18th Century Literature

1. Tukaram — Thoughts about the World (1–6)

Tukaram (c. 1608–1650) is the great sant-poet of the Varkari tradition of Maharashtra — the tradition of the varkaris, pilgrims who walk to Pandharpur, the town of Vitthal (also called Vitthoba or Panduranga), a form of Vishnu shown standing with his hands on his hips. Born in Dehu into a family of grain merchants, Tukaram lost his trade, his parents, and his first wife and child to famine and grief, and turned from the market to the kirtan. He stands in the sant line that runs from Dnyaneshwar (13th century) through Namdev to Eknath (16th century): poet-saints who sang in Marathi, rejected caste pride, and taught that God is reached by devotion, not by ritual privilege.

His verse-form is the abhang — a short Marathi devotional lyric meant to be sung, a personal cry that still belongs to a pilgrimage people. The set text is K. B. Marathe's The Poems of Tukarama (Motilal Banarsidass, 1991). Its Section 1 is labelled "Autobiography", and the first subsection, "Thoughts about the World," poems 1–12, is the whole Tukaram on this paper. Later subsections — on humility, prayers, how he awoke — are not set. In the exam, name Marathe and the subsection; do not wander beyond poem 12.

Poem 1 opens with the book's master-gesture: do not let go of my hand. Tuka has come in faith; sitting among the saints he has learned Vitthala, the lord of Lakshmi. But the world raises hindrances and calls the base sweet. Men die without number; he will not answer men's censure; Narayana's feet are the solid gain. If he depended on his own merit, he would be a sinner the saints would laugh at. The note struck at once is humility and surrender: the hand held is worth more than the merit claimed.

Poem 2 is about haste. Country people cover the dead and go back to sowing — life's business does not stop for grief. The body of flesh is given for one purpose: haste toward one's true gain. Grain taken out by the hand sprouts sooner than grain left in the bag: use the time now. We have no authority over time, so the wise take counsel with themselves while the world is still mortal. It is a memento mori in a farmer's image, and very Marathi in its concreteness.

Poem 3 remembers the old sages, who knew this and kept the world at a distance: mystic powers, roots and leaves, the forest, silence. Tuka asks the Infinite to do that with his spirit — keep the crowd far. The world here is noise and company; the opposite of God is not sin so much as the crowd.

Poem 4 asks whom God loves. Not the merely wise or learned: Tuka is the servant of whoever fixes thought on God's name and form, and who knows the nine forms of worship (navadha bhakti — hearing, singing, remembering, serving the feet, worshipping, bowing, servitude, friendship, self-surrender) in their purity. This is the classic sant position: bhakti over scholarship, the devout heart over the clever head.

Poem 5 is the fever-poem. Consumed by the fever of the world in household service, Tuka has forgotten the feet, and calls "Mother Panduranga" to come quickly — note the startling Mother for the Lord of Pandharpur, tenderness breaking through world-weariness. Thieves beset him; no one hears; he is weary of many lives (the round of birth and death). But the Lord's name in the world is Lord of the helpless — so Tuka bids him run. The devotee commands God by God's own reputation.

Poem 6 makes the singer a stranger: this is not his country, nor his garb; he has wandered here by chance. Hands and feet he calls his own, yet he is bereft — blind, lame, with no brother and no child. He sits at the crossroads holding God in thought, hungry, restless through countless villages. He has cast off wealth, family, mother, desire, and Panduranga is now the protector. The world is a foreign land; the sant is a traveller who has unpacked everything except the Name.

Taken together, poems 1–6 are the unit's first room: the world as fever and snare, the saints as school, the Name as the only property. The voice is fiercely autobiographical — I throughout — which is why Marathe files them under "Autobiography." Exam tip: a 20-mark answer on "Tukaram's view of the world" should walk through these six in order, using the key images (the hand held, the grain in the bag, Mother Panduranga, the stranger at the crossroads), and close on surrender: the world is not reformed, it is left, for the feet of Vitthal.

2. Tukaram — Thoughts about the World (7–12)

Poems 1–6 were the personal cry — hold my hand, I am a stranger. Poems 7–12 turn outward: from the fever in his own breast to the fraud in the world's face, and from preaching at men to trembling for them. This second room is society, hypocrisy, and surrender.

Poem 7 is a gallery of hypocrites, and the finest observation in the set. The world is full of parts, like actors on a stage: a heron stands as if in meditation — to catch fish; a hypocrite wears the garland and the brow-mark and hides guile beneath them; an angler offers a morsel — with a hook inside; a butcher is kind to beasts — with a knife behind the kindness. Tuka's verdict is disarming: he is a simple man in that world, and Panduranga is merciful. The pictures are not decoration; they are how the world looks to a devotee who will not trust appearances. For Tukaram, maya is not metaphysics — it is social fraud.

