The Bhakti Movement

The Bhakti movement is the name given to the great wave of devotional religion that swept India from about the sixth century to the eighteenth, transforming Hinduism and leaving a vast body of poetry and song in almost every Indian language. Bhakti (from the root bhaj, “to share, to participate, to love”) means devotion — passionate, personal love of God. Where the Vedic tradition emphasised ritual and the Upaniṣadic and philosophical traditions emphasised knowledge, the bhakti saints taught that love is the surest way to God: that God is a person who can be known, adored, longed for and even quarrelled with; that his grace saves, regardless of one’s birth, learning or ritual purity; and that he is best praised not in Sanskrit, the sacred language of the Brahmins, but in the languages of the people — Tamil, Kannada, Marathi, Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Gujarati, Kashmiri. Many of its greatest poets were from the lower castes, or untouchables, or women; many mocked the pretensions of priests and pandits; some, like Kabīr and Nānak, reached across the boundary between Hinduism and Islam. The bhakti poets created much of the vernacular literature of India, its devotional music and its popular religion, and their songs are still sung by millions.

Origins

Bhakti in the scriptures

The idea of devotion to a personal God is ancient. The Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad (perhaps 4th–2nd century BCE) speaks of “supreme devotion (parā bhakti) to God, and to the teacher as to God”. The The Bhagavad Gītā made bhakti one of its three paths and, in its climax, the highest: “Fix your mind on me, be devoted to me… Abandoning all dharmas, take refuge in me alone; I will free you from all sins” (18.65–66). The epics and the Purāṇas — above all the Bhāgavata Purāṇa (c. 9th–10th century), with its tales of the child Kṛṣṇa and his love-play with the cowherd women (gopīs) of Vṛndāvana — supplied the stories and images that later devotion drew on. The Nārada Bhakti Sūtra and the Śāṇḍilya Bhakti Sūtra systematised devotion as a doctrine.

The Tamil saints

As a popular movement, bhakti began in the Tamil country between about the sixth and ninth centuries, with two groups of poet-saints who travelled from temple to temple singing ecstatic hymns in Tamil. The twelve Āḻvārs (“those immersed”) sang of Viṣṇu; their 4,000 hymns, the Nālāyira Divya Prabandham, are revered as the “Tamil Veda” and sung in Vaiṣṇava temples to this day. Their greatest poet, Nammāḻvār (9th century?), wrote the Tiruvāymoḻi; their only woman, Āṇṭāḷ, longed for Viṣṇu as her bridegroom. The sixty-three Nāyaṉārs sang of Śiva; among them Appar, Campantar and Cuntarar, whose hymns form the Tēvāram, and Māṇikkavācakar, whose Tiruvācakam is one of the most moving devotional works in any language; and Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār, a woman who asked Śiva to turn her into a skeletal ghost so she could dance at his feet in the cremation ground. The Nāyaṉārs included a hunter, a potter, an untouchable (Nantaṉār, who is said to have passed through fire to enter the temple at Chidambaram) and a king.

Philosophical foundations

The theologians of Vedānta gave bhakti intellectual foundations. Rāmānuja (11th–12th century) built his Viśiṣṭādvaita on the Āḻvārs’ devotion; Madhva (13th century) founded Dvaita on devotion to Viṣṇu; Nimbārka, Vallabha and the Bengali Vaiṣṇavas developed theologies of Kṛṣṇa’s love. In the Śaiva tradition, the Śaiva Siddhānta of Tamil Nadu and the Vīraśaiva (Liṅgāyat) movement of Karnataka did the same for devotion to Śiva.

The spread of bhakti

A famous Sanskrit verse in the Padma Purāṇa personifies Bhakti as a woman who says: “I was born in Draviḍa, grew up in Karnataka, lived here and there in Maharashtra, and grew old and weak in Gujarat… Then I came to Vṛndāvana, and became young and beautiful again.” The verse roughly maps the movement’s spread.

