For years I have lived in two intellectual worlds that seldom meet. One is the world of Marathi bhakti poetry, of Tukaram, Jnaneshwar and the pilgrim road to Pandharpur. The other is the world of modern physics, of quantum theory, uncertainty and the profound questions raised by Heisenberg and Bohr. I make no claim to expertise in either. I have simply been intrigued by the way both, in very different languages, challenge the neat categories through which we understand the world.
Before going further, a disclaimer is in order. This is not an attempt to argue that seventeenth-century saints anticipated twentieth-century quantum physics, or that quantum mechanics somehow proves Advaita Vedanta. Both claims do a disservice to science and spirituality alike. My interest lies elsewhere. It is in the striking similarities in the way both traditions confront the limits of human thought.
There is a point in some of Sant Jnyaneshwar’s writings where language itself begins to behave like physics. Familiar opposites lose their certainty. The observer seems to merge with the act of observation. The poem stops describing God and starts asking deeper questions about reality.
Take these well-known lines:
तुज स्थूल म्हणू की सूक्ष्म रे ।
स्थूल सूक्ष्म एकु गोविंदु रे ॥
Should I call You gross or subtle? The gross and the subtle are one Govinda.
This is no poetic flourish. Tukaram creates a distinction only to dissolve it. Gross and subtle are not reconciled; they are shown to be inadequate ways of describing what lies beyond them.
Modern physics arrived at a similar crossroads. The electron refused to behave as either a particle or a wave. It displayed characteristics of both while fitting comfortably into neither. The problem, it turned out, was not the electron but the framework through which scientists were trying to describe it.
Again, Tukaram makes the same move:
आकार निराकार एकु गोविंदु.
Form and the formless are one.
Another celebrated abhang pushes the idea further:
अणुरेणुयां थोकडा
तुका आकाशाएवढा
Smaller than the smallest particle, yet as vast as the sky.
The imagery is atomic, but the subject is not matter. Tukaram is speaking of consciousness. The ego shrinks into insignificance while awareness expands beyond all limits.
The closing line is perhaps the most remarkable:
सांडिली त्रिपुटी, दीप उजळला घटीं ।
The tripuṭī has been abandoned and the lamp within the vessel is lit.
The reference is to the ancient Indian idea of tripuṭī, the triad of knower, knowledge and known. Long before the bhakti movement, the Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika philosophers had analysed knowledge into three components: the knower (pramātā), the means of knowledge (pramāṇa) and the object known (prameya). It was an elegant way of understanding cognition.
Tukaram does not reject that analysis. He simply says that there comes a point where it is no longer enough.
Jnaneshwar develops the same idea more systematically in the Dnyaneshwari:
ज्ञाता ज्ञान आणि ज्ञेय ।
हे त्रिविध असे दिसे ।
परी जाणोनि आत्मतत्त्वें ।
त्रिपुटी नाही उरे ॥
The knower, knowledge and the known appear to be three. Realise the nature of the Self and the triad disappears.
Then comes one of the most beautiful images in Marathi literature:
लाट आणि पाणी ।
दुजेपणा नाहीं ॥
Wave and water are not two.
The wave has shape, movement and identity. Yet it has no existence apart from water. The distinction is useful, but it is not ultimate.
Quantum mechanics arrived at an equally unsettling conclusion. The observer cannot always be separated from the observed. Measurement influences the system being measured. What we see depends, at least in part, on how we ask the question.
That does not make physics and bhakti the same. One is built on mathematics and experiment, the other on inward experience. Their methods and purposes are entirely different. Yet both reach moments when inherited categories begin to fail.
Quantum field theory tells us that particles are really excitations of underlying fields. What appears to be a solid object is better understood as a pattern of relationships.
Jnaneshwar’s image of wave and water points in much the same direction. Diversity is real enough at one level, but beneath it lies unity.
Quantum theory also replaced certainty with probability. Position and momentum cannot both be known with complete precision. The universe turned out to be subtler than Newtonian certainty had imagined.
The Varkari saints carried out their own experiment, not in a laboratory but within the mind. When they examined the sense of a separate self, it slowly dissolved. As Tukaram says elsewhere, द्वैताचा भ्रम गेला.
Both journeys eventually run into the limits of language.
Physicists speak of wave-particle duality because ordinary words no longer suffice. Tukaram reaches for paradox because lived non-duality cannot be captured by everyday speech.
Even quantum entanglement quietly challenges our instinctive belief that everything exists in isolation. Tukaram expresses a similar intuition in a different language: जेथे जातो तेथे तू माझा सांगाती.
So the phrase Quantum Abhangas is not meant as a historical claim. It is simply an invitation to read these poems with fresh eyes. The tripuṭī that Nyāya philosophers analysed with such precision becomes, for Tukaram and Jnaneshwar, something to be left behind. The gross and the subtle are one. The wave and the water are one.
Perhaps the most “quantum” thing about Tukaram is not his references to atoms but his intellectual humility. स्थूल सूक्ष्म एकु गोविंदु reminds us that the categories through which we understand reality are useful, but they are not reality itself.
When classical mechanics reached its limits, quantum theory emerged. When conceptual duality reached its limits, the abhang became an expression of non-duality.
The gross and the subtle are one.
The wave and the water are one.
The knower and the known are one.
Not because physics proves scripture or scripture predicted physics, but because honest inquiry, whether in the laboratory or on the road to Pandharpur, eventually teaches the same lesson. Reality is always a little richer than the language we use to describe it. At the end of both journeys, certainty gives way to wonder.
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