The Bhakti Movement

Sometime in the early centuries of the first millennium, a new note entered the religious life of India, and once it was struck it never faded. It was not the sound of a ritual formula in Sanskrit, chanted by a priest at a fire that ordinary people could not approach. It was the sound of a poet singing, in his own everyday language, to a God he addressed as a lover, a friend, a mother, a master — singing that this God could be reached by anyone who loved Him enough, and that no accident of birth, no barrier of caste, no lack of learning could keep a true devotee out. Over the next thousand years that note swelled into a chorus that swept the whole subcontinent, region by region, language by language. We call it, today, the Bhakti movement.

The word bhakti comes from a root meaning to share, to partake, to belong to. It is usually translated “devotion,” but that word is too pale. Bhakti is love directed at God — personal, passionate, often extravagant, the love of a heart that wants not to understand the divine but to belong to it. The astonishing claim of the poet-saints was that this love, and this love alone, is enough. Not sacrifice, not scholarship, not the correct performance of rites, not the purity of one’s lineage. Just love. It was, in its quiet way, one of the most democratic ideas any civilization has produced.

A goddess who travelled north

The tradition tells the story of its own devotion as a story about a woman. In a famous passage from the Bhagavata Mahatmya, Bhakti herself appears as a goddess and describes her life. She was born, she says, in the Dravida country — the Tamil south — and there she was young and radiant. She grew to maturity in Karnataka, then wandered west and north through Maharashtra and Gujarat, and there, neglected, she grew old and worn. Only when she reached Vrindavan, the land of Krishna’s play, was her youth restored, and she danced again.

It is an allegory, of course, and a self-aware one: it is the movement telling the map of its own spread as the biography of a goddess. And the map is essentially right. The oldest scripture of devotion, the Bhagavata Purana, had already prophesied it, promising that in the dark age of Kali the truest devotees of God would be born in the south, by the rivers of the Tamil land, the Tamraparni and the Kaveri and the rest. The great wave of bhakti did begin in the Tamil country, and it did travel, over many centuries, from there to nearly every corner of India. Hold on to the goddess and her journey; it is the thread through everything that follows. But hold it loosely, too, because one of the more interesting questions about the Bhakti movement is whether it was ever quite the single, orderly journey the story makes it sound.

The Tamil dawn

The first singers we can name arose in the Tamil-speaking south between roughly the sixth and ninth centuries, and there were two families of them. The Alvars, twelve in number, were lost in love for Vishnu. The Nayanars, sixty-three of them, were on fire for Shiva. They were not philosophers writing treatises; they were poets in ecstasy and anguish, wandering from temple to temple, singing verses in Tamil so raw and intimate that they still ache to hear. One of the Alvars, Andal, was a young woman who refused every earthly husband because she considered herself already married to the Lord, and her poems remain among the most passionate devotional verse ever composed. Among the Nayanars was Karaikkal Ammaiyar, another woman, who asked Shiva to strip away her beauty so that nothing would stand between her and Him.

Two things about this Tamil dawn set the pattern for everything after. First, the poets sang in Tamil, not Sanskrit — in the mother tongue, the language of the marketplace and the home, so that everyone could understand and join in. Their collected Vaishnava hymns came to be called the Nalayira Divya Prabandham, the “Four Thousand Divine Compositions,” and the tradition honoured them with a startling title: the Tamil Veda. A vernacular poem, set beside the eternal Sanskrit scripture as its equal. Second, the poets came from everywhere in society. Among the sixty-three Nayanars were kings and also a man remembered as an untouchable, and among the Alvars was one of low birth whose devotion, the stories insist, outshone that of every brahmin. The message was there from the very first verses: God does not check your caste at the door.

It is worth pausing to correct a common mistake. Many people, especially in the north, imagine that bhakti “began” with Kabir or with the sants of the Hindi belt in the fifteenth or sixteenth century. It did not. By the time Kabir sang, the devotional tradition was already close to a thousand years old, and it had begun a very long way to the south.

The god with form and the god without

As the wave moved on, it revealed a fault line running through the whole of bhakti — a disagreement not about whether to love God but about what, exactly, God is.

On one side stood the devotion the tradition calls saguna, “with qualities.” Here God has a form, a name, a face, a story you can hold in your mind and your heart: He is Rama, or Krishna, or Vithoba standing on his brick at Pandharpur. You can picture Him, serve Him, quarrel with Him, adore His image in the temple. Most of the best-loved bhakti poets sang this way — Tulsidas to Rama, Surdas and Mirabai to Krishna, the whole world of Krishna devotion that would reach its height with Chaitanya.

