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Tukārām

Tukārām

1600 CE · Dehu

birth disputed (variously 1568, 1577, 1598, or 1608); died 1650 CE

Tukārām was a Marathi bhakti poet of the Varkari tradition, born at Dehu near Pune to a family of small traders. After early hardships — famine, the loss of family members — he turned wholly to devotion to Viṭṭhala (Viṭhobā) of Pandharpur, and poured out his religious experience in thousands of abhaṅgas, vernacular devotional songs of extraordinary directness, doubt, and longing that became, with Jñāneśvar's Jñāneśvarī, the heart of the Varkari movement. His birth date is genuinely uncertain (scholars propose 1568, 1577, 1598, or 1608), though his death is generally placed in 1650; tradition holds he disappeared bodily at the end of his life. His abhaṅgas are securely his and survive in large numbers.

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Dehu

What they did here

Birthplace and lifelong home, on the Indrāyaṇī river near Pune; where he composed his abhaṅgas and where his life ended (c. 1650).

About Dehu

Dehu is a town on the Indrāyaṇī River in the Pune district of Maharashtra, western India. It is the birthplace and home of the Vārkarī sant-poet Tukārām (17th c.), composer of Marathi abhaṅgas.

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The world in their lifetime

Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Tukārām’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.

Works

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