Karnataka: the Vīraśaivas

In twelfth-century Karnataka, Basavaṇṇa (Basava), a Brahmin minister at the court of King Bijjala, founded the Vīraśaiva or Liṅgāyat movement, which rejected caste, temple worship, Brahmin priests and the Vedas, and taught that every devotee should wear a small Śiva-liṅga on the body as the sign of a direct relationship with God. Basava and his companions — Allama Prabhu, the mystic, and Akka Mahādēvi, a young woman who rejected her husband, threw off her clothes and wandered naked, covered only by her hair, in search of Śiva, “the lord white as jasmine” — composed short, fierce prose-poems called vacanas (“sayings”) in Kannada. Their community, the Anubhava Maṇṭapa (“hall of experience”), included members of every caste; when Basava arranged a marriage between a Brahmin’s daughter and an untouchable’s son, a violent backlash destroyed the community.

Maharashtra: the Vārkarīs

In Maharashtra, the Vārkarī (“pilgrim”) tradition centred on the god Viṭṭhal (Viṭhobā) of Pandharpur, a form of Kṛṣṇa who stands on a brick with his hands on his hips. Its saints include Jñāneśvar (13th century), whose Marathi commentary on the Gītā, the Jñāneśvarī, is a masterpiece of Marathi literature; Nāmdev (13th–14th century), a tailor; Janābāī, a maidservant; Cokhāmeḷā, an untouchable who was not allowed into the temple and sang to Viṭṭhal from outside; Eknāth (16th century); and Tukārām (17th century), a grocer of the Śūdra caste whose abhaṅgas (devotional songs) are the most loved poems in Marathi. Every year, hundreds of thousands of Vārkarīs walk for three weeks to Pandharpur, carrying the sandals of Jñāneśvar and Tukārām, singing their songs.

North India: saguṇa and nirguṇa

In North India, from the fourteenth century, bhakti took two forms. The saguṇa (“with qualities”) poets worshipped God in a personal form — Rāma or Kṛṣṇa. Tulsīdās (16th century) retold the Rāmāyaṇa in Avadhī as the Rāmcaritmānas, the most widely read book in North India. Sūrdās (16th century), traditionally blind, sang of the child Kṛṣṇa’s pranks and the gopīs’ longing. Mīrābāī (16th century), a Rajput princess, rejected her royal marriage and her family’s demands, declared herself the bride of Kṛṣṇa, and sang her love in songs that defied every convention.

The nirguṇa (“without qualities”) saints worshipped a God beyond all form, to be found within the heart and through the repetition of his name. Their greatest voice was Kabīr (15th century), a weaver of Vārāṇasī from a Muslim family, who mocked both Hindu idol-worship and Muslim ritual: “If God is in the mosque, whose is the rest of the world?” Ravidās (Raidās), a leatherworker, sang of a city without sorrow, “Begampura”, where there is no caste. Guru Nānak (1469–1539), founder of Sikhism, taught devotion to the one formless God (Ik Onkār), the equality of all, and the rejection of ritual and caste. Many of these saints were connected, by legend at least, with the teacher Rāmānanda of Vārāṇasī, who, it is said, opened Rāma-devotion to all castes.

Bengal: Caitanya

In Bengal, Caitanya (1486–1534) led an ecstatic movement of congregational singing (kīrtan) of the names of Kṛṣṇa, and was regarded by his followers as Kṛṣṇa and Rādhā in one body. His disciples, the six Gosvāmīs of Vṛndāvana, developed a sophisticated theology of devotional emotion (bhakti-rasa). The twelfth-century poet Jayadeva‘s Sanskrit Gītagovinda, on the love of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa, was its scripture of passion. Caitanya’s tradition, Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism, spread worldwide in the twentieth century as the Hare Kṛṣṇa movement.

Kashmir, Gujarat, Assam, Punjab

Bhakti flowered in every region: Lal Ded (14th century), a Kashmiri Śaiva mystic who wandered naked singing; Narsinh Mehtā (15th century) in Gujarat, whose “Vaiṣṇava jana to” was Gandhi’s favourite hymn; Śaṅkaradeva (15th–16th century) in Assam, who founded a religious and theatrical tradition; and in Punjab, the Sikh Gurus.

