SAYS TUKA

Abstract

This article discusses and provides examples of the revolutionary poetry of Tukaram (“Tuka”), the seventeenth-century writer who represented the culmination of three centuries of a radical bhakti (devotional) movement that aimed to bring together women and men of low caste to proclaim their equality and reject Brahmanic ritualism and caste hierarchy. The backdrop to this discussion of Tuka's songs is the recent reassessment of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries in India–an era of Muslim rule and linkages to the modern world through Islam– as an “early modern” period of time.