I have been influenced a lot, recently, by the teachings of Sant Tukaram Maharaj.
He was not a monk or a scholar. He was a householder and a small merchant in Dehu — a man who lost his first wife and a child to the famine of 1629, who had no one to lean on, who was mocked by the society around him. And from that life, with nothing to protect him, he rose to become one of the most beloved voices in Maharashtra: answering the ordinary problems of ordinary people in plain language, and pushing back against a religion that had hardened into ritual with no heart left in it. Even Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, the great king of his time, revered him.
He left behind more than four thousand abhangs — short devotional poems. Over the centuries many people have tried to translate them, but no one has ever translated them all. Only the most famous few have been carried into other languages, by one author or another. The rest have stayed where they were.
That gap is what made me curious. What is hidden in the other four thousand? What would we learn if every one of them were finally readable? What is the whole theme across all of them, not just the handful everyone quotes? And could his teaching be cross-checked against the other works that have shaped me too — the Guru Charitra, the Ashtavakra Gita, the Dnyaneshwari, the Dasbodh — to see where the saints agree, and where each says something only he could say?
I don't have the years it would take to translate four thousand abhangs by hand. So I did what I could: I used AI to do the heavy lifting, and put the result through two passes of verification. That first phase is now done. All 4,500-plus abhangs are translated, and there is a summary page that maps the themes — the real, everyday problems his words can speak to. Anger and grief, fear and loneliness, burnout and money worry, ego and envy and the feeling of unworthiness, the simple question of where to even begin. And underneath them all runs a single current: surrender, and the practice of carrying the divine into an ordinary householder's life — the same life he himself lived.
It took about three months, built in stolen hours over weekends. To fully verify it, polish the translations, and draw the threads across to the other saints' literature will take another year or two. I know that. This is a first pass, not a finished thing, and it carries all the caution that an AI-assisted reading should.
But there are millions of people who love Sant Tukaram. If even a summary of what he taught — finally drawn from all of it, and not just the famous fragments — can help some of them meet a problem in their own life with his words, then the weekends were worth it.
The first phase is live at sant.ajinkya.ai/tukaram.