Abhanga 7

If devotion is real, the shame the world will throw at you is not a problem to solve. It is the visible shape of devotion having actually cost you something.

The verse

Literal translation

What it means

The abhang's most arresting move is the gendered specificity of the slur. Tukaram could have written "let people defame me, let them call me a fool" — and that would have been a normal sant-defense against criticism. Instead he chooses शिंदळी — whore, unfaithful woman. The slur is the slur a woman receives for choosing love outside the socially-sanctioned bond. By placing this word in his own mouth, Tukaram is not defending himself against generic criticism; he is identifying with the gopī accused of adultery for loving Krishna. This is gopī-bhāva at its most theologically intense — to love God is to be like the unfaithful wife in the eyes of social order. [T] [Tradition]

The three verses each deepen the renunciation in a different register:

• Verse 1: social renunciation — let them say what they want.
• Verse 2: existential renunciation — I do not even fear or hope for my life.
• Verse 3: receptive renunciation — I do not listen to what they say.

The third is the strangest. The first two are active renunciations (I'm letting go of social standing, I'm letting go of attachment to my life). The third is a receptive renunciation — I have stopped letting their words enter me. The defense is not just "I don't care what you say"; it is "I have closed the channel by which your words could reach me." This is a more interior move than mere defiance. [T]

The closing — "जालों तुका हरिरता" — is the answer to the implicit question of why this renunciation is possible. Tukaram does not have a reasoned argument against the world's judgment; he has become absorbed in Hari. The absorption itself is the answer. There is no place left in him for the social shame to land.

Tukaram lived under documented social attack — the warkari hagiography records that orthodox brahmins, offended that a low-caste poet was writing devotional poetry, threw his manuscripts into the Indrayani river. His own marriage was difficult; his wife Jijai is recorded as having been frustrated with his devotion-prioritizing life. Public ridicule was not abstract for him. So when he writes "वाळो जन मज म्हणोत शिंदळी," he is writing from inside actual experience of being publicly named as someone who has abandoned proper duties for an improper love. [Tradition]

The choice of feminine voice is, again, gopī-bhāva — but this abhang is even more pointed than 0004 because it directly invokes the social punishment of female-coded devotion. The gopīs of Vrindavan are described in the puranic tradition as women whose love for Krishna led them to leave husbands, to dance through the forest at night, to abandon spinning-wheels and crying babies. The conventional verdict on such women is shindali. The bhakti tradition's revaluation is to say: that is the highest form of love. The sant-poets, whether male or female, take this voice when articulating devotion at full intensity. [Tradition]

For someone today

English: This abhang is the verse for the moment when your life-choices have started to cost you socially. Maybe you've left a conventional career to make something the world doesn't measure; maybe you've prioritized contemplative practice in a family that finds it baffling; maybe you've made a relational or sexual or spiritual choice that has the people around you talking. Tukaram's claim — uncomfortable but precise — is that the gossip is the visible shape of devotion having actually cost you something. If the choice cost nothing socially, you may not have made the choice yet. The shame the world is throwing at you is information about whether you have moved.

But notice he is not advising defiance as an aesthetic. He is not modeling "I don't care what people think" as a performance. The verse moves from defiance (verse 1) through existential nakedness (verse 2 — I have no fear, no hope of preserving my life) to not letting their words enter you (verse 3). That third move is the real teaching. Defiance is still a relationship to the gossip; non-listening is freedom from it. The way to non-listening, Tukaram says, is not willpower — it is being so absorbed in something else that there is nowhere for the shame to land. The cure for caring-what-people-think is not "stop caring." The cure is finding what you are absorbed in, and going further into it.

मराठी: ही ओवी अशा क्षणासाठी आहे जेव्हा तुमच्या जीवन-निवडींना सामाजिक किंमत बसायला लागली आहे. कदाचित तुम्ही पारंपरिक करियर सोडून जग जे मोजत नाही ते करत आहात; कदाचित ध्यान-साधना अशा कुटुंबात प्राधान्य देत आहात ज्याला ते विचित्र वाटतं; कदाचित नातं, लैंगिकता किंवा अध्यात्म याबाबत अशी निवड केलीय की आसपासचे लोक बोलू लागलेत. तुकाराम काय सांगतायत — अस्वस्थ करणारं पण अचूक — की चर्चेची आगच ही तुमच्या निवडीला खरोखर किंमत बसली आहे याचं दृश्य रूप आहे. निवडीला सामाजिक किंमत बसली नसेल, तर अजून निवड पूर्ण झाली नाही. जग तुमच्यावर जी लाज ओतत आहे, ती तुम्ही पुढे सरकलात की नाही याची माहिती आहे.

पण लक्ष द्या — ते "लोकांची काळजी न करणं" ही पोझ शिकवत नाहीत. "मला कुणाचं काही वाटत नाही" ही कामगिरी नाही. ओवी पहिल्या ओळीच्या निडरतेपासून (वाळो जन) → दुसऱ्या ओळीच्या अस्तित्वात्मक निरावलंबनापर्यंत (जीविताची भीती-आशा नाही) → तिसऱ्या ओळीच्या न-ऐकण्यापर्यंत (नाइकें वचन) — पुढे जाते. तिसरी हालचाल खरी शिकवण आहे. निडरता म्हणजे चर्चेशी अजूनही नातं आहे; न-ऐकणं म्हणजे चर्चेपासून मुक्ती. आणि न-ऐकण्याकडे जायचा रस्ता इच्छाशक्तीतून जात नाही — दुसऱ्या कशात तरी इतकं बुडून जाणं की लाज उतरायला जागाच राहिली नाही. "लोक काय म्हणतील" ची चिंता बंद करायचा उपाय "चिंता बंद कर" नाही. उपाय आहे — तुम्ही ज्यात बुडून आहात ते शोधा आणि आणखी आत जा.

Where this applies

• When your spiritual life or meaning-making choices have started to make you the odd one in your family or social circle. Tukaram is not telling you to argue with them. He is suggesting that if your absorption is real, their words will stop reaching you — not because you have hardened against them, but because there is no longer a place inside you that needs their approval. The work is not on the relationship to them; the work is on the absorption.

• When you have left a conventional path and the costs are showing up as social judgment. Verse 2 is the verse for this: नाहीं भय आस जीवित्वाची — I have no fear, no hope for my life. The phrase is extreme on purpose. Tukaram is saying that what enables this kind of choice is a relationship to one's own life that has already let go of preserving it. If you are still trying to keep your social standing intact while making a non-conventional choice, the choice is not yet costing you what it needs to.

• When you face the choice between being respectable and being honest, and the cost of honesty has become public. The abhang's word "लौकिक" — social respectability, the public-image self — is what gets sanded off. Tukaram does not promise you a new respectability on the other side of the choice. The bhakta does not become a different kind of respectable person; the bhakta becomes a person to whom respectability is no longer load-bearing. The reward is not approval. The reward is no longer needing approval to function.

Related verses

• Abhanga 4 — Beauty seen and not yet possessed is the position devotion is built from. The longing is n
• Abhanga 9 — English: This abhang is the verse for the moment after a real life-direction choice. Most
• Abhanga 10 — Once a real choice is public, the work becomes taking leave of the people who knew the pre
• Abhanga 11 — Once you have left, the next discipline is becoming deaf to the people who keep calling yo