Bhakti Movement in India: Origin, Philosophy, Causes, Features and Saints

What Is the Bhakti Movement: Meaning, Origin and Time Period

Bhakti Movement Meaning: Loving Devotion to a Personal God

The word bhakti comes from the Sanskrit root bhaj, which means to divide, share, partake or belong to; from it come the senses of attachment, devotion, faith, love and worship. One who practises bhakti is a bhakta. The Bhakti movement is the name historians give to the many devotional traditions that grew around this idea in medieval India: the conviction that God can be reached through love and devotion, by anyone, without the help of elaborate ritual.

The movement was never one organisation with one founder. It grew region by region around different gods and goddesses, Vishnu and his avatars, Shiva and the Goddess, and around saints who sang in the language of the people they lived among. What tied these traditions together was a shared emphasis: a personal relationship between the devotee and God, open to women and to those whom the Brahmanical order kept out of Vedic learning.

Who Started the Bhakti Movement: Alvars and Nayanars of the Tamil Country

The earliest bhakti movements were led by the Alvars and the Nayanars of the Tamil region. The Alvars, literally those immersed in devotion to Vishnu, and the Nayanars, leaders who were devotees of Shiva, travelled from place to place singing hymns in Tamil in praise of their gods. NCERT's Class XII book dates these first movements to about the sixth century; its Class VII book places the Alvars and Nayanars in the seventh to ninth centuries.

• Who they were: Tradition counts 63 Nayanars and 12 Alvars, from backgrounds ranging from Brahmanas to artisans, cultivators, hunters and castes considered untouchable.
• Best known: Appar, Sambandar, Sundarar and Manikkavasagar among the Nayanars; Periyalvar, his daughter Andal, Tondaradippodi and Nammalvar among the Alvars.
• Their hymns: By the tenth century the compositions of the 12 Alvars were compiled as the Nalayira Divyaprabandham, the Four Thousand Sacred Compositions, often called the Tamil Veda; the poems of Appar, Sambandar and Sundarar form the Tevaram.
• Women saints: Andal saw herself as the beloved of Vishnu, and Karaikkal Ammaiyar, a devotee of Shiva, took the path of extreme asceticism; their very compositions challenged patriarchal norms.

The saints identified certain shrines as the homes of their gods, and large temples were later built at many of these places, which grew into centres of pilgrimage. Singing their hymns became part of temple ritual, and the saints' own images came to be worshipped. A fuller account of each saint is in the Nayanars and Alvars of south India.

Textual Roots of Bhakti: Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita and Bhagavata Purana

Bhakti has roots in older texts. The Shvetashvatara Upanishad uses the word bhakti in its closing verse (6.23), widely cited as one of the earliest mentions of the love of God, though scholars debate whether the verse was added later. The Bhagavad Gita, composed between the fifth and second centuries BCE, presents bhakti as one of three paths to spiritual freedom, beside the path of works (karma) and the path of knowledge (jnana).

The idea of a Supreme God who could free human beings from the cycle of rebirth, if approached with devotion, grew in popularity in the early centuries of the Common Era. The Puranas, composed in simple Sanskrit verse and meant to reach women and Shudras, who were generally kept from Vedic learning, laid down that a devotee could receive the grace of God whatever his caste. The idea became so popular that Buddhists and Jainas also took it up.

Many ideas of the Tamil bhaktas, especially the Vaishnavas, then entered the Sanskrit tradition through the Bhagavata Purana, one of the best-known Puranas. It lists nine forms of devotion (7.5.23), shown in Figure 1, and its stories of Prahlada and of the gopis' love for Krishna became models of bhakti.

Philosophy of the Bhakti Movement: Saguna, Nirguna and Vedanta

Saguna and Nirguna Bhakti: God With and Without Attributes

Historians of religion divide bhakti traditions into two broad kinds. Saguna bhakti, devotion to God with attributes, focused on particular deities, Shiva, Vishnu and his avatars Rama and Krishna, and forms of the Goddess, usually imagined in human form. Nirguna bhakti, devotion to God without attributes, was the worship of an abstract, formless God.

