6 - Tukaram (1608–1649): non-brahmin religious movements

Summary

The brahmin who flies into a rage

at the touch of a mahar [a low caste]

– That’s no brahmin.

The only absolution for such a brahmin

Is to die for his own sin.

He who refuses to touch a chandal [a low caste]

Has a polluted mind.

Says Tuka, a man is only as chaste

As his own belief.

Tukaram

TO THE BANKS OF THE INDRAYANI RIVER

The year 1608 saw Malik Ambar confidently moving about the western Deccan, his armies building on success after success. Just two years earlier, he had defeated his rival for leadership of the anti-Mughal resistance movement, Raju Dakhni, who now languished in a prison in the fort of Junnar, the temporary capital of the revived Nizam Shahi state. In 1608 Malik Ambar also negotiated an alliance with his neighbor to the south, Sultan Ibrahim II of Bijapur, so that he could concentrate all his forces on thwarting the gathering Mughal threat from the north. His efforts paid off, for just two years later, the Mughal garrison in Ahmadnagar would fall and the Habshi peshwa would be emboldened to move the Nizam Shahi court from Junnar further north, to Daulatabad.

While these events were taking place at the level of high politics, one of India's most revered poets was born in the village of Dehu, on the banks of the Indrayani River some forty miles south of Malik Ambar's capital at Junnar. This was Tukaram, whose life spanned the period 1608 to 1649 (see Plate 10). Familiar to millions of ordinary Marathi-speakers, Tukaram's verses, or abhangs, would enter the collective consciousness of a substantial portion of the Deccan's population. While historians have approached his career from many perspectives, we are most interested in the impact his life and work had on the social history of the seventeenth-century Deccan.