Varkari saint whose abhangas scolded caste power
Tukaram, seventeenth-century Marathi Varkari saint also called Tuka or Tukoba, devoted himself to Vithoba and wrote abhanga lyrics still sung across Maharashtra. Born Tukaram Bolhoba Ambile, he spent later years in worship, communal kirtan, and poems that attacked social injustice and corrupt religious authority.
Opposition from figures such as Mambaji blamed him for losing “traditional” abhangas while his reformist verses challenged Brahmanical orthodoxy—views then unpopular, though irony later folded critics into his orbit in some tellings.
Legend says he met Shivaji, founder of the Maratha Empire, and Eleanor Zelliot argues that Bhakti poets such as Tukaram helped shape Shivaji's rise. Historians broadly agree that Tukaram died in 1650. He named four saints as his chief influences: Namdev, Dnyaneshwar, Kabir and Eknath.
His theology resists tidy labels. The early scholar J. F. Edwards found him swinging between dualist and non-dualist views of God without reconciling them, while later translators, among them R. D. Ranade, stress a pantheistic Vedanta in which God fills the universe. Marathi readers still argue whether he followed Adi Shankara's monism: R. G. Bhandarkar noted some abhangas in Shankara's style, yet others attack monism and lean toward the dualist schools of Madhvacharya and Ramanuja. What is clear is that he rejected mechanical rituals, sacrifices and vows in favour of direct devotion, and treated kirtan, communal singing and dancing, not as a route to bhakti but as bhakti itself.
He took disciples regardless of gender; his celebrated follower Bahinabai, a Brahmin woman, endured her husband's anger for choosing him as guru. In Ranade's rendering he taught that caste pride never made anyone holy and that an outcast who loves God's name is a true Brahmin. His abhangas use the traditional ovi metre and blend folk tales with spiritual themes in rough vernacular, unlike the polished style of Dnyaneshwar or Namdev. The Tukaram Gatha, probably composed between 1632 and 1650, is traditionally said to hold about 4,500 poems; the first modern edition appeared in 1869, subsidised by the Bombay Presidency, and noted that some manuscripts had been corrected and rearranged.
Source: Tukaram
