What Tukaram Knew About Literacy That Our Education System Has Still Not Fully Learned: The Sant Tradition as India's First Grassroots Language Confidence Movement

TL;DR: When Tukaram composed his abhangas in seventeenth-century Maharashtra, he was doing something that had no precedent in the dominant literary culture of his time: he was writing sacred poetry in the spoken language of farmers, weavers, and untouchables, and he was singing it in public spaces where everyone could hear. He was not merely creating literature. He was building literacy — the sense, in people who had been told their language was too ordinary for truth, that their language was exactly the right vessel for it. This post makes the case that India's Bhakti and Sant oral traditions were among history's most effective grassroots literacy movements, and that understanding them as such opens a powerful new framework for social investment in community-led literacy programmes today.

The Literacy Crisis That Nobody Named

In medieval India, the literacy crisis was not measured in reading scores or enrolment statistics. It was measured in something more fundamental and more damaging: the belief, held by enormous numbers of people across the subcontinent, that the language they spoke — the language in which they dreamed, grieved, argued, and loved — was not a language in which truth could be expressed. That the sacred, the philosophical, the literary, the worthy — all of this belonged to Sanskrit, to Arabic, to Persian. To the languages of the educated, the powerful, the high-born. Their language was for the market and the kitchen. Not for the sacred. Not for wisdom. Not for them.

This is a literacy crisis of the deepest kind. Not the inability to decode written symbols — though that too was widespread — but the prior, more crippling condition: the belief that one's own linguistic and cultural inheritance has no value. That what one knows in the language one was born into does not count as knowledge.

Contemporary India has not fully escaped this crisis. It has merely updated its terms. The language that now carries the burden of prestige is English. The languages that carry the stigma of ordinariness are the regional ones — Marathi, Gujarati, Bhojpuri, Gondi, Tulu, Santali. And the children who arrive at school speaking these languages, only to find that their language is the medium of the playground rather than the classroom, are experiencing a version of precisely the same dispossession that Tukaram's community experienced in the seventeenth century.

The response that the Bhakti and Sant traditions mounted to that medieval crisis is one of the most instructive episodes in the history of community-led literacy. And it has direct implications for the design of grassroots education initiatives in India today.

The Voice of the Soil: Tukaram, Narsinh Mehta, and the Sant Tradition as Grassroots Literacy Movement

Tukaram was a Shudra — a man of low caste, a farmer and shopkeeper from Dehu village in Maharashtra, living in the early seventeenth century. He had no formal education in Sanskrit, no access to the scholarly traditions that defined religious and intellectual authority in his time. What he had was Marathi — the spoken language of his community — and an interior life of such intensity and clarity that it generated, over the course of his lifetime, more than four thousand abhangas: devotional poems of extraordinary literary quality, composed in the spoken vernacular, addressed to Vithoba of Pandharpur, and sung in public spaces where anyone could hear them.

The institutional authorities of his time recognised immediately what Tukaram was doing and why it was threatening. He was told to throw his compositions into the river — that sacred knowledge had no business being expressed in a low-caste farmer's spoken Marathi. The tradition holds that the abhangas floated. That Vithoba himself validated them. Whether or not one holds this literally, the meaning is clear: the community that received and preserved Tukaram's abhangas was making a collective decision that their language was worthy of sacred expression, and that this decision could not be unmade by institutional authority.

This is what made the Sant tradition a literacy movement. Not in the narrow sense of teaching reading and writing — though the warkari communities that formed around Bhakti saints like Tukaram, Dnyaneshwar, Namdev, and Eknath did develop significant literary cultures in the vernacular. But in the deeper sense: the sense that their language was a valid medium for the highest forms of human expression. That wisdom spoken in Marathi was wisdom. That a Shudra farmer's insight into the human condition was insight. That the community's own linguistic and cultural inheritance was not a deficit to be overcome but a resource to be celebrated.

In Gujarat, Narsinh Mehta — the fifteenth-century poet-saint whose Vaishnava devotional compositions in Gujarati are among the finest in that language's literary tradition — performed a parallel act of linguistic validation. Born into a Brahmin family, he chose to compose in spoken Gujarati rather than Sanskrit, to sing in the company of people his caste position should have kept him from associating with, and to locate the divine not in the ritually pure spaces of orthodox religion but in the everyday, embodied, emotionally available life of the community. His Bhajan — Vaishnav Jan To — was Gandhi's favourite song, and it remains one of the most widely known compositions in the Gujarati language. It endures not because it was preserved in a library but because it was carried, for six centuries, in the memory and the mouths of a community that recognised itself in it.

What Tukaram and Narsinh Mehta and the entire Sant tradition accomplished — across multiple languages, multiple centuries, multiple regions — was the restoration of community linguistic confidence. They did not teach communities to read. They taught communities to believe that what they already knew, in the language they already spoke, was worth knowing. And this belief — this restoration of linguistic and cultural self-worth — is, as contemporary literacy research confirms, the essential precondition for everything that formal literacy instruction attempts to produce.

What Contemporary Literacy Research Confirms About Language Identity and Learning

The connection between language identity — a child's sense of pride and confidence in their mother tongue — and literacy outcomes is one of the most robustly supported findings in contemporary educational research. UNESCO's work on mother-tongue-based multilingual education, the extensive literature on culturally responsive pedagogy, and the growing body of research on indigenous language revitalisation programmes all point to the same conclusion: a child who is ashamed of or ambivalent about their mother tongue learns to read and write in it significantly more slowly and less securely than a child who feels pride and confidence in that language.

