Eating Hunger: Selections from the Poems of Tukarama,
trans. J. Nelson Fraser and K.B. Marathe

rearranged with a new introduction

One of India's best-known poets, "Tuka" (1608-1649) was a wandering monk who had fled society when famine killed his family and destroyed his grain business. Before he disappeared at age forty, he preached and sang his teachings throughout South India. Two hundred of his nearly 8000 poem-sayings are here reprinted from Fraser and Marathe's classic prose translation.

The present edition is an edited selection, newly rearranged, from The Poems of Tuk r ma, (3 volumes) translated by J. Nelson Fraser (1869–1918) and K.B. Marathe (d. 1918); Vol. I (1909; poems 1–1208), Vol. II (1913; poems 1209–2648) and Vol. III (1915; poems 2649–3721), originally published in Madras by The Christian Literature Society for India.

Contents

New Introduction

The Life of Tukarama

Selected Poems

Tuka on Tuka

Tuka's wife speaks

My mother's house

Lessons from food

Moral Injunctions

Breaking the world's nets

The true and the false

Tuka's prayers