Bhakti (devotion)

Bhakti is usually introduced as emotional religion set against ritual or philosophy, and the contrast misleads, because the tradition treats devotion as a discipline with stages, techniques and a technical vocabulary.

Classical texts on bhakti analyse it into modes, borrowing the terms of Sanskrit dramatic theory: the devotee may stand to God as servant to master, as friend to friend, as parent to child, or as lover to beloved, and the last is treated as both the highest and the most dangerous. The devotional literature works these relations out in great detail, and the poetry of the Krishna traditions in particular adopts the position of the woman in love, including in poems written by men, which is a deliberate and much-discussed feature rather than an accident of convention.

The practices are collective and sonic. Kirtan and bhajan are sung in call and response, sometimes for hours, accompanied by drum and cymbals, and the sustained repetition is designed to wear down self-consciousness in a group faster than any individual could manage alone. Repetition of the divine name is a discipline in its own right, counted or continuous. Weeping, trembling, hair standing on end and loss of composure are catalogued in the texts as recognised signs of progress rather than as embarrassments to be suppressed.

What makes bhakti theologically significant is its claim about access. The path requires no Sanskrit, no ritual purity, no priest, no wealth and no ancestry, only love. The texts state this explicitly and repeatedly, and everyone at the time understood that it was a claim with social consequences attached.

The bhakti poets are among the most quoted figures in Indian religious history, and much of what they said was aimed squarely at the religious establishment of their own communities.

From roughly the sixth century in the Tamil south, spreading north over the following thousand years, poet-saints composed in regional languages rather than in Sanskrit, which put religious speech within reach of people who had been excluded from it by language alone. The most revered among them include a leather worker, a weaver, a tailor and a number of women, and their poems attack ritual formalism, temple wealth, priestly authority and caste distinction directly and by name.

Kabir, a fifteenth-century weaver from a Muslim family in Banaras, ridiculed Hindu and Muslim ritual with equal contempt and is claimed by Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs alike; his compositions are included in Sikh scripture. Mirabai, a sixteenth-century Rajput noblewoman, left her marriage for Krishna and is remembered as much for the refusal as for the poetry. Ravidas, a leather worker and therefore of the lowest ritual status, is revered by a community that takes its name from him and that has at times asserted a separate religious identity on that basis.

How far any of this constituted social reform is genuinely disputed among historians. One reading holds that bhakti opened a real alternative to caste hierarchy within the religious sphere. Another holds that it offered spiritual equality while leaving social arrangements entirely intact, and notes that several of the saints were subsequently absorbed into the very temple establishments they had attacked. Both readings have evidence behind them. What is not in doubt is that the poems remain in constant circulation, are sung daily across India, and are still quoted in public argument by people standing on opposite sides of it.