On the other side stood nirguna devotion, “without qualities.” Its poets, called the sants, insisted that God has no form at all — no image, no incarnation, nothing the mind can grasp or the hand can carve. To worship a statue, they said, was to mistake the finger for the moon. Kabir is the towering figure here, and his verses scald: he mocked the pandit with his scriptures and the mullah with his call to prayer alike, and pointed past both to a formless truth living in the heart. Ravidas, Dadu, and Guru Nanak sang in this key too. Nirguna bhakti tended to be the more socially radical of the two, precisely because a God without form has no temple to guard, no priesthood to feed, and no use for the ranks of purity that the temple sustained.

These were not two separate religions but two banks of one river, and the water often crossed between them. Yet the difference was real and deeply felt, and much of the drama of later bhakti is the drama of these two loves living side by side.

The regions catch fire

From the Tamil country the fire leapt north, and in each region it took a local shape and a local tongue.

In Karnataka, in the twelfth century, arose the vachana poets — the Virashaivas, or Lingayats. Basava, a statesman and reformer, and the fearless woman-saint Akka Mahadevi, who walked away from a king and, by some accounts, from her clothes, to belong wholly to Shiva, composed short, sharp free-verse sayings that attacked temple, priest and caste with astonishing directness. “The rich will make temples for Shiva,” Basava wrote; “what shall I, a poor man, do? My legs are pillars, the body the shrine.” The body itself, not the built temple, as the true house of God.

In Maharashtra, a devotional tradition gathered around the god Vithoba of Pandharpur and the pilgrims, the Varkaris, who still walk to him in their hundreds of thousands. Its founding voice was Jnaneshwar, who in the late thirteenth century, while barely out of his teens, produced the Jnaneshwari, a Marathi commentary on the Bhagavad Gita so luminous that it made philosophy sing in the common tongue. Centuries later the same tradition gave voice to Tukaram, a struggling grain-seller of low caste whose abhangs — plain, wounded, funny, and utterly sincere — are perhaps the most loved poems in the Marathi language.

In the Hindi-speaking north the wave arrived latest and broke hardest. The tradition remembers a teacher named Ramananda as the bridge who carried southern devotion into the northern plains and, crucially, opened it to disciples of every caste and creed. From that opening poured the greatest names of northern bhakti: Kabir the weaver and Ravidas the cobbler on the nirguna side; on the saguna side Surdas, blind and singing Krishna’s childhood; Tulsidas, whose Ramcharitmanas retold the Ramayana in Awadhi and has often been called the Bible of northern India; and Mirabai, the Rajput princess who abandoned her palace and her marriage to wander singing of Krishna, her only husband. In Bengal, at the turn of the sixteenth century, Chaitanya danced through the streets in a rapture of Krishna’s name and set in motion a whole theology of divine love. In Assam, Sankardeva built a devotional culture that endures to this day.

Everywhere the shape was the same and the language was different: a saint, a personal God, a stream of song in the mother tongue, and crowds who had never been welcome at the Sanskrit rite finding that they were welcome here.

When the mother tongue became holy

That last point is not a footnote. It may be the single most consequential thing the Bhakti movement did, and its effects long outlived the movement itself.

For centuries, the language of the sacred in India had been Sanskrit — precise, magnificent, and guarded. The Vedas were Sanskrit; the priesthood was its keeper; and access to it was, in practice, access limited by birth. When the poet-saints chose instead to sing to God in Tamil, in Kannada, in Marathi, in Braj and Awadhi and Bengali and Punjabi, they did something quietly revolutionary. They declared that the God of the whole universe understood the language of the cowherd and the washerwoman perfectly well, and preferred, if anything, the honest cry in a rough dialect to the flawless formula in a tongue the speaker did not understand.

The consequence was enormous. These devotional songs became the first great literature of India’s regional languages, and in becoming scripture they lifted those languages into dignity. The Ramcharitmanas did for Hindi something like what Luther’s Bible did for German or the King James did for English: it gave a whole people a shared sacred text in words they actually spoke. When a modern Indian sings a bhajan in her own language, she is standing at the end of a line that the poet-saints began: the line along which God learned, so to speak, to speak the vernacular.

Devotion against the grain

The most electric thing about the Bhakti movement, and the thing most often exaggerated, is what it did about caste and about women.