Poem 8 answers fraud with renunciation: he has renounced the world, sprinkling his head against it (dust on the head, the gesture of one done with the world). Why pollute the hands only to wash them again? God has assigned each thing its place; and when we forget to think of ourselves, we cease to say "mine" and "another's." There is an Advaitic flash here — the end of meum and tuum — but Tuka reaches it by devotion, not by philosophy.

Poem 9 wants solitude: he cannot bear restraint or company and would sit alone. Sensuous desire wearies him; the snares of desire and illusion that keep us from God only increase pain. What looks like misanthropy is really God-hunger: company is noise, and noise drowns the Name.

Poem 10 confesses the failure of preaching. 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 (anubhava) they stay wretched. This is sant epistemology in one blow — instruction without experience is noise, and the saint knows it.

Poem 11 turns the knife inward: saints must not praise him. Praise will make him proud; pride will keep him from their feet and from crossing the sea of the world; a "high spirit" will sever him from Vitthoba's feet. Humility here is not modesty but spiritual strategy — the one sin the devotee cannot afford is the pride of being devout.

Poem 12 closes the twelve in trembling, not triumph. Listen to nothing that brings sorrow and separation from those feet. He trembles to see destruction so near other men; he shames them and they will not hear; he has no strength to beat them onto the path. So the last prayer is almost a complaint: Panduranga should not set such madmen before his sight. The devotee who began by asking God to hold his hand ends by asking God to spare his eyes. Compassion without power — that is where the "Thoughts about the World" stop.

The arc of all twelve runs from "hold my hand" (1) to "take these madmen from my sight" (12): personal surrender, then social vision, then the surrender of even the reformer's hope. Exam tip: for "Tukaram's attitude to society," lead with poem 7's five pictures (actor, heron, hypocrite, angler, butcher) — examiners love the list — then show how 8–12 refuse both the world and the preaching of it. And never turn Tuka into Surdas's butter-thief child: his world is a snare to flee, not a courtyard to play in.

3. Surdas — Maiya Mori, Maiya Mohe, Kat Tu Suman

Surdas, blind poet of Braj and singer of Krishna's childhood, belongs to the sixteenth century and to a different bhakti from Tukaram's. Tradition calls him blind from birth; it makes him the disciple of Vallabhacharya and the crown of the Ashtachhap — the "eight seals," the eight poets of Vallabha's Pushtimarga (the path of grace). His great work is the Sursagar, an ocean of songs in Brajbhasha. Where Tukaram flees the household as fever, Surdas finds God inside the household — in the courtyard, the butter-pot, the mother's lap. This is sagun bhakti: God with a name, a body, a family, a mischief.

Its ruling mood is vatsalya rasa — parental affection raised to worship. The devotee does not argue with God or flee the world for Him; the devotee mothers Him. Yashoda (Jasumati), Nanda, the cowherd friends, the high-hung pot: the theology is a home. The set text is Usha Nilsson's Surdas (Makers of Indian Literature, Sahitya Akademi, 1969) — the syllabus prints the surname as "Nilson" — and only three pads are set: "Maiya mori" (1), p. 41; "maiya mohe" (2), pp. 42–43; "kat tu suman" (22), p. 65. Hold the numbers and pages; do not import other famous pads.

"Maiya mori" (1) — Mother, I didn't! — is the butter-thief's defence. (Nilsson's English says curds, not butter; follow the set rendering.) Little Krishna, accused, argues like a small lawyer. You sent me early to the forest after the cows; I wandered for hours and came home in the evening; the other cowherds smeared my face. And besides — look at these arms: such small arms cannot reach a pot hung so high. The defence is comic and exact, and it works: Yashoda throws down the stick, picks him up, and hugs him. Surdas seals the pad: Jasumati's joy makes Shiva and Brahma crazy with envy. Hold the theology inside the comedy: the Lord is a thief who must still be believed innocent, and the mother's tenderness is itself the worship. The devotee here is not the singer but the mother holding the child-God.

"Maiya mohe" (2) keeps the household and sharpens it. 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 their fingers and clap; Balbir coaches the mockery. And the sting in the tail: you only punish me, Mother — you never chastise him. Jasumati, says Surdas, enjoys Mohan's anger even as she looks at him — the mother's delight inside the complaint. Then she answers, and the pad turns: Kanha, your brother talks nonsense; he has been a crook from birth. And the oath that closes it — "O Shyam of Surdas, I swear by all the cattle: I am your mother and you my son." The household's wealth (the cattle) becomes the seal of love. Beside poem 1, the stick has become the brother's taunt and the hug has become a sworn mother. The theological tease — whose son is the dark one? — is answered not by philosophy but by a mother's oath: sagun love, not a riddle.

