A Grocer's Ruin, and a Turn to Vitthal

Tukaram was born around 1608 in the village of Dehu on the Indrayani river in Maharashtra, into a family of the Kunbi caste who worked as small-scale grocers and moneylenders, a livelihood he initially continued. Traditional accounts describe a series of personal disasters in his young adulthood, a catastrophic famine around 1629 that ruined the family's trade, followed by the deaths of his first wife and a child, that turned him decisively away from business toward devotion to Vitthal, the form of Krishna worshipped at the great temple of Pandharpur, the central pilgrimage site of the Varkari tradition into which Tukaram had been raised. He described his own crisis and turn to devotion directly in his verse, a habit of frank autobiography that distinguishes his abhangas, a Marathi devotional song form, from more impersonal genres of religious poetry. He composed in the vernacular Marathi of ordinary speech rather than in Sanskrit, a choice shared across the Varkari sant tradition and one that let his poetry reach listeners with no access to formal religious education, and he drew explicitly on earlier Varkari poets, particularly Namdev, whom his verses treat as a spiritual predecessor. Tukaram's low caste status put him in direct and, by his own account, painful conflict with Brahmin religious authorities in the region who objected to a Kunbi grocer composing scripture-adjacent devotional verse in the vernacular.