Taking God By Storm

Taking God by Storm: Tukaram versus Vithoba Dilip Chitre ___________________ 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 poetmessenger. 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)________________________________________________________________