Voices from India notes

Tukaram is a seventeenth-century Varkari poet of Maharashtra. The god is Vitthala, also called Panduranga, whose house is Pandharpur; Tukaram’s own town is Dehu. The verse-form is the abhang, sung in Marathi, a personal cry that still belongs to a pilgrimage people. Section 1 of Marathe’s book is labelled Autobiography; the first subsection is “Thoughts about the World,” numbered 1–12. That is the whole Tukaram on this paper. Later headings in the same book — humility, prayers, how he awoke — are not set.

Surdas is sagun Krishna-bhakti in Braj. The child, the mother Yashoda (Jasumati), the cowherds, the gopi who speaks to a black bee: God has a name, a body, a household. Nilsson’s three pads are that household. The Gita chapter is a third voice: not a pad and not an abhang, but a teaching on two minds, daivi and asuri, in Radhakrishnan’s pages 334–335. Keep the three distinct. Tukaram’s world is a snare and Panduranga is the protector. Surdas’s world is lila in Braj. The Gita’s world is a moral sorting of qualities. Write enough place to seat the set lines.

Marathe’s English is the named text; the sense below follows that section without reprinting the translation. 1. Tuka asks God not to let go of his hand. He has come in faith; sitting among the saints he has learned Vitthala, Lakshmi’s lord. The world raises hindrances and calls the base sweet. Men die without number; he will not answer censure; Narayana’s feet are the solid gain. To depend on his own merit would make him a sinner the saints would laugh at. 2. Country people cover the dead and go back to sowing. A body of flesh is given for that haste toward one’s true gain. Grain taken out by the hand sprouts sooner than grain left in the bag. We have no authority over time; the wise take counsel with themselves in this mortal world. 3. The old sages knew this and kept the world at a distance: mystic powers, roots and leaves, forest, silence. Tuka asks the Infinite to do that with his spirit — keep the crowd far.

4. God’s darling is the one who knows the affection of a devout heart. Tuka does not want the merely wise or learned; he is the servant of whoever fixes thought on God’s name and form, and who knows the nine forms of worship in their purity. 5. He is consumed by the fever of the world in household service, has forgotten the feet, and calls Mother Panduranga to come quickly. Thieves beset him; no one hears; he is weary of many lives. The Lord’s name in the world is Lord of the helpless — so Tuka bids him run. 6. This is not his country or his garb; he has wandered here by chance. Hands and feet he calls his own, yet he is bereft, a stranger, blind and lame. No brother, no child; he sits at the crossroads holding God in thought, hungry, restless through countless villages. He has cast off wealth, family, mother, desire. Panduranga is now the protector. The six together are the unit’s first room: the world as fever and snare, the saints as school, the Name as the only property.

7. The world is full of parts. An actor plays a role; a heron stands as if in meditation to catch fish; a hypocrite wears garland and brow-mark and hides guile; an angler offers a morsel; a butcher is kind to beasts with a knife behind the kindness. Tuka says he is a simple man in that world, and Panduranga is merciful. The pictures are not a play-scene to retell; they are how the world looks to a devotee who will not trust appearances. 8. He has renounced the world, sprinkling his head against it. Why pollute the hands only to wash them again? God has assigned each thing its place. When we forget to think of ourselves, we cease to say “ours” and “another’s.” 9. He cannot bear restraint or company; he would sit alone. Sensuous desire wearies him. The snares of desire and illusion that keep us from God increase pain.

10. It is vain to tell the secret to the world. Men wander; they pretend to run after the saint and return empty. Teaching will not make them lay the matter to heart. Without true experience they stay wretched. 11. Saints must not praise him. Praise will make him proud; pride will keep him from their feet and from crossing the world’s sea; a high spirit will sever him from Vitthoba’s feet. 12. Listen to nothing that brings sorrow and separation from those feet. He trembles to see destruction so near other men; he shames them, they will not hear. He has no strength to beat them onto the path. Panduranga should not set such mad men in his sight. The twelve stop there. In an answer, name Marathe, “Thoughts about the World,” 1–12, Vitthala / Panduranga, and the world as temptation, hypocrisy, and crowd. Do not turn Tuka into Surdas’s butter-thief child.

