The saint of Dehu
On the banks of the Indrayani river, in a village called Dehu near Pune, a grain‑trader's son spent his life turning the largest ideas in the world into the smallest, plainest Marathi anyone had ever sung.
He is Tukaram — Tukoba to those who love him — the last and most beloved poet in the great line of the Varkari saints. He wrote no philosophy. He wrote songs. Roughly four and a half thousand of them survive, and four centuries later millions still walk three hundred kilometres on foot to sing them.
Tukaram is born in Dehu to a Kunbi (Maratha cultivator) family who run a small grain business and money‑lending. He is the middle son, and the ledgers eventually fall to him.
A catastrophic famine sweeps the Deccan. His first wife, Rakhama, and a young son die of hunger. The business collapses; the debts he is owed are never repaid. The grief turns him inward — away from the ledger, toward the river and the hill.
He withdraws to Bhandara hill above Dehu and immerses himself in the name of Vitthal of Pandharpur. Out of that solitude comes a torrent of verse — not in scholar's Sanskrit but in the speech of the market and the kitchen, so anyone could sing it. The collection becomes the Tukaram Gatha.
A learned Brahmin, Rameshwar Bhat, is scandalised: a low‑caste man, composing scripture in the people's tongue? He orders the notebooks thrown into the Indrayani. The songs sink.
Tukaram does not argue. He sits at the water's edge and fasts and sings, refusing to leave — for thirteen days and nights.
On the last day the notebooks rise to the surface, the ink unspoiled. Even Rameshwar becomes a devotee. The story is the heart of why these songs are held sacred: the word that refuses to drown.
Word reaches Chhatrapati Shivaji, who sends gifts and an invitation to court. Tukaram sends the gifts back. A man who has already lost everything and found it again has nothing a king can offer him.
On a day the Varkaris still keep as Tukaram Beej, he vanishes from the riverbank at Dehu. The tradition does not say he died — it says Vitthal sent a vehicle and carried him, body and all, to Vaikuntha. What is certain is that he left, and the songs stayed.
The Varkaris are an order of ordinary householders — farmers, traders, teachers — who walk to Pandharpur twice a year, carrying the saints' sandals in palanquins, singing these abhangas the whole way, with caste set aside on the road. Tukaram's verses are their hymnbook. To read him is to overhear four centuries of people who chose to make the journey on foot.
What is an abhanga?
The word means "unbroken" — a short, rhymed devotional song meant to be sung, not silently read. A few couplets, a fixed metre, and a tune anyone can carry.
Listen for the last line. Most of his songs close with "Tuka says…" — the poet signing the verse, and usually turning it into the punchline that flips everything before it.
Below, scroll slowly. The Marathi appears first, then a close reading, while a picture of the idea draws itself beside you. End each song with: what do I do with this?
मन करा रे प्रसन्न
Here is the whole spiritual life relocated. Not to a temple, not to a mountain — to the single thing carried everywhere you go. Let's see why Tukaram calls the mind the cause of everything.
सर्व सिद्धीचें कारण ।
मोक्ष अथवा बंधन ।
सुख समाधान इच्छा ते ॥१॥
"Make the mind serene — it is the cause of every attainment." He doesn't begin with God or ritual. He begins with the one instrument behind all of it. Don't try to fix the world first; refine the mind.
And the second half is the deepest line of the verse: liberation or bondage — both grow from the same root. The criticism that ruins one person's week makes another person stronger. The event is outside; the chain, or the freedom, is made within.
मनें मना पूजा केली ।
मनें इच्छा पुरविली ।
मन माउली सकळांची ॥ध्रु.॥
The mind sets up the image of god; the mind, with the mind, performs the worship. A stone becomes Vitthal only because devotion is placed into it. The mind is the mother of all — the womb every experience is born from.
करी आपुलें चि दास्य ।
प्रसन्न आपआपणास ।
गति अथवा अधोगति ॥२॥
The same mind is both teacher and student. One half wants to react in anger; the wiser half says wait, understand first. It serves only itself — so the whole task is to train it to serve what is noble. Both ascent and downfall start here.
