Give me smallness
Every other voice asks for strength, clarity, or stillness. Tukaram asks for something no one else on the list asks for.
लहानपण दे गा देवा । मुंगी साखरेचा रवा ॥
ऐरावत रत्न थोर । त्यासी अंकुशाचा मार ॥ध्रु.॥
ज्याचे अंगीं मोठेपण । तया यातना कठीण ॥
तुका म्हणे जाण । व्हावें लहानाहुनि लहान ॥
airāvat ratna thor, tyāsī aṅkushāchā mār
jyāche aṅgī moṭhepaṇ, tayā yātanā kaṭhiṇ
tukā mhaṇe jāṇ, vhāveṁ lahānāhuni lahān
"Give me smallness, God — the ant is the one who gets the grain of sugar. The great jewelled elephant gets the driver's hook. Whoever carries bigness carries a hard punishment with it. Tuka says, understand this: become smaller than the small."
One of the most widely recited abhangas in Maharashtra, taught in Marathi school readers and sung in the Warkari tradition. Airāvat is Indra's white elephant — magnificent, jewelled, and led by a hook in the neck.
We cite by opening line rather than number: abhang numbering differs between printings of the Gāthā, and the placement of the dhruvapada (refrain, marked ध्रु.) also differs — some editions print ऐरावत रत्न थोर as the refrain, others as the second charaṇa. Text pending a final check against the Government of Maharashtra Gāthā.
मन करा रे प्रसन्न । सर्व सिद्धींचें कारण ॥ … मनें इच्छा पुरविली । मन माउली सकळांची ॥ — "Make the mind glad — it is the cause of everything: freedom or bondage, ease or the wanting of it. … The mind granted its own wish. The mind is mother of us all."
Four centuries before anyone in India said the words "mental health," a failed shopkeeper named the mind as both the patient and the physician — and then called it māulī. Mother. Not enemy, not battlefield, not something to conquer before dawn. Mother.
जे कां रंजले गांजले । त्यासि म्हणे जो आपुले ॥ तोचि साधु ओळखावा । देव तेथेचि जाणावा ॥ … ज्यासी आपंगिता नाहीं । त्यासी धरी जो हृदयीं ॥ — "Whoever calls the worn-out and the crushed their own — recognise that one as the saint; know that God is right there. … Whoever has nobody to hold them: the one who holds them to their heart."
The test of holiness here is not serenity, or knowledge, or having transcended anything. It is whether you go and sit with the person nobody is sitting with. Which cuts both ways: if you are the frightened one tonight, then by Tukaram's definition whoever stays with you is doing the holiest work available to a human being.
शब्द चि आमुच्या जीवाचें जीवन । शब्दें वांटूं धन जनलोकां ॥ — "Words are the very life of our life — and it is with words that we hand our wealth out to the people."
He lost the shop, the grain, the standing, the family. What was left was words, and he spent them at a rate of thousands. When fear has taken away everything you could point to, naming is still available to you — and having something left to say is not a small inheritance.
Read the other names in this collection and notice what most of them share: they are quoted from the far side of the thing. The Upanishads speak from realisation. The Stoics speak from composure. The moderns speak from a lectern. Tukaram writes from inside it — the failed shop, the empty grain store, the child who did not survive the famine, the pandits laughing at a farmer who presumed to write scripture. He never once claims to have finished. That is not a weakness in his testimony. It is the reason it is usable.
Which is why his instruction on fear is so unlike the others. He does not ask for strength. He asks for smallness. The ant is small enough that the sugar belongs to her. The elephant is magnificent, and therefore has a hook in its neck. Sit with that, because almost all the fear a person carries in a city is fear attached to bigness: being seen to fail, losing the position, not being enough. Tukaram's way out is not to grow bigger than the fear. It is to want less of the size the fear is attached to.
व्हावें लहानाहुनि लहान — become smaller than the small.
The sugar is down at that height.
The weapons are words
He had every ingredient of a violent life and used none of it. Notice, though, that he does not claim to be unarmed.
आम्हां घरीं धन शब्दांचींच रत्नें । शब्दांचींच शस्त्रें यत्न करूं ॥
शब्द चि आमुच्या जीवाचें जीवन । शब्दें वांटूं धन जनलोकां ॥
shabda chi āmuchyā jīvāche jīvan, shabdeṁ vāṁṭūṁ dhan janalokāṁ
"In our house the wealth is words: words are our jewels, and words are the weapons we work with. Words are the very life of our life — and it is with words that we hand our wealth out to the people."
A very widely quoted abhang, printed in the Tukārām Gāthā and standard in Marathi anthologies. We cite by opening line rather than number, since numbering differs between printings.
Two honest notes. Recited versions often carry a third charaṇa (तुका म्हणे पाहा शब्द चि हा देव — "Tuka says, look: the word itself is God") which we have left off pending verification against the Gāthā. And a separate abhang uses the very similar phrase शब्दांचीं रत्नें करूनी अळंकार — the two are sometimes conflated in circulation.
नाहीं निर्मळ जीवन । काय करील साबण ॥ … तैसें चित्तशुद्धि नाहीं । तेथें बोध करील काई ॥ — "If the water itself isn't clean, what will the soap do? … In just the same way — where the mind has not been cleared, what will good advice accomplish?"
Everyone in your life has told you to calm down. Here is why it did nothing, written four hundred years before they said it: soap needs clean water to work in. The advice was not wrong — it simply had no medium to act in. Water first. Then soap.
मन गुरू आणि शिष्य । करी आपुलें चि दास्य ॥ प्रसन्न आपआपणास । गति अथवा अधोगति ॥ — "The mind is both the guru and the student; it does its own serving. Glad or not glad with itself — that is what decides whether you rise or fall."
The argument you have been having in your head since this afternoon has exactly one participant. You are the one shouting and the one being shouted at, and you are also the one who could stop. He says it without any pity, which is somehow easier to hear than sympathy.
जे कां रंजले गांजले । त्यासि म्हणे जो आपुले ॥ तोचि साधु ओळखावा ॥ — "Whoever calls the worn-out and the crushed their own — recognise that one as the saint."
Sit with this one on an anger page rather than a sad one. The person you are most furious with tonight is, with fairly high probability, also worn out and also crushed. Tukaram's test has no exemption clause for people who have wronged you — which is annoying, and is the point.
Notice what he does not say. He does not say he has no weapons. He does not claim to be past all this, or to have no fight left in him. He says: शब्दांचींच शस्त्रें — the weapons are words, and words are what we work with. That is a man admitting he is armed and telling you which armoury he chose.
Which makes his position quite different from the advice you have already been handed. "Don't be angry" was never Tukaram's line. He wrote abhangas that argue with God, accuse God, sulk at God, and demand to know why. In this tradition rage is permitted to be addressed upward — you may take it to the deity and say plainly that this is unfair. What is not permitted is letting it out sideways, into the people nearest you. So the instruction is neither swallowing nor venting, and the two words we usually reach for both miss it. It is transposition. Same heat, different instrument: from the fist to the sentence.
शब्दांचींच शस्त्रें — the weapons are words.
Same heat. Different exit.
These passages live inside the longer reads, beside eleven other voices —
the full long-read on Fear → · on Anger →
The one who laid the foundation, three hundred years earlier: Dnyaneshwar →
Everything he wrote, and everything written about him — sourced: The Tukaram Archive →