Pilgrim's India

by ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM

  Few people recollect what Tukaram looked like before 1936. In popular representations, he is always modelled after Vishnupant Pagnis, the actor who played the title role in the Prabhat Film Company’s black-and-white classic Sant Tukaram, which was released that year. But truly, Tukaram is more than a saint-poet in Dehu: he is a climatic condition; his signature endorses the locale. Or else the turmeric-yellow pagoda would be a mere steeple, not the commandment that it is. Remember, it says, this is where Vishnu’s solar eagle swooped down on the snaking Indrayani River to spirit Tukaram away.

  Then the last zinc-roofed sheds are behind us and the scrubland opens out, offering no relief until the Bhandara Hill rears up to fill the windscreen. Tukaram’s cave, known locally as the kapaat, or cupboard, is halfway up its steep slope: this is where he would retreat to meditate and compose his poems. The best, if riskiest, way to reach it is by driving to the top of the Bhandara Hill and clambering down. Arriving at the summit, we pay our respects at the more conventional temple situated there, the solitary icons praised in song and gesture by a solitary varkari, and then negotiate the jagged slope, seeking purchase from leap to leap.

  Great shadows of clouds swim across the acid plain below; we feel them as periodic cool wetnesses creeping across our skins, weightless shields against the sun. There is no way back to the hilltop and the plain is a long fall away. The way back is barred by a fusillade of wild grasses, and looking ahead, we are signalled towards our destination by a chameleon that streaks across the rocks to the scrawny shade of the oleanders. A dog that has been sleeping at the entrance to the cave wakes up; a prickle along the spine tells us we are about to step into a sanctuary.

  When Tukaram came here—dunned by creditors, his land sequestered, his children hungry—he had given himself over to an absorption in Vithoba. ‘Vruksha-vali amha soyari vanachare,’ he sings in one of his abhangas: trees, creepers and the animals of the forest kept him company, as he ignored the rain’s blitzkrieg and the scorn of neighbours to bear witness to the healing presence of the blue god.

  Like Tukaram, we are cocooned beyond radar range of communal pieties and sectarian hostilities here, and Chitre begins to recite an abhanga in honour of the moment. The cadence is picked up immediately, and the verse completed, by a voice from inside the cave. He lives!

  It is a villager who works in the Cadbury chocolate factory on the plain below, and comes up to the cave to spend his lunch hour in contemplation. An archive in human form, this varkari needs only the opening line to zero in effortlessly on one poem from the more than 4,000 Tukaram compositions preserved in the oral tradition: most of them from the master’s quill, others later interpolations in the canon, all revered by the bhagvat sampradaya. No search engine could have performed better or faster, no iPod could possibly match his pithy wisdom. We hear Tukaram again:

  The sky is my canopy, the earth my throne.

  My mind is free to dwell wherever it will.

  A piece of cloth, one all-purpose bowl

  Take care of all my bodily needs.

  The wind tells me the time.

  III.

  We spend half an hour with the varkari. He shows us around the interior of the cave, which has suffered the unfortunate visitation of the blue-and-white bathroom-tile modernity favoured by contemporary popular Hinduism. This cave has come a long way down the slope of aesthetic refinement since it served Buddhist monks, centuries before Tukaram, as an austere retreat during the four monsoon months when bhikshus were forbidden to travel, for fear that they might trample the signs of renewed life underfoot or hurt themselves in difficult weather.

  The Western Ghats are rich in such caves, or ‘leni’ as they are called locally. Many of these have served generations of seekers professing diverse beliefs: the gentle expositors of the Buddha’s dhamma, often supported by Greek merchants settled in this region; the grimmer Lakulisha and Natha Panthi ascetics from Kashmir, Gandhara and the Baluch country; and the Yogins, Aghoris, Nagas and Siddhas who have wandered the subcontinent through the centuries.

