Sant Tukaram

The film tells the life of the poet Tukaram, who lived in the seventeenth century. Tukaram is one of the best known saint poets of Maharashtra. He belonged to the Bhakti movement and to the Varkari tradition. What he did was leave the courtly language, Sanskrit, and write in the language people spoke. The film treats that choice as a question reaching into the twentieth century as well. Vishnupant Pagnis plays the lead. The work was made by the Prabhat Film Company. It was screened at Venice in 1937 and was the first Indian film shown at an international festival. It ran in a single hall in Bombay for more than a year. This Marathi film, a hundred and thirty one minutes long, was completed in 1936.