The Movement of Bhakti along a North-West Axis: Tracing the History of the Puṣṭimārg between the Sixteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Abstract

The growth of the Hindu devotional tradition (bhakti) has been commonly conceived as a movement of South Indian origin that gradually spread into northern India where, between the fifteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries, it gave birth to a number of religious communities whose membership cut across caste divisions and used vernacular languages as their primary mode of theological, literary, and ritual expression. This understanding of bhakti has been greatly influenced by the well known description of the movement of bhakti from South to North India in the sixteenthor seventeenth-century text, the Bhagavata Mahatmya, and has been rein forced in both modern Indian and Western scholarship on Hinduism and medieval North India (Prentiss 1999: 25-41). Scholars of religion have devoted much time to studying the literary and intellectual history of North Indian bhakti and the extent to which it can be traced back to South India, while historians have focused their interests on whether one can talk of a single bhakti movement whose social inclusiv ity and sometimes trenchant critiques of Indian society constituted a form of social protest against Brahmanical Hinduism or even Muslim rule in medieval North India (Sharma 1987: 26-38, 74-91). The difficulty, however, with viewing bhakti as a movement of ideas or as a single movement of social protest across India is that it fails to appreciate that bhakti constitutes not only ideas, rituals, and poetry but also communities of individuals who were active participants in the world around them and reacted, through their own unique religious worldviews, to the socio-historical changes particular to the regions in which they lived. This essay proposes to examine the dynamic between bhakti communities and the larger socio-political contexts in which they thrived by tracing the history of the Krsnaite devotional community known as the Pustimarg. The community was founded in sixteenth-century North India by Vallabhacarya (1479-1531) whose descendants carried his message to Gujarat and Rajasthan, where it came to enjoy the patronage of the political and mercantile elites of western India. The community today is still a very vibrant and active one whose devotees largely come from the