  We take the long view out of the cave: across the acetylene blue of the sky and across the plain, to where the cleft peak of the Bhamchandra Hill stands. It was in a cave on the slopes of this other peak that Tukaram achieved his definitive vision of the Divine, after praying and meditating for fifteen days in complete isolation from the world of social relationships and material obligations below, far from the priesthood’s anger and the scolding of a wife who had to bring up her children, suffer the taunts of the community and keep house for a holy fool. Unlike the ascetics who gave up their connections with the world of householders to retreat into the forest, Tukaram did not forsake the domain of family, clan, bazaar and shrine: he returned to it, a transfigured man.

  In his own words, he had become a ‘pilgrim of eternity’. His abhangas are charged with the passion and delirium of such a figure. While his overvaulting love of God and his disdain for cant are grounded in an earthy peasant tradition of utterance, he lifts himself bodily from the fields, hills and valleys of his native landscape to celebrate a condition of being coloured by the burnished tones of Heaven. In one of his abhangas, he sings:

  Those compelled to wander

  Are spent by their walk;

  There is only one door

  That allows one to enter:

  Vithoba’s feet

  Are the quintessence of life:

  Do not ever

  Leave them.

  He has made life

  Accessible to all:

  It needs no secret

  Teaching to grasp.

  Says Tuka, it fulfils

  All that you desire:

  It has a root and a trunk

  And its branches spread vast.

  On our own far more subdued return to Dehu, we drive across an indecisive strand that lies between the slurry of building activity and the flow of the river. Disembarking into the heat of the afternoon, we walk through the cool relief of tree shade to the Ananda Dohi, the ‘pool of bliss’. A small haven scooped from the soil at the margin of the Indrayani: chipped viragalas and broken Khandobas lie in its shallows, grey hero stones and buff equestrian gods that have fallen to the unforgiving music of decay, been superseded and ceremonially abandoned to the elements, no longer presences but bodies from which the Presence has passed to other bodies. This is also the spot where Tukaram sank his poems at the instruction of a vengeful council of the orthodox; and where he sat, rooted to the ground, until the river goddess dredged his manuscript up, vindicating his love of God and his right to express it.

  Standing on ground once marked by Tukaram’s footsteps, I ask myself what we had hoped to find here. Had this been a field trip, or an attempt to reopen lines of transmission that have been jammed over the years? What the pilgrimage does, perhaps, is to slip into your bloodstream an awareness of possibilities that you would never find in the crusted beehive of words. On the pilgrimage, you test yourself against outer conditions and your own preconceptions, setting the mind’s promptings against the energy of the sites you enter; and you are subtly transformed in the testing. You risk the self you were before you started, move closer to a light that destroys even as it promises regeneration. The pilgrimage is a tirtha, a crossing, and the bridge that it asks you to walk can be as sharp as a razor’s edge.

  IV.

  Parchment was an expensive commodity in the seventeenth century, and the lines of careful black and red script are packed tightly together on the age-browned manuscript. But the text has been stained by more than age. The visible evidence suggests that it has spent a stretch of time under water at some point in its history. We shade our eyes against the afternoon glare and look at the manuscript, with renewed excitement, through the glass in which it is now encased. The scene is not a hushed, white-walled, centrally air-conditioned museum in Washington, DC, Paris or Berlin, but the temple of Vithoba in Dehu; on this early summer day, we are surrounded, not by suave curators and gawking tourists, but by turbann
ed varkaris who pursue their traditional pilgrimage routes in a spirit of serene devotion, humming abhangas to themselves.

  Unlike the icon or folio that has been transplanted into the antiseptic environment of a museum—cut away from its natural and cultural ethos, the round of seasons and festivities—this manuscript carries a specific gravity, a deep resonance. By virtue of having remained in the physical context of its origin, a compellingly and visibly symptomatic presence, it prompts the visitor into a vivid awareness of events incised into the terrain around the temple: events that have never really been allowed to become the past, because they are retold and re-enacted in proverb and fable. If the 350-year-old pages of this manuscript record the beatitudes and revelations their writer experienced, they also tell a sordid tale of the jealousy and fear he aroused among those who held power in his society.