Nilsson’s poem 1, page 41, is the pad the syllabus cues as “Maiya mori.” The Braj first line is the child’s cry to Yashoda: mother, I did not eat the butter (Nilsson’s English says curds). This is sagun lila, not Tukaram’s fever of the world. Krishna argues like a small lawyer. She sent him early to the forest after the cows; he wandered hours; he came home in the evening. The other cowherds smeared his face. Besides, he is a child: such small arms cannot reach a pot hung so high. The defence is comic and exact. Yashoda throws down the stick, picks him up, hugs him. Surdas says Jasumati’s joy makes Shiva and Brahma crazy with envy.

What to hold. The Lord is a butter-thief who must still be believed innocent; the mother is the devotee’s own tenderness given a name. Social household — cows, friends, a high pot — is the theology. Do not replace this pad with another butter song. Here the devotee is the mother holding the child-God. Nilsson’s page is 41; the number is 1.

Nilsson’s poem 2, pages 42–43, is “maiya mohe”: Mother, big brother Daau (Balarama, Balbir, Balbhadra) teases me a lot. He says Krishna was bought, not born of Jasumati. He asks who the father and mother are. Why is Krishna so dark when Nanda and Yashoda are fair? The cowherds snap fingers and clap; Balbir coaches the mockery. You only punish me, Mother; you never chastise him. Jasumati enjoys Mohan’s anger, looking at him. Then she answers: Kanha, your brother talks nonsense; he has been a crook from birth. O Shyam of Surdas, I swear by all the cattle — I am your mother and you my son.

The pad keeps the household and raises a theological tease the child can feel: whose son is the dark one? Yashoda’s oath by the cattle closes it as sagun love, not as a riddle for a philosopher. Beside poem 1, the stick becomes the brother’s taunt; the hug becomes a sworn mother. Stay on Nilsson’s pages. Do not import the Yamuna-serpent or the mountain-lift; they are not these three pads.

Nilsson’s poem 22, page 65, is the pad the syllabus cues as “kat tu suman.” The voice is no longer the child to Yashoda. A woman of Braj speaks to Krishna as a black bee who wants to taste her. She is puzzled. She is not that golden jasmine he left her for, the flower of the night after he spent the day with her. Let the saffron-fragrant body go to the night lily. His face and limbs radiate differently with different women. Her devotion causes him chagrin; his absence is a mountain she cannot cross; she grows weaker. Surdas signs the complaint.

This is still sagun: the Lord has a body that can be unfaithful in lila, and the devotee is the lover who keeps speaking. It is not Tukaram’s hypocrite-heron, and not the Gita’s list of demonic marks. The bee and the jasmine (suman) are the pad’s pictures: many flowers, one restless lover, one woman who will not pretend to be the night-bloom. Keep Nilsson’s number 22 and page 65. An answer that treats all three pads as butter-theft has not reached this page. Poem 1 is the mother’s lap; poem 2 is the mother’s oath; poem 22 is the gopi’s bee. That is the set Surdas.

Radhakrishnan’s English, George Allen & Unwin, pages 334–335, is the set rendering. Chapter XVI is titled on this paper “The Nature of the Godlike and the Demonic Mind.” Only verses 1–5 are set. Do not write the rest of the chapter’s long portrait of the asura. The teaching is a sorting of qualities, not a Braj pad and not an abhang of Dehu.

Verses 1–3 name the godlike endowment (daivi sampad): fearlessness; purity of heart; steadfastness in knowledge and yoga; charity; self-control; sacrifice; study of scripture; austerity; uprightness; non-violence; truth; absence of anger; renunciation; peace; not slandering; compassion for beings; uncovetousness; gentleness; modesty; absence of fickleness; vigour; forgiveness; fortitude; purity; absence of hatred; absence of pride. These belong to one born for the divine state. Verse 4 names the demonic endowment (asuri sampad): ostentation, arrogance, self-conceit, anger, harshness, ignorance. Verse 5 draws the consequence: the godlike nature is for liberation; the demonic for bondage. Arjuna is told not to grieve: he is born with the godlike qualities.

Hold the pair, the named book, and the page numbers. Liberation and bondage are the Gita’s stakes, not Gray’s churchyard fame, not Crusoe’s island ledger. Beside Tukaram’s snare of the world, this chapter lists the inner marks that bind or free. Beside Surdas’s child and bee, the Lord here is the speaker of a teaching, not a butter-thief in the courtyard. Stay on XVI.1–5. Radhakrishnan’s commentary around the verses is the climate of those two pages; do not turn the answer into a life of the translator.