A website devoted to Marathi poet-saint Sant Tukaram records a viewership across 134 countries as it completes six years
Yogesh Joshi
Yogesh Joshi
IN 1930, during the freedom struggle, when Mahatma Gandhi was incarcerated in Yerawada Jail, he took to reading the abhangs (devotional songs) of Tukaram. Fascinated by the lyricism of the poems, he undertook the task of translating 16 of them into English.
Seven decades later, a website devoted to the 17th century poetsaint has translations in French, Russian, German, Spanish and even Esperanto. And it is viewed by aficionados across 134 countries.
Suzanne Voidette in faraway Atlanta in the USA, is one of them. "So rare to stumble upon a shining jewel… essence of truth. May he shine and inspire forever," she remarked on February 9 this year.
It's an eclectic bunch of readers out there on the site. While Dirk Rottman of Hamburg says, "Nama japa brings great joy to me and eases the heavy weight of materialism that we are facing these days," Ian Schwartz puts it in typical Americanese: "Brilliant. Freaking brilliant." Search for grace Tukaram's global odyssey began in 1868 when some of the 4,500 abhangs he wrote in his lifetime were translated into English by British litterateur Sir Alexan- der Grant, who declared, "Tukaram is a national poet."
But when Dilip Dhonde, a civil engineer-turned-freelance soft- ware professional and his friend Sandeep Apte were looking for in- formation on Tukaram and his poems some years ago, they found no material on the Internet. "We were so disappointed that we decided to set up our own website," says Dhonde.
Born in 1609 at Dehu, a small town on the banks of the riv er Indrayani, near Pune, Tukaram, through his de votional dis courses blended with poetry is not only one of India's most popular saints, but his work constitutes one of the high points of Marathi literature.
The-then existing editions of Tukaram's work formed a mas sive collection of randomly scat tered poems, which Dhonde col lected and uploaded on his web site in Marathi. In addition to translations in other Indian languages, there are also poems translated by international devotees in German, Russian, French, Spanish and Dutch.
Dhonde and Apte spent many restless months reaching out to people across the world to procure translated collections of Tukaram's poems in these languages and finally launched the website in 2002, on 17 February, Tukaram's birth anniversary.
The site's viewership has grown steadily since then. As Maurizio from Ponzano Veneto in Italy puts it, "Sometimes it is difficult to spend some time in the company of saints because of family life and the job, but when there is a real longing, grace comes in unexpected ways… the site is wonderful…"
Even after the passage of four hundred years, the magic of Tukaram's poetry still has the power to transcend the boundaries of region, religion and language.
The Hindustan Times, Mumbai. 24th February, 2008.
Web site "Saint Tukaram"
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