"Kat tu suman" (22) changes the voice entirely. No longer the child to Yashoda: a woman of Braj speaks to Krishna as a black bee that wants to taste her. Behind the pad stands the Bhramaragita of the Bhagavata Purana — when Uddhava brings Krishna's message to Braj, the gopis address a passing dark bee as the dark messenger, and through it, Krishna himself. Surdas's gopi is puzzled and hurt: she is not that golden jasmine he left her for, the flower of the night after he spent the day with her; let his saffron-fragrant body go to the night-lily. His face and limbs radiate differently with different women — the restless lover, many flowers, one bee. Her devotion causes him chagrin, she says; his absence is a mountain she cannot cross; she grows weaker. And Surdas signs the complaint. This is still sagun — a God with a body can be unfaithful in lila, and the devotee is the lover who keeps speaking, refusing to pretend she is the night-bloom. It is not Tukaram's hypocrite-heron and not the Gita's list: the bee and the jasmine (suman) are this pad's pictures.

Three stations, then: the mother's lap (1), the mother's oath (2), the gopi's bee (22). Exam tip: reference-to-context questions love these pads — practise placing each opening line ("Maiya mori," "maiya mohe," "kat tu suman") with its situation, speaker, and feeling in two sentences each. An answer that treats all three as butter-theft has not reached page 65. And keep the set text named: Nilsson 1969, poems 1, 2, 22.

4. Gita XVI.1–5 — Godlike and Demonic Mind

Chapter XVI of the Bhagavadgita is titled "Daivasura-sampad-vibhaga-yoga" — the yoga of distinguishing the divine and the demoniacal endowments. It stands after Chapter XV (the Supreme Person) and before the Gita's closing movement: Krishna, still teaching Arjuna on the field of Kurukshetra, now sorts human nature itself into two lots. The set text is S. Radhakrishnan's translation (George Allen & Unwin, London), pp. 334–335, and only verses 1–5 are set. Do not write the chapter's later, longer portrait of the asura — it is not on the paper.

Verses 1–3 name the godlike endowment (daivi sampad) — some twenty-six qualities belonging to one "born for the divine state": fearlessness; purity of heart; steadfastness in knowledge and yoga; charity; self-control; sacrifice; study of the scriptures; austerity; uprightness; non-violence; truth; absence of anger; renunciation; peace; absence of slander; compassion for beings; uncovetousness; gentleness; modesty; absence of fickleness; vigour; forgiveness; fortitude; purity; absence of hatred; absence of pride. Notice the architecture: it opens with fearlessness (abhaya) — the soul that knows itself fears nothing — and moves from inner states (purity, steadfastness) through disciplines (charity, sacrifice, study, austerity) to social conduct (non-violence, truth, compassion, gentleness). The godlike is not otherworldly; it is a character, livable in the world.

Verse 4 names the demonic endowment (asuri sampad) in six hard words: ostentation (dambha — religious show), arrogance (darpa), self-conceit (atimana), anger (krodha), harshness (parushya — roughness of speech and act), and ignorance (ajnana). The demonic here has no horns: it is pride dressed as piety and cruelty dressed as strength. Set beside Tukaram's poem 7 — the heron in meditation, the garlanded hypocrite — verse 4 reads like the Gita's own gallery of the same fraud.

Verse 5 draws the consequence and gives the consolation. The godlike nature is for liberation (moksha); the demonic for bondage (bandha). Then Krishna turns to the warrior before him: "Grieve not" (ma shuchah) — you are born with the godlike qualities, Arjuna. The man trembling before battle is answered not with tactics but with anthropology: know what you are made of, and the fear will know its place. Liberation and bondage are this chapter's stakes — the only stakes the Gita recognises.

Radhakrishnan's reading — philosopher as well as translator — treats the two sampads as psychological and ethical types present in human nature, not as fixed destinies stamped at birth. Every person carries both lots in some measure; the chapter is a mirror held up so the seeker can cultivate the godlike and starve the demonic. His commentary on these pages (the "climate" of pp. 334–335) stresses that the division is moral and inward: it is about what we become, and the Gita's confidence is that Arjuna — and the reader — can choose. This is why verse 5 can console rather than condemn: the list is a diagnosis, and a diagnosis is the first step of a cure.

Set the chapter in its unit: beside Tukaram's world-as-snare, the Gita lists the inner marks that bind or free — the snare has an address inside us; beside Surdas's courtyard, the Lord here is the teacher, not the butter-thief. Exam tip: the likely 8-mark question asks you to enumerate the godlike qualities (learn the list in Radhakrishnan's order, grouped: inner states → disciplines → conduct); the likely 20-mark question asks for daivi vs asuri as a contrast — answer it as a two-column table in prose, and close with verse 5's ma shuchah: the chapter ends not in condemnation but in consolation.