The exaggeration first, because honesty demands it. The Bhakti movement did not abolish caste, and it did not set out to. It was a religious movement, not a social-reform programme, and the caste order of Indian society survived it intact, sometimes even absorbing the saints’ own followings back into new hierarchies. Anyone who tells you that bhakti dissolved caste is telling you a hope, not a history.

And now the electricity, which is real. Over and over, in region after region, the saints who burned brightest were exactly the people the old order ranked lowest. Ravidas was a cobbler, a worker in dead animal skin, at the very bottom of the purity ladder — and kings and brahmins sat at his feet. Kabir was a weaver from a Muslim family. Tukaram was a poor shudra. Nandanar, among the Nayanars, is remembered as an untouchable whose love for Shiva shamed the temple that barred him. And the women — Andal, Karaikkal Ammaiyar, Akka Mahadevi, Mirabai, Lalleshwari of Kashmir — sang with an authority that no priestly rule granted them and no priestly rule could silence. The claim their lives made was not a claim about social policy. It was something more dangerous to a hierarchical world: the claim that God does not see the ranks at all, that before Him the cobbler’s love and the king’s are weighed on the same scale, and the cobbler’s is often heavier. That claim, sung in a thousand voices for a thousand years, left a mark on the Indian imagination that no amount of reabsorption could quite erase.

Where Ram met Rahim

The northern bhakti of the sants unfolded in a India where Islam had long been present, and the two devotional worlds touched. The formless God of the nirguna sants had an obvious kinship with the God of Islam, and the ecstatic love-poetry of the Sufis ran in channels remarkably close to bhakti’s own. Kabir, by tradition born into a family of Muslim weavers and drawn to a Hindu teacher — details that later hagiography surely tidied — stood exactly on that seam and refused to stand on either side of it, ridiculing the exclusive claims of Hindu and Muslim orthodoxy alike and pointing past both to the one nameless Beloved.

Out of this meeting ground came something entirely new. Guru Nanak, steeped in the sant tradition, taught a path of devotion to the one formless God that grew, through his successors, into Sikhism — a religion in its own right, which honours its own scripture and Gurus and rightly resists being folded back into Hinduism as a mere branch of bhakti. The contact zone was fertile, and it must be described with care: not as a blending that erased differences, but as a place where Hindu and Muslim devotion could hear, in each other, a familiar longing.

Was there ever a “movement”?

Here the honest historian raises a hand. We have been speaking of “the Bhakti movement,” a single thing with a beginning in the south and a journey to the north, as though it were one great river with one source. But was it?

The songs are old and real; nobody doubts that. What is newer than it looks is the frame around them — the idea that all these scattered saints, across a thousand years and a dozen languages, were participants in one continuous, unified movement. The scholar John Stratton Hawley has shown that this tidy picture was largely assembled in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, by writers and critics, many of them moved by a rising national feeling, who wanted to find in India’s devotional past a single, unifying, homegrown tradition of the heart. It was in that period that the many local devotions were gathered under one name and arranged into a neat procession from Tamil country to Vrindavan, threaded together by the notion of four great teaching lineages passing the flame northward. The goddess Bhakti’s journey, in other words, is partly the tradition’s own poetry and partly a modern nation’s search for its soul.

This does not make the Bhakti movement a fiction. It makes it something subtler and more human: an immense, genuine, centuries-long surge of devotional creativity that was real in every region, but that only became a single, named “movement” when later generations looked back and drew the connecting lines. Both things are true at once — the songs, and the story we tell to hold them together — and a mature understanding keeps both in view.

What the singing changed

Whatever we call it, its legacy is everywhere. The bhajan sung in a temple, the kirtan that rolls on through the night, the abhang on a pilgrim’s lips walking to Pandharpur, the Ramcharitmanas recited in a village courtyard, the whole vast world of Indian devotional music and poetry — all of it flows from the poet-saints. They took the highest reaches of the tradition, which had risked becoming the property of a learned few, and handed them back to everyone, in words everyone could sing.

The old scripture had given devotion a taxonomy — nine forms of it, from simply hearing God’s name to offering up the whole self. The poet-saints did not add to the list. They lived it, out loud, in the open, in the language of the street, and they proved a thing the priestly tradition had never quite dared to say plainly.

You do not have to be born in the right family to reach God.

You do not have to know the sacred language.

You have only to love, and to sing.