The bhakti poets: devotion for everyone
Poet-saints across India, from Tamil singers to Kabir and Mirabai, preach passionate love of God in the people's languages, open to women and low castes.
- A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement — John Stratton Hawley, Harvard University Press (2015)
- An Introduction to Hinduism — Gavin Flood, Cambridge University Press (1996)
- Speaking of Śiva — A. K. Ramanujan (trans.), Penguin Classics (1973)
- Mira Bai — Encyclopaedia Britannica
Bhakti means devotion, or loving participation in God. The Bhagavad Gita had already praised it as a path to liberation, but from around the sixth century it became a mass, emotional, singing religion.
- An Introduction to Hinduism — Gavin Flood, Cambridge University Press (1996)
- A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement — John Stratton Hawley, Harvard University Press (2015)
The Tamil beginnings
In the Tamil country, between about the sixth and ninth centuries, wandering poet-saints sang hymns to their God in Tamil rather than Sanskrit: twelve Vaishnava Alvars, devoted to Vishnu, and sixty-three Shaiva Nayanars, devoted to Shiva. They included a woman, Andal, who imagined herself as Vishnu’s bride, and saints from low castes. Their hymns are still sung in South Indian temples, and the philosopher Ramanuja built on their devotion to argue for a personal, loving God.
- An Introduction to Hinduism — Gavin Flood, Cambridge University Press (1996)
- A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement — John Stratton Hawley, Harvard University Press (2015)
Spreading north
In twelfth-century Karnataka, Basava and the Virashaivas (Lingayats) composed short, piercing poems (vachanas) to Shiva that mocked temple ritual and caste: “the rich will make temples for Shiva; what shall I, a poor man, do?” begins one of Basava’s best-known poems in A. K. Ramanujan’s translation.
- Speaking of Śiva — A. K. Ramanujan (trans.), Penguin Classics (1973)
- A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement — John Stratton Hawley, Harvard University Press (2015)
- An Introduction to Hinduism — Gavin Flood, Cambridge University Press (1996)
In the north, from the fifteenth century, came a great wave. Kabir, a weaver from a Muslim family in Varanasi, sang of a formless God beyond Hindu and Muslim ritual. Ravidas, a leatherworker, is revered by many Dalits today. Mirabai, a Rajput princess, sang of Krishna as her only husband. Surdas sang of Krishna’s childhood, and Tulsidas retold the Ramayana in Awadhi Hindi in his Ramcharitmanas, perhaps the most loved book in north India. In Bengal, Chaitanya (1486–1534) led ecstatic chanting of Krishna’s names, a tradition that later produced the Hare Krishna movement.
- A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement — John Stratton Hawley, Harvard University Press (2015)
- Mira Bai — Encyclopaedia Britannica
- An Introduction to Hinduism — Gavin Flood, Cambridge University Press (1996)
What it changed
The bhakti poets wrote in the languages people spoke, so they helped create the literatures of Tamil, Kannada, Marathi, Hindi, Bengali and others. They taught that God cares for love, not birth or ritual purity, and many of their saints were women or from low castes. Songs by Kabir, Ravidas and Namdev were included in the Sikh scripture, the Guru Granth Sahib.
- A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement — John Stratton Hawley, Harvard University Press (2015)
- An Introduction to Hinduism — Gavin Flood, Cambridge University Press (1996)
Yet bhakti did not abolish caste. Low-caste saints were honoured in song while temples often stayed closed to people of their communities. Ambedkar and later Dalit writers have pointed to that gap. Still, when Gandhi sang his favourite hymns, or when crowds today sing bhajans through the night, they are drawing on this tradition of devotion open to everyone.
- A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement — John Stratton Hawley, Harvard University Press (2015)
- From Untouchable to Dalit: Essays on the Ambedkar Movement — Eleanor Zelliot, Manohar (1992)
A single great "bhakti movement" swept India from south to north, renewing Hinduism with love and equality before God and holding it together in hard times.
- An Introduction to Hinduism — Gavin Flood, Cambridge University Press (1996)
- A Survey of Hinduism (3rd edition) — Klaus K. Klostermaier, State University of New York Press (2007)
John Stratton Hawley shows that the idea of one bhakti "movement" was largely built by twentieth- century scholars and nationalists. There were many regional traditions, and while they gave voice to women and low castes, they rarely overturned caste in social life.
- A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement — John Stratton Hawley, Harvard University Press (2015)
Why it matters today
Bhakti is how most Hindus actually practise their faith: singing hymns, loving a personal God, visiting temples and going on pilgrimage. The songs of Mirabai, Kabir, Tukaram and Tulsidas are still sung daily, and their challenge to caste and priestly authority is a resource for reformers today.
The bhakti poets helped create India's regional literatures in Tamil, Kannada, Marathi, Hindi, Bengali and more. Poets such as Kabir drew on both Hindu and Sufi ideas and are celebrated as symbols of a shared Indian culture.