"Bhakti Movement” Narratives

Abstract

In many ways the measure of a religion is the history or tradition it is believed to encompass. Rituals, beliefs, representations of deity, and laws of behavior also matter deeply, but nothing replaces the sense that the religion in question builds on a history that is sufficiently coherent and persistent that it can be savored in the present day. The concept of the “bhakti movement” articulates one of the most important understandings of how Hindus stand together as a body. It shapes into a single historical pattern regions, languages, and eras that would otherwise be in danger of seeming fragmented and disparate. In its most widely shared form, it offers a story of how bhakti—the religion of song, communal sharing, common speech, and the heart—swept across the Indian subcontinent in time and space for a thousand years or so, beginning in the middle of the 1st millennium ce. This narrative holds that bhakti first made its appearance as a vernacular force in the Tamil-speaking south; it then spread gradually northward as bhakti songs and sentiments were shared from language to language and region to region; and it arrived finally in northern India in the 15th and 16th centuries, expressing itself in the words of widely revered poet-saints such as Kabīr, Tulsīdās, Mīrābāī, and Nānak. According to “standard” versions of this narrative, the western regions of Karnataka and Maharashtra were the most important intermediate zones of transmission, but Telugu contributions have been emphasized in more recent tellings, and it is widely acknowledged that the periphery of the bhakti movement extends to Bengal, Sindh, Assam, and Kashmir; and in the person of Chaitanya, Bengal and Orissa play more than peripheral roles in the overall story. A major problem that arises in telling this tale is how best to represent the relationship between Muslim, Jain, Sikh, and Dalit devotional practices and those that seem to belong more clearly to a Hindu idiom. This in turn points to the fundamental question of whether the bhakti movement is to be understood as a subset of Hindu religiosity and history or as something that transcends its boundaries. Such matters are actively being debated in the 21st century, both at the scholarly level and in less rarefied domains. To some people’s perception, at least, the stakes are high. If one disbands the notion of the bhakti movement, is one in danger of dismembering the idea of the Indian nation? Especially against the background of the political partition of the subcontinent in 1947, such debates cut deep.