  For this is the bhijki vahi, the legendary ‘immersed book’ of Tukaram: the transcript of his abhangas, which he was forced to sink in the Indrayani at the behest of the regional Brahmin orthodoxy. These insecure guardians of the faith were shaken by his undeniable gift for hymnal composition despite the damning circumstance of his low birth, as judged on the scale of caste. They were aghast, also, at his insistence on using the demotic Marathi, the coarse tongue of the peasants and artisans, to invoke the Divine: to make matters worse, this strategy seemed to yield considerably finer results than their own epigonic classicism, their efforts in a Sanskrit that had already become fossilized. Above all, the priestly autocrats were terrified by Tukaram’s direct approach to the Divine; they could not tolerate Tukaram’s defiance of the ritual-maker’s monopoly on mediating between the gods and their human supplicants.

  As the chronicler Mahipati tells the story in his Bhakti-lilamrita, Tukaram sat by the banks of the Indrayani, fasting and praying for thirteen days until the manuscript was miraculously restored to him from the depths, intact. The word abhanga translates literally as ‘indestructible’; and so, indeed, Tukaram’s poems of praise and indignation, complaint and joyousness, self-inquiry and God-intoxication, have proved to be.

  The bhijki vahi, as it is displayed at the Vithoba temple in Dehu, represents only a portion of the original manuscript. It contains only 250 poems; at the beginning of the twentieth century, it was recorded as having contained 700. Chitre surmises that the original manuscript may have suffered the depredations of scholars who borrowed it from the trustees of the temple. Serious as this loss of primary material is, it does not dent the faith of the varkaris, who accord the manuscript the veneration that is due to the visible manifestation of shabda, the Word as enunciated by the master.

  The paths of the varkaris converge at Vithoba–Pandurang’s shrine in the holy city of Pandharpur twice a year, on the occasions of the Ashadh and the Kartik Ekadashi; the varkaris are the custodians of a sacred geography that connects Pandharpur with Dehu and with the beloved thirteenth-century philosopher and saint-poet Jnanesvara’s samadhi, or final resting place, in Alandi. This geography also graphs a lineage: Vithoba is the fountainhead of varkari belief; Jnanesvara was one of the founders of the bhagvat sampradaya; Tukaram was his direct spiritual descendant.

  Varkari tradition has passed down the story that a circle of fourteen disciples accompanied Tukaram whenever he sang his hymns in public; several of the extant compilations of the Tukaram Maharajanchi Gatha, the ‘collected works of Tukaram Maharaj’, can be traced to notations said to have been made from memory, or for performance, by these fourteen accompanists. These notations thus form the source material for all present-day print editions of Tukaram’s works, although the ‘immersed book’ remains, symbolically, their ultimate source.

  Tukaram’s abhangas replace the ceremonial approaches of Brahminical ritual with wit, play, love and irreverence: God is Friend, God is Body to Tuka. And if Vithoba is the sublime Thug who garrottes his lovers with the slip-cord of love, he is also the Great Ghost of Pandharpur, who possesses his devotees and refuses to be exorcised. He is the abyss of unknowing into which the devotee dives without pause or question. Tukaram’s poems can be conversational or contemplative, fruits grown in solitude or instruments welded for assemblies; his voice is a barometer of pain, wandering, exile, yearning and gratification. Tuka bears sensuous, intelligent, wry testimony to the world and its delusions; but ironic as he can be, he is also always possessed by an awareness of the world’s marvellous inexplicability. He attends on the sacramental dimension of life, which waits to spring at us from beneath the stratagems of language, the facile comforts of convention:

  I made you bear the entire burden of my being.

  I made you suffer my thirsting and my starving.

  I made you sustain my life itself.

  You kept my manuscripts safe under water.

  You saved me from being damned by the public.

  Says Tuka, truly, you lived up to your name.

  … You were with me and deep inside the river, too.

  In neither place did you allow

  The tiniest trace of damage to be done.

