By Ritambhara
Tukaram, the 17th-century Marathi poet-saint of Dehu near Pune, left one of the few first-person records of a famine in Mughal-era India. In Tukaram’s famine poem, a short autobiographical abhang, he says the famine took his wealth and his good name, and that he watched one of his wives starve.
Tukaram was born around 1608 in Dehu, on the Indrayani river, into a trading family that also held the village post of mahajan, collecting dues from traders. His parents died while he was young. He disappeared in about 1649. His abhangs, short devotional songs to Vithoba of Pandharpur, are still sung by Varkari pilgrims every year.
The famine in his own words
Around 1630 the rains failed across the Deccan and Gujarat. The English merchant Peter Mundy recorded drought in 1630, then crops eaten by mice and locusts, then excessive rain. Contemporary estimates put deaths at about 3 million in Gujarat and 1 million around Ahmednagar. Tukaram’s biographers place the death of his first wife, Rakhma, and of a son in this famine. His trade collapsed, he borrowed and went bankrupt, and the village removed him as mahajan.
Dilip Chitre’s translation in Says Tuka gives the lines “Famine reduced me to penury, I lost my honour” and “I had to watch one of my wives starve to death.” Thomas Dabre’s rendering of the same abhang reads “The famine used up my wealth and took away my good name.”
The hill above the village
After these losses Tukaram withdrew to Bhandara hill near Dehu. Local tradition says he meditated there for days and composed many abhangs on the hill. One abhang linked to it names trees, creepers and forest animals as his kin, with birds singing to him in sweet voices. It is among his best-known verses in Maharashtra.
What the stalagmites show
In 2022 a team led by Gayatri Kathayat published a thousand-year monsoon record in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The record comes from oxygen isotopes in stalagmites from Mawmluh cave near Cherrapunji. It shows a run of frequent droughts from the 1590s to the 1630s, which covers Tukaram’s youth and the famine years. The study found that droughts lasting three years or more cluster inside decades of weak monsoon. India has had only one such drought since 1871, in 1985 to 1987. The authors warn that current water policy is planned around this recent calm, and they call for it to be reassessed.
The rain India still waits for
Farming in India still leans heavily on the monsoon. A 2023 NABARD policy brief puts rainfed farming at about 51 per cent of the country’s net sown area. The Union agriculture ministry told the Lok Sabha in 2010 that rainfed areas produce about 40 per cent of India’s food.
Tukaram’s poem records what a run of failed monsoons did to one trading family in one village. The cave record shows that such runs recur. Read beside that record, his poem asks readers now to plan grain stores and water supplies for droughts that last several years.
