Sant Tukaram: Poet-Saint of the Varkari Tradition

A 17th-century poet-saint wrote thousands of devotional verses, not in Sanskrit, but in the language ordinary people actually spoke.

That choice shaped Maharashtra’s culture for centuries. Before any of that, a famine took his wife, his son, and his family’s entire livelihood.

1. A Poet-Saint of Dehu

1.1 Who was Sant Tukaram?

Sant Tukaram was a 17th-century Bhakti poet-saint from Maharashtra, who died around the year 1650. He was born in Dehu, a small village near Pune. Sources give varying birth years, commonly cited as around 1608. His family is generally described as Kunbi, a cultivator caste, though some sources call it a trading, or Vani, family. The family ran a grocery and moneylending business alongside some farming. He belonged to the Varkari sect, part of the wider Bhakti tradition, and was a contemporary of Chhatrapati Shivaji, active in the same 17th-century Maharashtra.

2. The Famine That Broke a Mahajan

2.1 What did the 1629 famine actually cost him?

Tukaram’s family had inherited the office of mahajan, a village-level post combining revenue collection and moneylending, alongside their own grocery trade. A severe famine struck in 1629. His first wife, Rakhumabai, and his elder son starved to death in it. He borrowed and tried other trades, but the family business collapsed anyway. Tukaram later remarried, to a woman named Avali, also called Jijai. Tradition remembers her as sharp-tongued and frustrated by his growing devotion, a recurring, humanising figure in stories about his own later life.

2.2 How did the village respond, and what did he do about it?

Debtors could not repay him during the famine, while his own creditors kept relentlessly pressing him for payment. The village council publicly humiliated him and stripped him of the mahajan title entirely. Rather than chase the debts still owed to him, Tukaram destroyed the loan records of the poor and waived what they owed. Devotion to Vitthala of Pandharpur soon became his one remaining source of strength.

3. The Varkari Tradition and the Gatha

3.1 Did Tukaram found the Varkari tradition himself?

The Varkari sect centres on devotion to Lord Vitthala, also called Panduranga or Vithoba, at the town of Pandharpur. Here’s a common mix-up worth clearing up: Tukaram did not found the Varkari tradition himself. It traces back to Dnyaneshwar in the 13th century, roughly three full centuries before Tukaram. Tukaram became the tradition’s most celebrated later poet, not its originator.

3.2 What did he actually write, and why did it matter?

He composed thousands of devotional poems, called Abhangs, commonly put at around 4,500, though the exact count varies by source. He wrote these in Marathi, the language people actually spoke, not Sanskrit. He helped popularise community singing, known as kirtans, as a form of worship. His Abhangs criticised the caste system and opposed blind ritualism. His own ambiguous caste background, debated between Kunbi and Vani identities, has itself become a subject of ongoing social and political discussion in modern Maharashtra.

4. Legends and Legacy

4.1 What legends grew up around him?

• Tradition holds that orthodox opponents forced Tukaram to throw his manuscripts into the Indrayani river, and that they resurfaced undamaged after 13 days. This is a devotional legend, not documented history, though the Indrayani riverbank at Dehu is still venerated today because of this very story.
• Popular stories describe Shivaji as Tukaram’s own devoted follower, even offering to give up his throne entirely. Historians treat this relationship as legendary, not a firmly documented connection.
• Tradition holds that Tukaram was bodily taken up to heaven at the end of his life, witnessed by villagers gathered at Dehu. This, too, is legend rather than historical record.

4.2 What is his actual lasting legacy?

Writing in Marathi, not Sanskrit, made Tukaram’s own teachings genuinely accessible to ordinary people. This reflects a wider Bhakti-movement pattern across India: vernacular language over Sanskrit. His Abhangs, collected as the Tukaram Gatha, remained central to Maharashtrian devotional and cultural life long after his death. His own paduka, or sandals, are still carried each year in the Palkhi, or Wari, pilgrimage from Dehu to Pandharpur, a tradition that continues to this day.