This finding has a corollary that is less frequently cited but equally important: a child who is taught from their earliest schooling years in a language other than their mother tongue — even a language they are beginning to acquire — experiences a cognitive and emotional cost that is measurable in learning outcomes, school attendance, and long-term educational engagement. The cost is not merely linguistic. It is psychological. It is the cost of being told, implicitly but unmistakably, that the language your family speaks at home is not the language of learning. That what you know in the most intimate register of your experience does not count in the official world of knowledge.

In India, this cost falls most heavily on children from rural, tribal, and linguistic minority communities — children who arrive at school speaking Gondi, Santali, Tulu, Bodo, Meitei, or any of the hundreds of other languages that are not the medium of instruction in their state's formal education system. These children are not linguistically deficient. They are linguistically rich, in a language that the system around them does not recognise as richness. And the gap between what they know and what the school will acknowledge them for knowing is one of the primary drivers of the rural literacy gap that community-led literacy programmes are trying to close.

The lesson of Tukaram's abhangas — that restoring a community's confidence in the value of its own language is the first and most essential act of literacy development — is not a historical curiosity. It is a live and urgent design principle for contemporary grassroots education initiatives.

The Spin a Yarn India Approach: Oral Storytelling as Language Confidence Infrastructure

The Anhaya Foundation's approach through Spin a Yarn India is grounded in precisely this understanding. Our programmes do not begin with reading instruction. They begin with the prior question: does this child believe that the language they speak at home — the language in which their grandmother told them stories, in which their community names the seasons and the stars and the moods of the river — is a language worth knowing? A language in which wisdom can be expressed and received?

When the answer to that question is yes — when a child has heard their community's folk stories told with pride and care, in the language of those stories' origin, and has been told explicitly that this knowledge is valuable, that this language is rich, that what their community knows and has always known is worth carrying forward — the rest of literacy development follows with a naturalness and an ease that instruction alone cannot produce.

Our oral storytelling programmes work at this foundational level: building the language confidence and cultural pride that transform reluctant, alienated learners into children who want to read — because reading offers them access to more of the stories and knowledge that they have come to understand as their inheritance.

This is the Sant tradition's insight applied to contemporary educational design. And it is an insight that social investors, CSR partners, and educational institutions can directly support — not by replacing what communities already do, but by resourcing and amplifying the oral storytelling practices that build language confidence from within.

Five Indicators That a Community-Led Literacy Programme Is Working: What to Look For Beyond Reading Scores

For social investors and programme evaluators accustomed to measuring literacy outcomes through reading fluency scores and grade-level assessments, community-led oral storytelling programmes present a measurement challenge that is worth addressing directly. The most significant early outcomes of these programmes are not captured by reading tests. They precede reading. They create the conditions in which reading becomes possible. And they are measurable — but through different instruments than the ones that standardised assessment relies on.

• Voluntary language use: Children in effective oral storytelling programmes begin using their mother tongue more frequently and more confidently in contexts where they previously defaulted to the dominant language. They begin correcting adults who mispronounce words from their community's language. They begin asking for more stories in that language. These are early indicators of language confidence restoration — the precondition for mother-tongue literacy acquisition.

• Story retelling frequency and complexity: Children who have been exposed to a rich oral storytelling environment begin retelling stories spontaneously — to siblings, to peers, to parents. The complexity and accuracy of their retellings increase measurably over time. This is a direct indicator of narrative comprehension and oral language development, both of which predict reading comprehension with high reliability.

• Question generation: Children in effective programmes begin generating questions about the stories they hear — about motivation, consequence, cultural context, alternative outcomes. Question generation is one of the strongest early predictors of reading comprehension and critical thinking development.

• Community storytelling participation: Adults in communities with active oral storytelling programmes begin telling more stories themselves — at home, in community gatherings, in the spaces between labour and sleep. This indicates that the programme has succeeded in restoring the social value of the oral tradition, not merely delivering content to children. Community-wide participation in oral storytelling is the strongest predictor of long-term transmission and sustainability.

• School attendance and engagement: Children who feel pride in their cultural and linguistic identity show measurably higher school attendance rates and stronger classroom engagement than children who do not. The causal pathway runs from cultural confidence through psychological security through the willingness to enter and remain in learning environments that may be linguistically and culturally challenging. Attendance is a proxy for this confidence — and it is a metric that every education funder already tracks.

An Invitation to Invest Where the Evidence Points

Tukaram threw his abhangas into the river because he was told they did not belong there. They floated. Five centuries later, schoolchildren in Maharashtra still memorise them. Narsinh Mehta's Vaishnav Jan To was sung at Gandhi's prayer meetings and is sung today in Gujarati homes across the world. The warkari tradition that Tukaram's community created — the annual pilgrimage to Pandharpur, the singing of abhangas along the road, the community of devotion that dissolved caste distinctions for the duration of the journey — continues to gather hundreds of thousands of people every year.

These are not merely cultural achievements. They are the long-term outcomes of a grassroots literacy investment that nobody formally funded, nobody formally measured, and nobody formally planned — but that produced results so durable that they are still compounding five centuries later.

Imagine what could be achieved with deliberate investment. With the recognition that the oral tradition is infrastructure. With the resources to identify the Tukarams of contemporary India — the community storytellers, the folk singers, the grandmothers with three hundred songs in their memory — and give them the platform, the support, and the reach that their knowledge deserves.

This is what the Anhaya Foundation and Spin a Yarn India are building. We invite you to invest in it.

"Tukaram did not teach Maharashtra to read. He taught Maharashtra that Marathi was worth reading in. Five centuries of literacy followed from that single act of cultural confidence. This is the return on investment that the oral tradition produces. It just takes longer than a financial quarter to see." — Anhaya Foundation

🌲 Connect with the Anhaya Foundation to explore partnership opportunities in community-led oral storytelling and mother-tongue literacy programmes across India. The abhangas are still floating. Come find out why.