The great body of bhajan poetry was composed by the devotional saints of medieval and early-modern India, whose songs remain the living repertoire today. Mirabai's songs of longing for Krishna, the verses of Surdas, Tulsidas and Kabir, the Marathi abhangas of the Varkari saints, and the Tamil and Kannada devotional poetry of the south are sung across the subcontinent centuries after their composition. Because many of these saints came from outside the priestly and learned elite, some from low castes, some women, one at least a Muslim weaver by tradition, the bhajan carried an implicit levelling: devotion, not birth or Sanskrit learning, was made the measure of a worshipper.
Sung communally the practice is often called a satsang, a gathering in the company of truth, and it may run for hours, building through repetition toward an absorbed collective feeling. The tradition holds that the divine name and praise, sung with love, purifies the singer and is itself a form of the presence it invokes.