries after his disappearance. The writer Irawati Karve, after a visit to Pandharpur in the 1940s, famously remarked that she had happened upon a new definition of Maharashtra, as “the land whose people go to Pandharpur for pilgrimage”. The egalitarian ethos of the pastoralists settled across the hinterland of this State undoubtedly shaped the character of the cult of Vitthala, and of the saints who composed songs to venerate him. It could also explain why from the 19th century onwards, the region produced some of the most vehement and successful challenges to caste, led by people like Jyotiba and Savitri Phule, and Dr Ambedkar.

Highlights

• Translators Shanta Gokhale and Jerry Pinto offer a glimpse of Tukaram, a 16th-century saint-poet, as a bracingly contemporary and continually relevant voice.
• The book is divided across three loosely thematic sections, about Tukaram’s relationship with poetry, life, and the object of his devotion, Vitthala, an avatar of Vishnu.
• Tukaram, a shudra by birth, had to suffer incessant harassment by members of the Brahmin community in his village, Dehu. He was eventually forced to sink the manuscript containing his life’s work in the Indrayani River. 

Indigenous tradition of rationality

Reading Tukaram in this new series of cleareyed and playful translations, one is struck by the egalitarianism, compassion, and courage of his verse. It also embodies, as Amit Chaudhuri argues in a recently published essay, an indigenous tradition of rationality, that finds its most powerful expression in the religious utterances of poets like Kabir and Tukaram.

By providing more than one iteration of each abhanga, this edition invites us to produce our own interpretations and translations; to “take possession” of these poems, as it were. Unlike what the votaries of a singular, monological idea of Indian civilisation would have us believe, these multiple readings are mutually enriching, and prove, if anything, that plural iterations of even the most sacred texts can only serve to deepen our appreciation of them.

Nachiket Joshi is a research author at Monk Prayogshala, a not-for-profit academic research institution in Mumbai.