your bridge home
Saints and Poets
He lost the shop, the money, his first wife and his son in one bad year. What came out of it was the songs.
He ran a shop.
Tukaram was born at Dehu, a village on the Indrayani north of Pune.
Into a family of small traders. With a bit of land, a bit of moneylending, and a modest position. He inherited it in his teens when his parents died, and he was expected to keep it going, and for a while he did.
Then came the famine.
The Deccan famine of the late 1620s was one of the worst in the region's recorded history. Crops failed across the plateau; the cattle died; grain prices went past what anyone could pay; and in the villages people simply starved.
Tukaram lost the business.
A moneylender in a famine either ruins his neighbours or is ruined. And he was not able to be the first kind.
He lost his first wife, Rakhumabai, to starvation.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.