The difference is one of emphasis, not of two hostile camps. Tulsidas and Surdas accepted existing beliefs and practices but wanted to make them accessible to all, while Kabir and Guru Nanak rejected the orthodox religions around them and taught devotion to a formless God through remembering his name. Both kinds reach the same conclusion: love of God, not ritual, is the way to salvation.

Shankara, Ramanuja and the Vedanta Schools Behind Bhakti

The bhakti saints sang; the philosophers explained. Three schools of Vedanta gave devotion its intellectual foundation, and Figure 2 places them on one line from the oneness of God and the soul to their distinction.

• Shankara and Advaita: Born in Kerala in the eighth century, Shankara taught that Brahman, the only reality, is formless and without attributes, that the world is maya or illusion, and that salvation comes through knowledge. He did not reject bhakti, but a devotee had first to clean his heart through jnana, and this path could be followed by only a few.
• Ramanuja and Vishishtadvaita: Born in Tamil Nadu in the eleventh century and deeply influenced by the Alvars, Ramanuja held that the best means of salvation is intense devotion to Vishnu, who by his grace helps the devotee reach union with him. His doctrine of qualified oneness holds that the soul, even when united with God, remains distinct.
• Madhva and Dvaita: In the twelfth to thirteenth century Madhvacharya of Karnataka taught a true dualism, in which God and the soul are two different realities and the soul depends on God.

Ramanuja's teaching mattered most for the movement. He argued that the grace of God was more important than knowledge about him and that the path of bhakti was open to all, whatever their caste. In this way he built a bridge between the popular devotion of the saints and the Vedic learning of the Brahmanas. Thinkers such as Nimbarka, whose Bhedabheda theology is close to Ramanuja's, and in north India Ramananda and Vallabhacharya, followed in this tradition, and by the early sixteenth century bhakti was acceptable to all sections of Hindu society.

Grace, Surrender and the Guru in Bhakti

Bhakti placed God's grace and the devotee's surrender at the centre of religious life. In Ramanuja's school, total surrender at the feet of the Lord, called sharanagati, is accepted as the sole means of release from the cycle of birth and death. In the fourteenth century that school divided over how much effort the devotee must make: one view compared the devotee to a baby monkey that clings to its mother, the other to a kitten that the mother cat simply carries.

The guru was the devotee's guide on this path. Kabir's verses speak of the guru and the satguru, the true guru, without naming any particular teacher, and Guru Nanak appointed his disciple Angad to succeed him as guru, a practice his followers kept for nearly 200 years. Congregations of devotees gave the same idea a social form: Nanak's sangat with its collective recitation, and Shankaradeva's sat sanga with its recitation of the Lord's names.

Causes of the Bhakti Movement: Why Devotion Spread in Medieval India

Social Causes: Ritual, Caste and the Search for Equality

Social inequality was the deepest cause. Over the centuries before the movement, the idea had gained ground that human beings are unequal even at birth and that social privilege comes from birth in a high caste, and many people were uneasy with these ideas. Women and the lower castes were considered ineligible for liberation within the orthodox Brahmanical framework and were excluded from Vedic learning.

The revival of Hindu worship around Shiva and Vishnu in the early medieval period also increased the power and the arrogance of the Brahmanas. That produced popular movements that stressed human equality and freedom. Bhakti offered exactly that: a path to God open to all, which needed neither a priest nor a costly sacrifice.

• Ritualism: The Vedic gods Agni, Indra and Soma had faded, yet contact with the divine was still tightly regulated through sacrifices and precisely chanted mantras.
• Exclusion: Vedic scholarship and Vedic worship were closed to the lower castes; the bhakti path was open to all, whatever their caste.
• A wish for direct contact: The saints treated religion as a living bond of love between God and the worshipper, not as a cold, formal act.

