The Bhakti Saints

For most of its early history the highest religious authority in India spoke Sanskrit, and Sanskrit was the possession of a learned few. Then, somewhere in the Tamil country around the sixth century, a different kind of voice began to be heard, and it did not belong to the learned. It belonged to a weaver, a washerwoman, an outcaste leather-worker, a king who threw away his throne, a girl who refused to marry anyone but God. They sang, in the languages their mothers spoke, that the love of God outranked birth and learning and ritual and caste, and that anyone, anyone at all, could reach him directly. That long, many-voiced current is the bhakti movement, and the singers are the bhakti saints.

They are, in a sense, the human face of everything the philosophers argued about. The acharyas built the systems; the saints lived the love those systems tried to explain. And over a thousand years it was the saints, more than the scholars, who shaped the Hinduism that most Indians actually pray.

What bhakti is, and a caution

Bhakti comes from a root meaning to share, to partake, to be devoted, and it names a loving, participatory relationship with a personal God, emotionally intense and often ecstatic, the opposite of a cold transaction. Its scriptural roots are old, in the Bhagavad Gita and later the Bhagavata Purana. But as a mass movement of poet-saints singing in the vernacular, it is medieval, and it is plural.

A caution belongs at the start, because the tidy phrase “the bhakti movement” can mislead. The scholar John Stratton Hawley has argued that the idea of one organised, all-India movement is partly a modern construction, a frame laid in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries over what were in fact many distinct local traditions. The honest picture is a family resemblance rather than a single campaign: related currents of devotion, sharing a spirit and a few core convictions, arising in different regions and centuries. What unites a seventh-century Tamil saint and a seventeenth-century Marathi one is not an organisation. It is the same ache to reach God without a gatekeeper.

The first singers: Alvars and Nayanars

The movement crystallised first in the Tamil south, in two parallel streams that ran from roughly the sixth to the ninth centuries. The Alvars, twelve poet-saints devoted to Vishnu, and the Nayanars, sixty-three devoted to Shiva, sang their God in Tamil, not Sanskrit, and that choice was itself a revolution. Their hymns were collected and revered as scripture in their own right. The Alvars’ four thousand verses, gathered as the Divya Prabandham, were called the Tamil Veda, set beside the Sanskrit Veda as equal. The Nayanars’ songs, the Tevaram and the Tiruvachakam, became the heart of Tamil Shaiva worship.

Among them are figures the tradition has never forgotten. Nammalvar, the foremost of the Alvars, whose verses pour out the soul’s longing for Vishnu. Andal, the one woman among the Alvars, the bridal mystic who would have no husband but the Lord, whose absorption into the deity at Srirangam the tradition tells as a wonder. Appar, Sambandar and Sundarar among the Nayanars, and Manikkavachakar, whose Tiruvachakam is still wept over and sung. These saints came from across the social order, high caste and low, and that breadth was part of their message. Before God, the hymns insisted, the usual rankings fell away. It was the songs of the Alvars, gathered by later teachers, that gave Ramanuja the devotional soil his philosophy grew in.

The current moves north

Over the medieval centuries the devotional fire spread north and west, into language after language, until by the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries it had touched nearly the whole subcontinent. The northern saints are a crowd of unforgettable individuals.

Kabir, a weaver of Banaras, perhaps of the fifteenth century, sang of a formless God beyond every temple and mosque, mocking the externals of both Hinduism and Islam while pointing past them to the One within. Mirabai, a Rajput princess of the sixteenth century, gave up rank and safety for an all-consuming love of Krishna, and the legends of her persecuted devotion are sung across the north still. Tulsidas retold the story of Rama in Awadhi as the Ramcharitmanas, the Ramayana made the beloved scripture of millions who would never read Sanskrit. Surdas, the blind poet, sang the child Krishna with unmatched tenderness. Ravidas, a leather-worker and so an outcaste, sang of Begumpura, a “city without sorrow” where none is high or low. In Maharashtra the Varkari saints, Namdev, Jnaneshwar, Eknath and Tukaram, built a tradition of pilgrimage and song to Vithoba of Pandharpur that walks on to this day. And in Bengal, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu set whole towns dancing and weeping the name of Krishna, founding the ecstatic tradition of Gaudiya Vaishnavism.

The God with a form, and without

Run a line through this crowd and the saints fall, broadly, into two camps, the same two the deeper philosophy names. There are the saguna saints, who love God in a particular form, Rama or Krishna or Shiva, with a face and a story: Tulsidas, Surdas, Mirabai, Chaitanya. And there are the nirguna saints, who refuse every image and sing only the formless absolute that no temple can hold: Kabir above all, and Ravidas.

Kabir gives the nirguna voice its sharpest edge. In Rabindranath Tagore’s translation, he turns on the seeker looking for God in the holy places:

“O servant, where dost thou seek Me? Lo! I am beside thee. I am neither in temple nor in mosque: I am neither in Kaaba nor in Kailash.”

And he dissolves the very distinction between the soul and the absolute in a single image of water:

“The river and its waves are one surf: where is the difference between the river and its waves? When the wave rises, it is the water; and when it falls, it is the same water again.”

The two streams are not enemies. They are two temperaments, two ways the same love finds its object, one needing a face to adore, the other needing to strip every face away. Most of the saints, pressed, blur the line between them.

Why the saints matter

The bhakti saints did three things that changed Hinduism permanently, and an honest account should name them without overstating. First, they made scripture vernacular. After Tulsidas, a north Indian could meet Rama in their own tongue; after the Alvars, Tamil itself became a sacred language. Second, they levelled, at least before God. The saints came from every caste and both sexes, and they taught that devotion, not birth or learning, was what God valued, even as the caste structures around them mostly persisted. This was a spiritual levelling more than a social revolution, and it was real for all that. Third, they made the love itself central. Through the saints, the mantra on the lips and the song in the heart became, for vast numbers of people, the whole of religion, more than ritual and more than philosophy.

It is worth being plain about how little we securely know of many of them. The dates of Kabir are disputed, and the dramatic stories of his life, including the quarrel of Hindus and Muslims over his body, are legend. Almost everything about Mirabai’s life is, in the scholars’ phrase, conjecture, and many songs sung as hers were composed by later hands. The saints come to us wrapped in miracle, and the wrappings are part of how the tradition loved them. What is not in doubt is the songs, and the songs did the work.

They were not philosophers, most of them, and several could not read. They simply loved God out loud, in the language of the street, until a whole civilisation learned the tune.

The scholars mapped the way to God. The saints sang it, and the singing carried furthest.