Philosophy

Bhakti Movement

The long wave of Indian devotional religion centered on loving surrender to a personal God — sung by the Tamil Alvars and Nayanars and the later sant poets, often across the lines of caste and creed.

The bhakti movement is the name given to a long succession of Indian devotional religion in which the central act is bhakti — loving attachment, even surrender, to a personal God who can be loved back. The word does not name a single founder, creed, or organization. It marks a recurring turn, across many centuries and languages, away from priestly ritual and abstract knowledge and toward direct emotional relationship with the divine. The Sanskrit root bhaj means to share, to partake, to belong to; from it the noun carries the sense of a mutual holding between the worshipper and the one worshipped. The God of bhakti is not a principle to be grasped but a presence to be addressed — named, praised, served, quarreled with, longed for in absence and clung to in presence. Where the Vedic sacrifice bound the gods by exact procedure and Vedanta sought release through knowledge of the self’s identity with the absolute, bhakti proposes a third road: that the way to the highest runs through loving it, and that the love is itself the arriving.

The Tamil south: Alvars and Nayanars

The first sustained form of this religion took shape in the Tamil country, where from roughly the sixth and seventh centuries two parallel streams of poet-saints sang their gods in the spoken tongue rather than in Sanskrit. The Alvars, devotees of Vishnu, and the Nayanars, devotees of Shiva, are contemporaries and structural twins: each a loose company of singers — by tradition twelve Alvars and sixty-three Nayanars — drawn from across the social order, from brahmins and kings to a reformed brigand and a low-caste bard. The detail of each stream is handed to its own treatment, Tamil Vaiṣṇava bhakti and Nāyaṉār bhakti Śaivism; what matters at the level of the whole is that two distinct theological worlds invented, more or less at once, the same new emotional idiom.

The Alvars’ name comes from the Tamil root āḻ, “to immerse, to dive, to be absorbed” — an Alvar is one drowned in God. Their roughly four thousand hymns were gathered into the Nālāyira Divya Prabandham, the “Four Thousand Divine Compositions,” recovered and codified by the teacher Nāthamuni around the ninth or tenth century. The collection acquired the standing of scripture: it was called the Drāviḍa Veda, the Tamil Veda, held equal in sanctity to the Sanskrit revelation and recited in temple liturgy where it remains today. Its crown is Nammāḻvār’s Tiruvāymoḻi, eleven hundred verses revered as the Tamil equivalent of the Sāma Veda and the most heavily commented poem in the language. The only woman among the twelve, Āṇṭāḷ, composed a wedding-vow cycle and a longer poem of bridal longing so charged that one of its sections is sung at Tamil Vaiṣṇava marriages to this day. A defining device of the corpus is the poet who speaks as a woman pining for an absent lord — what the scholar Friedhelm Hardy called viraha-bhakti, the devotion of separation, built on the inherited conventions of classical Tamil love poetry and turned to a new religious purpose. The saints fall unconscious in rapture; Nammāḻvār, on the “madness” of the love of God, urges his fellows to run, jump, cry, laugh, and sing, and let everyone witness it.

A caution belongs here, and it belongs to the whole entry. The Tamil saints were ecstatic poets, not the systematic theologians the later schools made of them. The doctrines of dual revelation and of surrender as a settled mechanism, the apparatus of an unbroken teaching-lineage, are constructions of the commentators who came centuries after the songs. To read the Tiruvāymoḻi as if it already contained a finished metaphysics is to mistake the commentary for the poem.

The northward turn: the sant poets

Over the following centuries the impulse moved north and changed its accent in every region it reached — Kannada, Marathi, Bengali, Hindi, Rajasthani, Punjabi. In twelfth-century Karnataka the Vīraśaiva vacana poets, Basavaṇṇa and Akka Mahādevi among them, made a deliberately anti-temple, anti-brahmanical devotion to Shiva. In the Marathi country the Vārkarī tradition of pilgrims to Viṭṭhal of Pandharpur ran from Jñāneśvar (1275–1296) and Nāmdev through Eknāth to Tukārām (c. 1608–1649), who composed his abhaṅgs as a grain-merchant of low caste. In the Hindi belt and Rajasthan flourished the figures the later tradition gathered under the loose term sant: Kabīr the Banaras weaver (c. 1440–1518), Mīrābāī the Rajput princess turned devotee of Giridhar Kṛṣṇa, Tukārām, Sūrdās the blind singer of the child Kṛṣṇa, Tulsīdās whose Awadhī retelling of the Rāma story became the most widely loved religious text of north India, and Chaitanya (1486–1534), the Bengali ecstatic around whom Gauḍīya Vaishnavism took shape. From the same matrix Guru Nānak (1469–1539) drew the religion that became Sikhism, whose scripture canonized the verses of Kabīr, Ravidās, Nāmdev, and the Sufi Farīd side by side. The technical sant lineage — Kabīr, Ravidās, Dādū, Nāmdev as the north received him — and its organized continuation in the Kabīr-Panth belong to the sant tradition of formless devotion; the Krishna-centered streams to Krishna-bhakti. What spread north was less a doctrine than a stance, struck again and again in new languages: the conviction that the absolute is reached by being loved, and that the singer’s own voice is the instrument of reaching.