श्रोते वक्ते ऐका मात ।
नाहीं नाहीं आन दैवत ।
तुका म्हणे दुसरें ॥३॥
"There is no other deity," Tuka says. Not a denial of God — a relocation of the doorway. A disturbed mind cannot see the divine anywhere; a serene one sees it everywhere. So before the day's first argument, the first task is the oldest one: settle the mind. Everything else is downstream of it.
अणुरेणुया थोकडा
The most vertiginous thing Tukaram ever wrote, and the most modern. Watch a single point shrink past the atom — and, in the same breath, swell until it is larger than the sky. The ego at zero; the self at everything.
तुका आकाशाएवढा ॥१॥
"Smaller than a speck of an atom — Tuka is as vast as the sky." Both at once. As the "I" shrinks toward nothing, what's left is no longer bounded by a body — it has the size of everything.
भव भ्रमाचा आकार ॥२॥
"I swallowed and threw away the body — the very shape of this illusion of a world." The silhouette he was so sure was him comes apart into drifting light. Not death — declassification.
दीप उजळला घटीं ॥३॥
The tripuṭī — the split into knower, knowing, and known — is dropped. With the watcher and the watched no longer apart, a lamp is lit inside the clay pot of the body. The seeing turns into light.
उरलो उपकारापुरता ॥४॥
"Tuka says: now I remain only to be of use." Here is the punchline that saves the whole thing from grandiosity. The point of dissolving the ego isn't to feel cosmic — it's that what's left of a person with nothing to defend is simply useful. Shrink the "I", and you have more room to help.
जे का रंजले गांजले
Ask where God is kept and most traditions point at a shrine. Tukaram points somewhere else entirely. Watch the light leave the temple — and settle on the one person no one was looking at.
त्यासी म्हणे जो आपुले ॥१॥
"Whoever calls the afflicted and the broken his own…" Notice the test isn't ritual, or learning, or fasting. It is a single reflex: who do you count as kin?
देव तेथेंचि जाणावा ॥२॥
"Know him as the true saint — and know that God is right there." The divine light doesn't stay locked in the sanctum. It crosses the floor and comes to rest on the person the world walked past.
तैसें सज्जनाचें चित्त ॥३॥
"Soft within and without, like fresh butter — such is the heart of a good person." Not soft as in weak. Soft as in unhardened: still able to be moved by someone else's pain.
तोचि भगवंताची मूर्ति ॥
"How much can I say," Tuka ends — "that person is the very idol of God." The radical move: the human who tends the suffering isn't near the sacred, they are the sacred image. So the application is uncomfortably plain: the next worn‑down person you meet is the shrine.
वृक्षवल्ली आम्हां सोयरी
Asked who his people are, Tukaram doesn't name a village or a caste or a court. He names the forest. And by the last line he arrives, again, at the one companion he never leaves — his own mind.
पक्षीही सुस्वरें आळविती ॥१॥
"Trees, vines and forest creatures are my kin — and the birds call to me in their sweet voices." A whole web of belonging, drawn to a man sitting alone. Solitude, it turns out, is crowded.
नाहीं गुणदोष अंगा येत ॥२॥
"In this happiness, living alone is sweet — no praise and no blame cling to the body." Away from the marketplace of reputations, there is no one to perform for, and so nothing to defend.
रमे तेथें मन क्रीडा करी ॥३॥
"The sky is my canopy, the earth my seat — there the mind delights and plays." The grandest mandap ever built, and it has no walls. The whole world is the prayer hall.
आपुलाचि वाद आपणासी ॥
"Tuka says: there is a conversation with the mind — one's own argument, with oneself." We end where the very first song began. The forest, the kinship, the open sky — all of it is the setting for the only dialogue that was ever really happening: the mind, talking itself toward serenity.
The 50 top abhangas
Four are fully illuminated below with animation — tap to revisit. The other forty‑six follow, each with its opening verse, a plain reading, and how it lands in an ordinary life. The most‑loved songs of the Tukaram Gatha, gathered in one place.
"There is no other deity," he said — and then walked three hundred kilometres anyway, singing, because the point was never to be right. The point was to keep the mind serene enough to see.
Marathi text and readings drawn from the Tukaram Gatha. Translations and interpretations here are plain‑English paraphrase, not literal scripture. Sung recordings can be added to each song, and any of the fifty can be promoted to a full animated chapter like the first four.