Religious Causes: Buddhism, Jainism, Tantra, Naths and Sufis

Bhakti also grew out of rivalry and exchange between religious traditions. In the Tamil country the saints were sharply critical of Buddhism and Jainism, which had long drawn support from merchants and artisans; historians explain this hostility as competition for royal patronage. Bhakti won many followers of Buddhism and Jainism to Hinduism, and won over many tribal communities as well.

• Tantra: Tantric practices were open to women and men and ignored caste and class within ritual; in north India the popular counterpart of southern bhakti was tantra.
• Naths, Jogis and Siddhas: They questioned the authority of the Vedas, spoke the languages of ordinary people, taught meditation on a formless Ultimate Reality and were popular among the lower castes; their criticism of conventional religion prepared the ground for devotional religion in north India.
• Tamil Siddhars: Wandering adepts of the Tamil tradition who typically believed in one god and wrote their teachings as Tamil poems.
• Sufis: Muslim mystics who rejected outward religiosity and taught love and devotion to God and compassion for all people; the sants had so much in common with them that each is believed to have adopted ideas of the other.

Whether Islam caused the northern wave is debated. Some scholars see the rapid spread of bhakti in the second millennium partly as a response to Islamic rule; others point out that ecstatic devotional singing in local languages had already flourished in south India centuries before. The safer view is that Islam and Sufism shaped the form of northern bhakti rather than creating it.

Political and Economic Causes: The Delhi Sultanate, Towns and Crafts

Politics explains why north India's bhakti came late. Nothing like the compositions of the Alvars and Nayanars has been found in the north until the fourteenth century. Historians point out that the Rajput states that emerged there gave Brahmanas positions of importance, and little attempt was made to challenge them directly.

The coming of the Turks and the Delhi Sultanate in the thirteenth century undermined many Rajput states and the Brahmanas tied to them. At the same time new towns, organised craft production and long-distance trade with Central and West Asia raised the importance of artisans, among them weavers. Craftspersons, peasants, traders and labourers flocked to hear the new saints, and many of the saints, like Kabir the weaver and Ravidas the leather worker, came from these very groups.

Features of the Bhakti Movement: Teachings of the Bhakti Saints

Devotion Over Ritual: The Core Teachings of the Bhakti Saints

The bhakti saints taught a few clear ideas, repeated across regions and centuries. They put love of God above ritual, sacrifice and austerity, and they spoke to God directly, as a lover, a servant, a friend or a child.

• One personal God: Devotion to a single chosen deity, or to one formless God, rather than to many gods.
• Devotion over ritual: Sacrifices, ritual baths, fasts and pilgrimages were secondary or rejected; Guru Nanak rejected sacrifices, ritual baths, image worship and austerities outright.
• No priestly middleman: The devotee could reach God through love, prayer and the repeated name of God (nam-simaran).
• Life in the world: The saints of Maharashtra rejected renunciation, lived with their families and earned their living, and Guru Nanak asked his followers to be householders in productive work.
• Compassion: Bhakti lay in sharing the pain of others; the Gujarati saint Narsi Mehta said that they are Vaishnavas who understand the pain of others.

Basavanna's sayings show the method. When people see a serpent carved in stone, he observed, they pour milk on it, but when a real serpent comes they cry kill; they offer food to an image of God that cannot eat, but turn away the hungry servant of God at the door. Ritual without compassion, the saints argued, is empty.

Caste and Gender Equality in the Bhakti Movement

Equality before God was the movement's most radical claim. Bhaktas came from every caste, from Brahmanas to castes considered untouchable, and some traditions challenged the caste order itself.