A textual fact shadows every one of these names. The poems attributed to the sants survive in recensions curated by performing communities, not in stable authored texts. Kabīr alone comes down in three theologically distinct portraits — the abrasive iconoclast of the eastern Bījak, the tenderer figure of the Rajasthani Granthāvalī, the name-centered devotee of the Sikh scripture — and of the roughly two hundred poems sung as Mīrā’s, only a handful are attested in sixteenth-century manuscript. The signature line that closes a poem is a performative convention, freely taken up by later voices; “Kabīr” and “Mīrā” name traditions of voice as much as historical authors. The corpus is real and the saints are real; what is unstable is the boundary between the poet and the centuries that kept singing in the poet’s person.

That stance had a social edge, and it cut. Much bhakti poetry was composed not in Sanskrit, the guarded language of priests and the learned, but in the language people actually spoke — and many of its most celebrated voices came from outside the brahmin elite: Kabīr a weaver, Ravidās a leather-worker, Tukārām a śūdra trader, Nāmdev a calico-printer, and women across the regions. The poems say plainly and often that caste counts for nothing before a God who reads the heart, and that the temple’s gatekeepers, the scholar’s grammar, and the pilgrim’s exertions are beside the point. The vernacular pada and abhaṅg were weapons against the brahmanical mediation of the divine, and the communities that carry the poets — Kabīr-panthīs, the Vārkarīs, the Ravidāssia and Ambedkarite movements that read Ravidās as a prophet of a world without sorrow — keep that edge alive as living tradition.

Several sants were drawn on, or claimed, by hearers on both sides of the Hindu–Muslim line, and Kabīr in particular is invoked across it: a julāhā weaver who refused the authority of both the brahmin and the qāzī, whose death at Maghar is commemorated by a Hindu memorial and a Muslim tomb standing side by side. But the matter wants care. The radicalism of individual verses was real; the movement did not abolish the social order around it, and later traditions sometimes domesticated the very poets they revered, refitting the rebel to the temple. And the once-easy language of “syncretism” has worn thin. The closest recent reading finds the sants defining themselves not as a fusion of Hindu and Muslim piety but against both institutional orthodoxies at once — drawing freely on Nāth-yogic body-symbolism and Sufi devotional idiom, yet bending the knee to neither establishment. No single confessional claim settles Kabīr; the figure belongs to the act of refusing to be owned.

What the love is: the devotional theologies

Theologically the movement is plural rather than single, and the plurality turns on a precise question: when the soul reaches God, does it remain itself? Some streams hold the soul finally one with the absolute. Others insist the devotee stays forever distinct, because love is a relation and a relation requires two — to be wholly merged would be to have no one left to love. Devotional Vedānta worked these positions out with rigor. The bhedābheda theologians argued for difference-in-identity, the soul both one with God and other than God at once; Madhva pressed the opposite extreme, an unbroken and eternal difference between soul and Lord that leaves the loving relation permanently intact and real. Between them lies the whole spectrum of qualified non-dualism and its kindred schemes — the architecture set out under Vedānta. Cutting across this Sanskritic axis is the vernacular distinction between saguṇa devotion, to a God with name and form and image — Tulsīdās’s Rāma, Sūrdās’s Kṛṣṇa, Mīrā’s Giridhar — and nirguṇa devotion, to a formless absolute beyond image, the “Ram” of Kabīr that is emphatically not the hero of the epic. The line is heuristic and porous — Tukārām’s Viṭṭhal has a form, yet his verses reach into the formless — but it marks a genuine fork in what the love is aimed at.

