Wisdom sans frontieres

I worship Him with my words

– Translation by Dilip Chitre

Tukaram’s biography and literature is now available on tukaram.com in one more European language – Lithuanian (lietuviu kalba). The Lithuanian section has a biography of Tukaram based on Dilip Chitre’s introduction in his book Says Tuka and translations of Tukaram’s poems. The translation has been done by Jonas Skendelis. Lithuanian is a Baltic language,closely related to Latvian. It is written in an adapted version of the Roman script. Lithuanian is one of two living Baltic languages,along with Latvian.

“Tukaram,arguably the greatest poet in the Marathi language. Tukaram’s genius partly lies in his ability to transform the external world into its spiritual analogue. Tukaram’s stature in Marathi is comparable to that Shakespeare in English or Goethe in German. He could be called the quintessential Marathi poet reflecting the genius or the language as well as its characteristic literally culture. There is no other Marathi writer who has so deeply and widely influenced Marathi literally culture since,” are the introductory words of Tukaram by Dilip Chitre on tukaram.com.

The multilingual site is in Marathi,Hindi and English with translations of Tukaram in English (Mahatma Gandhi),Bangla (Rabindranath Tagore),Hindi (Dr AnandprakashDixit and Shriram Shikarkhane),French (Guy Poitevin),German (Dilip Chitre and Lothar Lutze),Russian (Irina Glushkova,Anagha Bhat and Sergei Serebriany),Spanish (Elsa Cross),Esperanto (Annirudha Banhatti) and Nederlands ( Leo van Der Zalm).

It also has biography and literature of Tukaram in Sindhi (Lachman Hardwani),Gujarati (Kedarnath,Neelkanth Panchbhai), Konkani (Suresh Amonkar),Sanskrit (Asha Gurjar and Dr Devidas Kharvandikar),Odiaa (Khageshwar Mahapatra), Kannada (Virupax Kulkarni),Telugu (Bhalchandra Apte),Malayalam (N E Viswanath Iyer) and Tamil (N Gopal).

The site is dedicated to Tukaram scholar late barrister Babaji Ganesh Paranjape. The Marathi section has articles by Dilip Chitre,Sadanand More and the late B G Paranjape. The Hindi section has Mahatma Gandhi’s foreword to the 1945 book Rashtragatha. The site tukaram.comwas launched on Tukaram Jayanti – February 17,2002 by eminent scholar Ram Bapat.