• Virashaivas of Karnataka: The movement of Basavanna (1106-1168), a Brahmana who had been a Jaina and a minister in a Chalukya court; his followers, the Virashaivas or Lingayats, challenged caste and the idea of pollution, questioned the theory of rebirth, accepted post-puberty marriage and the remarriage of widows, and buried their dead instead of cremating them.
• Maharashtra: Chokhamela and his family belonged to the Mahar caste, considered untouchable; his son asked God in an abhang why he had been made low caste.
• North India: Ravidas was a leather worker, and some traditions make him the preceptor of Mirabai; Guru Nanak’s followers ate together in the langar whatever their creed, caste or gender.
• Women: Andal, Karaikkal Ammaiyar, Akkamahadevi, Muktabai, Sakkubai and Mirabai; Mirabai, a Rajput princess of Merta, defied her husband and is the best-known woman poet of the tradition.

Bhakti Literature in Regional Languages: Hymns, Vachanas, Abhangs and Sakhis

The saints composed in the languages people spoke, and their works could be sung. This is the single feature that most changed Indian culture: the movement turned regional languages into languages of religion and literature.

Most of this literature lived in song before it was written. The compositions were handed down orally, usually by the poorest communities and by women, who often added their own experiences, so the songs we have today are as much the creation of generations of singers as of the saints. Later scribes and communities collected them: Guru Arjan compiled the Adi Granth in 1604 with the hymns of the Sikh Gurus and of Baba Farid, Ravidas and Kabir.

Bhakti poets also found new ways to say the unsayable. Kabir's ulatbansi, upside-down sayings such as the lotus that blooms without a flower, invert everyday meanings to hint at an Ultimate Reality beyond words, and his poems draw on the words of many traditions at once: Allah, Khuda and Pir, and also alakh, nirakar, Brahman and Atman.

Bhakti Movement Saints of South and North India

Bhakti Movement in South India: Temples, Hymns and Royal Patronage

In the south, bhakti grew together with the temple and the state. The Chola kings of the ninth to thirteenth centuries supported Brahmanical and bhakti traditions with land grants and temples for Vishnu and Shiva, among them the great Shiva temples of Chidambaram, Thanjavur and Gangaikondacholapuram, and between the tenth and twelfth centuries the Chola and Pandya kings built elaborate temples around many shrines the saints had visited.

• Royal singing: The Chola kings introduced the singing of Tamil Shaiva hymns in temples and had them collected into the Tevaram.
• Saints in procession: An inscription of about 945 records that Parantaka I consecrated metal images of Appar, Sambandar and Sundarar in a Shiva temple, carried in procession at their festivals.
• Why kings cared: The Vellala peasants revered the saints, and kings claimed divine support by building temples that brought the saints’ visions to life in stone and bronze.

The south then carried the movement forward. Ramanuja's Vishishtadvaita in the eleventh century, the Virashaiva movement of Karnataka in the twelfth, and the Vitthala devotion of Pandharpur in Maharashtra from the thirteenth century to the seventeenth, with Jnaneshwar, Namdev, Eknath and Tukaram, each gave bhakti a new regional voice. Figure 3 places these saints in their regions.

Bhakti Movement in North India: Ramananda, Kabir, Nanak, Tulsidas and Chaitanya

The period after the thirteenth century saw a new wave of bhakti in north India, an age in which Islam, Brahmanical Hinduism, Sufism, various strands of bhakti and the Naths, Siddhas and Yogis all influenced one another. Ramananda, a Vaishnava teacher who lived for most of his life in Varanasi, stands near its beginning; later tradition made him the guru of Kabir and Ravidas, though historians doubt that he and Kabir were contemporaries.