Themes

Love as the path

Bhakti made love — not knowledge, ritual or austerity — the path to God. The saints’ poetry explores every form of love: the servant’s devotion to his master, the friend’s affection, the parent’s tenderness for the child (Sūrdās’s baby Kṛṣṇa stealing butter), and above all the erotic longing of the lover for the beloved — the viraha, the pain of separation, of the gopīs for the absent Kṛṣṇa. Theorists like Rūpa Gosvāmī classified these as rasas of devotion.

Against caste and ritual

Bhakti saints repeatedly mocked the pretensions of Brahmins and the emptiness of ritual. Kabīr: “Pandit, you are a fool… if a Brahmin is born from a Brahmin woman, why was he not born by some other way?” Basava: “The rich will make temples for Śiva. What shall I, a poor man, do? My legs are pillars, the body the shrine, the head a cupola of gold.” Their communities often included people of every caste, and their saints included untouchables (Cokhāmeḷā, Ravidās, Nantaṉār). Historians debate how far bhakti actually changed the caste system — it created spiritual equality, but social hierarchy largely persisted — but it gave voice and dignity to people who had none in Brahminical religion.

Women saints

Few traditions in the pre-modern world produced as many women religious poets: Āṇṭāḷ, Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār, Akka Mahādēvi, Janābāī, Bahiṇābāī, Lal Ded, Mīrābāī. Their poetry often defied the norms of female conduct — Akka Mahādēvi’s nakedness, Mīrā’s refusal of her husband and in-laws, Lal Ded’s wandering — in the name of a higher love.

The name

Many bhakti saints taught that the name of God (nāma) — Rāma, Hari, Viṭṭhal — repeated with love, is itself saving. “The name of Rāma is greater than Rāma himself,” says Tulsīdās.

Saguṇa and nirguṇa

The great theological divide was between devotion to God with form (saguṇa) — Rāma, Kṛṣṇa, Viṭṭhal, Śiva — and devotion to God beyond form (nirguṇa). Sūrdās mocked the nirguṇa path in his “Bhramargīt” (“Song of the Bee”), where the gopīs ridicule Uddhava for telling them to meditate on a formless God when they long for the dark-skinned boy who stole their hearts.

Bhakti and Islam

Bhakti developed alongside Sufism, the mystical tradition of Islam, which arrived in India from the twelfth century; Sufi orders such as the Chishtīs shared with the bhakti saints an emphasis on love, music (qawwālī), the teacher, and the rejection of empty ritual. Kabīr, born into a Muslim family of weavers, drew on both; Guru Nānak travelled widely and included Muslim saints (Bābā Farīd) in the Sikh canon; Amīr Khusrau (13th–14th century), disciple of the Sufi Nizāmuddīn Auliyā, wrote in Hindavi and Persian; the Mughal prince Dārā Shikoh sought the common ground of the two traditions.

Legacy

The bhakti saints created the foundations of many modern Indian literatures — Kannada vacanas, Marathi abhaṅgas, the Hindi of Kabīr, Tulsī and Sūr, Punjabi Gurbānī, Bengali kīrtan. Their songs remain the core of popular devotion and of classical and folk music. Modern reformers drew on them: Gandhi’s prayer meetings sang Narsinh Mehtā, Tulsīdās and Kabīr; Tagore translated Kabīr; Ambedkar honoured Kabīr, Cokhāmeḷā and Ravidās (whose followers, the Ravidassia community, now have their own religion). In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the saints were rediscovered as poets of a pluralistic, egalitarian India.

Bhakti in conversation

Kabīr’s question is the sharpest thing the movement ever said: “If God is in the mosque, whose is the rest of the world?” And the devotee’s preference — “I want to taste sugar, not become sugar” — states, in one line, why bhakti chose love over knowledge.