Tukārām

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.