Bhakti, meaning loving devotion to a personal god, did not begin as a single organized movement. Its earliest clear expression is in the hymns of the Tamil Alvars, devoted to Vishnu, and the Nayanars, devoted to Shiva, composed across roughly the sixth to ninth centuries in south India. These poet-saints sang in Tamil rather than Sanskrit, addressing their god directly and emotionally, and organized pilgrimage and temple worship around their compositions, which later Vaishnava and Shaiva communities gathered into fixed canons.
From the twelfth century the emphasis moved north and across languages: Basava's Virashaiva movement in Karnataka, the philosopher-devotee Ramanuja's Sri Vaishnavism, and later the great vernacular poets, Kabir, who addressed both Hindu and Muslim audiences, Mirabai, a Rajput princess devoted to Krishna, Tulsidas, whose Awadhi retelling of the Ramayana remains the most widely read version of that epic in north India, and Chaitanya, whose ecstatic devotion to Krishna shaped Bengali Vaishnavism. Each figure worked in a regional language and addressed audiences largely excluded from Sanskrit learning, including women and people outside the twice-born castes.
By the sixteenth century, devotional practice organized around a chosen personal deity, expressed through song, pilgrimage and temple worship, had become the most widespread form of Hindu religious life across the subcontinent, standing alongside rather than replacing Vedic ritual and philosophical schools such as Vedanta.