  V.

  The restoration of the ‘immersed book’ was not the only marvellous event to have taken place in Tukaram’s life. Standing at the river’s edge as Tukaram must have done several centuries ago, looking out across the tarnished silver surface of the water, we are reminded of various other miracles associated with this extraordinary figure.

  The chroniclers tell of how Tukaram once lost the crop in a field that he was supposed to have been minding for a well-meaning benefactor; the birds had made away with the ripening corn, while the saint had remained absorbed in a trance. But Vithoba came to his devotee’s rescue, multiplying the yield at harvest time. As we have seen, the faithful also believe that a celestial craft descended to earth to conduct Tukaram to heaven at the end of his life. They also tell us that, every year, at a certain moment on the day commemorated as Tukaram-bij, the anniversary of the saint-poet’s departure, the imposing tree that marks the site of this event shakes as though it had been seized by a great wind.

  Moving from one focus of spiritual energy to another in a topography that has been consecrated into one expansive shrine by the presence of Tukaram, renewed in our awareness of him through the act of tracing his footsteps, we try to reconcile two streams of images in our minds: the thread of impressions left by this day of marvels and surprises, and the sequence of events in the saint-poet’s life as imagined and memorably staged by Prabhat. The mind supplies Pagnis at every instant, playing his role so effectively that he is Tukaram to millions of people, in the same way as Raja Ravi Varma’s Saraswati, with her veena and swan and picturesque Himalayan backdrop, is the goddess Saraswati to millions of people. Real life followed the course charted by the script: the actor’s already apparent inclination towards retreat and prayer became emphasized by the larger-than-life role he played, so that he himself became a renunciate, although he never wholly abandoned the householder’s life.

  And so we find ourselves wondering about the place of the miracle in our lives, shaped as they are by speed and reason, but also shadowed by the spectre of an irrationality that is bodied forth in avatars generated by the technologist’s sorcery. The restoration of a lost book by a river goddess, the descent of a heavenly eagle, the unseen stocking-up of a ravaged granary: such things simply do not happen, we say to ourselves; they must have been invented by wandering fabulists who came on the scene years after the event, or supposed event. They must have taken rumour and fashioned it into song, happened upon whispers and crafted them into legends. Or perhaps it was the saint-poet’s followers who set these tales into circulation, to add a further degree of lustre to the nimbus around his memory. But is the miracle to be dismissed as a collective hallucination? Or can we find reasons to explain the miracle as a tear in the fabric of space, time and logic?

  Whatever the answers to these questions, and whatever the renewal of nuance through which these questions can be asked in every epoch, the real miracle to which a symbol such as
the bhijki vahi bears testimony is the endurance of a questor’s faith, even in the face of the most contrary and unpropitious circumstances. While the bhijki vahi speaks, conceptually, of a faith that has survived social sanction and doctrinal proscription, its material form dramatizes the dialogue between the transient, that which is subject to decay, and the eternal, that which is beyond the defilement of time. Visionaries like Tukaram see the world is a maze of forms that arises from the contest between kshara and akshara, the perishable and the imperishable. And the way out of the maze is the way of personal piety and the opening-up of the self to grace, along which the questor is guided by the akshara made manifest in such a luminous image as that of Vithoba.

  The saint-poet bore witness to that which endures even as he negotiated with the ephemera of materiality and life. Not for nothing is akshara the Sanskrit word for ‘letter’ or ‘syllable’: for language is the continuing echo of the first sound, the sound of the primal explosion with which the universe came into being. A-bhanga, a-kshara. As we join the unending procession of varkaris marking the stations of their journey through the sacred landscape, we pay homage to the real miracle—which, on the evidence of Tukaram’s bhijki vahi, is that the word, carrying the charge of its distant origin, survives its oppressors.

  (July 2010)

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  *All translations from Tukaram quoted in this essay are taken from Dilip Chitre, trans. and with an introduction, Says Tuka: Selected Poetry of Tukaram.