What the Merchant-Guru Sold: Social and Literary Types in Hindi Devotional Verse

Abstract

The sants of North India were devotional poet-singers who emerged in the fifteenth century from the lowest Indian social strata; by the eighteenth century, however, they also included many figures from middle Hindu castes. Characteristically rejecting the sanctity of the orthodox mythic images found in much Hindu devotional poetry, the sants had frequent recourse to images from mundane life. In their poetry, they transformed these images into types with broad universal meaning that undermined the religious significance of conventional Hindu social roles. To do this they often used yogic terms in literary ways. Although the sants' transformation of mundane images is a regular feature of their verse, its socioreligious significance changes with the sants' changing social status. The implication of the merchant imagery in songs by Paltii, an eighteenth-century poet from a trading caste, thus differs from that of corresponding images of earlier sants.