Marathi Poetry: Saints, Reformers, and Modern Masters
Quick answer: Marathi poetry from Dnyaneshwar and Tukaram's abhangs to Keshavsut, Kusumagraj, Mardhekar, and Namdeo Dhasal: a guide to Maharashtra's verse tradition.
In 1290, a teenager named Dnyaneshwar composed a verse commentary on the Bhagavad Gita in the language of Maharashtra's farmers rather than in Sanskrit, and Marathi literature has carried that democratic charge ever since. The Dnyaneshwari, written in the flowing ovi metre, opened a devotional highway that the Varkari saint-poets walked for four centuries.
Marathi poetry's signature is the abhang, the short devotional song addressed to Vitthal of Pandharpur, and its signature temperament is plain speech with a moral edge. From medieval saints to Dalit revolutionaries, Marathi poets have assumed that verse exists to tell the truth in public, preferably in words a farmer or a millworker can carry home.
The landmarks: the saint-poets
After Dnyaneshwar came Namdev, whose songs travelled as far as the Guru Granth Sahib; Eknath, who restored and extended the tradition; and its summit, Tukaram, the seventeenth-century grocer of Dehu whose abhangs argue with God in startling, homely, sometimes furious language. Ramdas, Shivaji's contemporary, added a bracing verse of discipline and action.
Tukaram matters far beyond religion: his directness became the benchmark for Marathi authenticity. Dilip Chitre's English translations, Says Tuka, carried these poems to world readers and showed modern poets how radical the old voice still sounds.
Reformers and moderns
Keshavsut, writing in the 1890s, is called the father of modern Marathi poetry; his poem announcing a new era, tutari, the trumpet blast, made verse a reformer's instrument against caste and convention. The romantics of the Ravi Kiran Mandal followed, then B. S. Mardhekar detonated Marathi modernism in the 1940s with poems of urban alienation whose broken music scandalised and liberated at once.
The mid-century gave Marathi two towering Jnanpith-winning presences: Kusumagraj, whose Vishakha lit the freedom struggle, and Vinda Karandikar, experimenter and philosopher. Mangesh Padgaonkar made lyric hugely popular, while Arun Kolatkar wrote with equal genius in Marathi and English, and Narayan Surve brought the millworker's Mumbai into poetry.
Dalit poetry: the tradition's fiercest gift
Modern Marathi produced one of world literature's great protest movements. Namdeo Dhasal, co-founder of the Dalit Panthers, published Golpitha in 1972, poems from Mumbai's underworld written in a Marathi no classroom had admitted, and changed what the language was allowed to say. Poets like Daya Pawar and J. V. Pawar widened the breach.
For any poet, Dalit Marathi verse is a lesson in diction as politics: choosing the words of the excluded is itself the argument. Its influence now runs through Dalit and marginalised writing across India.
The tradition today
Marathi poetry remains a public habit: the annual Akhil Bharatiya Marathi Sahitya Sammelan draws crowds in the tens of thousands, Pune and Mumbai run dense reading circuits, and song forms from powada to lavani keep verse in performance. Contemporary poets move easily between metre, free verse, and spoken word, still arguing, as Tukaram did, that poetry should cost the poet something.
What poets can take from this
- Read Says Tuka to watch devotional poetry behave like a quarrel between equals.
- Write an abhang-like quatrain sequence addressed to whatever you hold sacred, using kitchen-level vocabulary.
- Study Mardhekar for how broken rhythm can express a broken city.
- Let your poem name its politics through diction, as Dhasal did, rather than through slogans.
- Attend or watch a poetry sammelan online to feel how Marathi audiences treat poets as public figures.
Try it yourself
Write a poem in the voice of someone whose work keeps a city running, a sweeper, a dabbawala, a night bus driver, addressed directly to the city itself.
Questions
What is an abhang?
An abhang is a Marathi devotional verse form sung by the Varkari saints to the god Vitthal, usually in short rhymed units built on the ovi metre. Tukaram's seventeenth-century abhangs are its greatest examples.
Who is the father of modern Marathi poetry?
Keshavsut, writing in the 1890s, holds that title. His reformist themes and formal experiments turned Marathi poetry from convention toward individual conscience and social change.
Why is Namdeo Dhasal significant?
Dhasal's Golpitha brought the language and lives of Mumbai's most marginalised into Marathi poetry for the first time, and helped found the Dalit Panther movement. He is a central figure of Dalit literature worldwide.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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