The practice that carries all this runs along a single arc: from the solitary, inward repetition of the divine name to the communal singing called kīrtan, in which a gathering takes the name up together and the song is treated not as a preparation for meeting God but as the meeting itself. The forms vary by region and lineage — the Tamil temple recitation of the Prabandham, the Marathi pilgrims’ processional abhaṅg, the Bengali ecstatic dance — but the logic is constant: the name held in the mouth and the heart is the place where the distant God is near. Architecture, here, is the whole of what can be described; the interior weight of the practice is not a procedure but a life.

The idea of a “movement”

A note on the name itself. The unified, pan-Indian “bhakti movement” — a single devotional wave originating in the Tamil south and sweeping north over a thousand years — is less a medieval fact than a modern idea. In A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement (Harvard, 2015), John Stratton Hawley traces the now-canonical narrative to twentieth-century historiography: to the Hindi literary historians Ramchandra Shukla and, above all, Hazariprasad Dvivedi, building on a colonial scaffolding laid by George Grierson and J. N. Farquhar, with the Sanskritist V. Raghavan giving the synthesis its pan-Indian reach. Its appeal was that it underwrote a story of Hindu and then national unity across the vernaculars; its cost was the flattening of fiercely distinct regional traditions into one phenomenon. The traditions surveyed here — Tamil Āḻvārs and Nāyaṉārs, Kannada Vīraśaivas, Marathi Vārkarīs, Bengali Gauḍīyas, the northern Sants — are kin in idiom and unmistakable in family resemblance, but they are not the limbs of one organism. The honest unit of study is the region, the language, the saint.

Scholarship and the textual record

The modern study of bhakti rests on a layered apparatus, part of it long in the public domain and part of it the living scholarship of the present.

Hawley’s A Storm of Songs (Harvard University Press, 2015) is the indispensable account of how the “movement” became an object of study at all, and the reference behind this entry’s caution against the singular noun; the work also appears under the publisher’s distribution at doi.org/10.4159/9780674425262. For the Tamil foundation, A. K. Ramanujan’s Hymns for the Drowning (Princeton, 1981) renders Nammāḻvār and explains the Alvars’ name from the root for immersion, while Friedhelm Hardy’s Viraha-Bhakti: The Early History of Kṛṣṇa Devotion in South India (Oxford, 1983) is the landmark study of the devotion of separation; both remain in copyright. Karine Schomer and W. H. McLeod’s edited volume The Sants: Studies in a Devotional Tradition of India (1987) defined the technical sense of sant, and Charlotte Vaudeville’s A Weaver Named Kabir (1993) and David Lorenzen’s work on the nirguṇa traditions set the terms for the Kabīr and syncretism debates.

The earliest English access to these poets came largely through the colonial missionary-scholars, and their framings show in their pages. The free literary recasting of Kabīr by Rabindranath Tagore and Evelyn Underhill — One Hundred Poems of Kabir (Macmillan, 1915), hosted here as Songs of Kabir and available as Project Gutenberg ebook #6519 — shaped the twentieth-century Anglophone image of the poet, though it worked from Kṣitimohan Sen’s Bengali transcripts of folk-Kabīr rather than from any of the manuscript recensions, and Underhill read him through Christian mystical categories. The same period produced J. Nelson Fraser and K. B. Marathe’s three-volume Poems of Tukārāma (1909–1915), Nicol Macnicol’s Psalms of Maratha Saints (1919), F. S. Growse’s complete English Rāmāyaṇa of Tulasī Dāsa (1877–1887), and Max Arthur Macauliffe’s six-volume The Sikh Religion (1909), which carried the Adi Granth’s Kabīr, Ravidās, Nāmdev, and Farīd to Western readers — each valuable, each to be read with its evangelical-comparative frame in view. These poets are also kin to the wider current of Indic bhakti and to the ecstatic singers of the Bauls of Bengal, and the comparison readers have most often pressed — to the loving God of the Sufi poets — is genuine in tone even where the grammar of each devotion differs.

What every region keeps returning to is one discovery, made independently in language after language and never quite codified out of existence: that the distance between the soul and the highest is closed not by learning and not by sacrifice but by love, and that the song in which the love is sung is already the nearness it asks for. The Tamil saint drowned in his god, the weaver who would own no temple, the princess who left a throne for Giridhar, the pilgrims walking to Pandharpur with the name on their lips — each found the same thing in a different tongue, and each treated the finding not as a doctrine to be defended but as a presence to be sung to. The hymn does not point toward the meeting. The hymn is the meeting, and it is still being held.

→ In the library: Songs of Kabir (Tagore & Underhill, 1915) · The Bhagavad-Gita (Arnold, 1885)

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