Bhakti Rhetoric in the Hagiography of ‘Untouchable’ Saints: Discerning Bhakti’s Ambivalence on Caste and Brahminhood

Abstract

Bhakti has often been praised as a form of religion based on loving devotion that transcends social class, caste, and gender. Since at least the early twentieth century, the history of bhakti has generally been told in terms of "the bhakti movement," a single coherent "wave" of devotional sentiment and egalitarian social reform that spread across the entire Indian subcontinent. According to the commonly accepted narrative, this "movement" began in the Tamil South between the sixth and ninth centuries CE with the Saiva Nayanars and Vaisnava AJvars. These poet-saints, according to one scholarly rendition of the trope, "produced a transformatory avalanche in terms of devotion and social reform that is now known as the Bhakti Movement" (Nandakumar 2003: 794; emphasis added). The concept of a single, coherent and socially progressive "bhakti movement" grew in large part out of the context of early twentieth century Indian nationalist agendas which sought to create a sense of national identity by propagating the notion of a shared pan-Indian bhakti religious heritage. Early and mid-twentieth century North Indian nationalist scholars such as Ramcandra Sukla and Hazariprasad Dvivedi sought to construct a nationalist history of India through the medium of bhakti and thus spoke of a pan-Indian bhakti "movement," or andolan (in Hindi), sweeping across and uniting the subcontinent in shared values of love, progress, and social egalitarianism that reached deep into the past.1 In his series of 1966 radio addresses to the Indian public, V. Raghavan gave a classic example of this rhetoric, referring to bhakti as the "democratic doctrine which consolidates all people without distinction of caste, community, nationality, or sex" (1966: 32). This conception of bhakti as being socially progressive continues still today. In 2003, Gail Omvedt wrote about the "radical bhakti (devotional) movement that had swept over northern and western India, bringing together women and men of low caste to proclaim equality and reject Brahmanic ritualism and caste hierarchy" (2003: 277). Rohini Mokashi-Punekar, in an essay published in 2005, described bhakti as a "deeply spiritual and democratizing movement" which is characteristically "revolutionary in spirit" and centered on "a questioning of the orthodox and repressive Brahminical understanding of Hinduism, [which] as such made it possible for the lower castes and women to give a form to their religious