• Kabir (probably fifteenth to sixteenth century): Brought up in a family of Muslim weavers near Varanasi, he rejected the external worship of both Hinduism and Islam and taught devotion to a formless God; his verses survive in the Bijak, the Kabir Granthavali and the Adi Granth.
• Guru Nanak (1469-1539): Born at Talwandi, now Nankana Sahib, he taught nirguna devotion through the repeated Divine Name, set up a centre at Kartarpur with a common kitchen, and is remembered for nam-japna, kirt-karna and vand-chhakna: right worship, honest living and helping others.
• Tulsidas and Surdas: Saguna poets who accepted existing beliefs; Tulsidas wrote the Ramcharitmanas in Awadhi, and Surdas sang of Krishna in the Sursagar.
• Mirabai (c. fifteenth to sixteenth century): A devotee of Krishna whose bhajans challenged the norms of the upper castes and are still sung in Rajasthan and Gujarat.
• Odisha: A bhakti tradition centred on Jagannatha of Puri, a local deity identified as a form of Vishnu by the twelfth century, began there in that century, with Jayadeva, author of the Gita Govinda, among its poets.
• Chaitanya and Shankaradeva: Chaitanya in sixteenth-century Bengal preached devotion to Krishna and Radha through ecstatic singing and dancing; Shankaradeva in fifteenth-century Assam taught surrender to Vishnu, naam kirtan, and founded satras and namghars.

Their lives and teachings are covered in more depth in Kabir, Nanak and the sant tradition, saguna bhakti of Rama and Krishna and the regional and women's bhakti traditions.

Significance and Limitations of the Bhakti Movement

Significance of the Bhakti Movement for Indian Society and Culture

The movement changed how ordinary Indians practised religion. Salvation, once thought open only to men of the three upper castes, became available to everyone, and the Vedic sacrifice or the monk's withdrawal gave way to a loving relationship with a personally chosen God.

• Languages and literature: Tamil hymns, Kannada vachanas, Marathi abhangs, Kabir’s Hindi sakhis and the Awadhi Ramcharitmanas grew into classics of their languages.
• Music and congregation: Community singing, the chanting together of God’s names, kirtan and naam ghar became lasting forms of worship.
• Social service: Seva, charity and community kitchens; Guru Nanak’s langar became a permanent institution.
• A shared culture: Kabir drew followers from both Hindus and Muslims, and Sufi poets of the Deccan wrote in forms inspired by the vachanas and abhangs.
• Recognition today: In May 2024 Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas, written in Awadhi in the sixteenth century, was inscribed with two other Indian works in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Asia-Pacific Regional Register.
• New communities: Guru Nanak’s followers became the Sikh community, the Kabirpanth preserved Kabir’s verses, and the Lingayats remain an important community in Karnataka today.

Limitations of the Bhakti Movement: Did It Reform Caste?

The movement's limits are as important as its achievements. The early Tamil saints disregarded the inequalities of caste, but they did not try to oppose the caste system as such. Brahmanas remained important intermediaries in several forms of bhakti, and the caste order survived the movement in every region.

• Absorbed by power: Kings used the saints to win popular support and legitimacy, as the Cholas did with the Tamil saints, so bhakti was often harnessed by the state it might have questioned.
• No single organisation: The movement was a family of regional traditions, which made its ideas spread widely but kept it from acting as one reform movement.
• Reform or revival: Many scholars now describe bhakti as a revival and reworking of older Vedic themes rather than a rebellion against Brahmanas, pointing out that several of its earliest champions were Brahmanas.

Sources

• NCERT: Themes in Indian History, Part II (Class XII), Bhakti-Sufi Traditions
• NCERT: Our Pasts II (Class VII), Devotional Paths to the Divine
• NCERT: Medieval India (Satish Chandra), Economic and Social Life, Education and Religious Beliefs
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• Wikipedia: Bhakti yoga
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• PIB (Ministry of Culture): Ramcharitmanas, Panchatantra and Sahrdayaloka-Locana enter UNESCO's Memory of the World Asia-Pacific Regional Register (13 May 2024)
• United Nations in India: From Epics to Fables, Three Indian Literary Works Enter UNESCO Registry (23 May 2024)
• Prime Minister's Office: PM dedicates to the nation the Statue of Equality commemorating Sri Ramanujacharya (5 February 2022)
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