Religious Movement in Medieval India

Preface

Through out the long course of Indian history there have been a large number of religious movements which have sprung from time to time with varying degrees of impact. Historically the religious beliefs and practices of the Hindus were too divergent to constitute a coherent, monolith religious system that has been a part of the imagined image of Hinduism in modern times. This fundamental mismatch between the sacred literature and their modern readings set me off on this endeavour on a path of tracing the history of the Bhakti movement on its own terms. A historical gaze at Hinduism clearly points out, that to view this as a single religious system is not correct and a distortion of the heterogeneous religious practices which has become well entrenched in the academia and our mindset. This exercise has also spurred a school of revivalists who have adopted equally narrow readings by imputing categories into medieval India to present a purely spiritual past obscuring the diversities. Thus the exercise of finding the diversities of language, region, caste, gender and religion and their narratives in the Bhakti was a logical starting point.

Through out history alternate spaces have been created and Bhakti was one such effective medium. It was only in the 19th century that a monolith definition of Hinduism was given basing on textual constructions. The British perception of Hinduism was from the point of view of Christianity. In the divide between the Colonizer and the Colonized it was the western standards and Christianity which became the basis to evaluate Hinduism. There was an inability to view Hinduism on its own terms and conditions. Efforts were made to find notions of Christianity like monotheism, a salvation and notions of after life in Hinduism. Hinduism to the Colonial administration became an imagined religion of a vast majority of the population. This was a concept that never existed in the consciousness of the Indian people them selves. In the rise and flowering of the Bhakti Movement we glean a revealing luminosity on the heterogenous religious practices of the Indian people.

Hinduism can never be viewed as one monolith tradition or a unitary practice. Through out history there have been various independent reform movements which questioned the authority of the Vedas and created an alternative religious space through different modes and means and we find a great representative in the Bhakti movement. India witnessed significant socio-economic changes during the Medieval period giving rise to the emergence of new social groups which could not fit into traditional hierarchy. The Law books were ossified as they did not anticipate these changes which were engendered by large scale socio-economic transformations at a macro-level. The newly emerging social groups attempted to redefine their position and status with in the given traditional hierarchy and spearheaded a movement articulating their demands for restructuring the existing order. By declaring that God dwells in each individual and one could attain God through faith and devotion these saints brought religion to the downtrodden and henceforth marginalized sections of society. Religious movements acquire greater significance as they have a far reaching impact on society as a whole by penetrating even its ideological as well as pragmatic base.

Bhakti as a concept literally means devotion and surrender. For the common person the term is understood in terms of religious devotion only, devotion to a personal God, a God who is conceived as a supreme God for salvation.

The earliest form of devotion was characterized with different kinds of rituals and sacrifices in which Vedic mantras played a significant role. The Brahmans were in the forefront and they initiated all kinds of ceremonies. But gradually the aspect of ritualistic religion began to be overtaken by the concept of Upasana or Bhajana in which Sraddha (devotion or genuine regard) had a fundamental place. The importance of this spirit of Sraddha bhakti or respectful dependence upon God was considered as the first step in the scheme of bhakti cult. It is interesting to see that even in the Vedic times Sraddha bhakti made its influence felt in many directions. Under its wholesome impetus, the Vedic religion progressed from Polytheism to Monotheism, for bhakti essentially stands for broad comprehensive faith in one who is adored.

Though this doctrine is traced to the Brahmanical tradition, in the religious scripture of Gita, it was in the south between the seventh and tenth centuries; this movement became broad based and acquired a huge social support. The great bhakti tradition that began in South India had its origins from the Sangam period. Bhakti or devotion appears for the first time in the literary accounts like paripadal and Tirumurukarappadai as the central concept which was to be later developed more fully by the Alvars and Nayanars and elaborated in the Vaishnava and Saiva canonical texts of medieval times. It was the Acharyas who provided a philosophical basis for this movement.

Of the four ways of attaining God, Bhakti is considered easy and simple since it makes one, more accessible to God directly. It creates a space which gives way to personal kind of relationship with the Almighty or the Creator eliminating any intermediaries. This aspect of bhakti attracted large number of people who began to follow these paths to attain salvation and hence, this became popular among the masses from all social backgrounds. The doctrine of bhakti as well as its practice can be traced to remote antiquity and infact medieval thinkers constantly appealed to these sources to give a long historical past. Therefore historically Bhakti manifested itself as early as Vedic hymns, but gradually developed through the time till medieval period when it reached its climax. A new wave of emotionalism spurred by a longing for a personal god who was addressed in the vernaculars is one of the main features of medieval Bhakti and this appears as a response to the existing situation. Emerging from the southern regions, we find this movement spreading in North and thence to Bengal, Mahrashtra, Kashmir, Gujarat and Assam.

The Bhakti movement is a very good example of unity in diversity in Indian culture and a vibrant living tradition that is very much a part of our plural identity and rich cultural heritage. It is one of the strengths of Indian civilization to accommodate a wide variety of voices which to the outsider may seem contradictory, confounding, disorganised and illogical. It is in this rich tapestry of creativity that the many voices interact over time to produce many hybrid forms which keep the vibrancy of Indian civilization alive as they are responses to a wide variety of situations from the homestead, village to the regional and universal. Today our myopic readings of the past using singular frames of references has brought about rigidity in public life leading to communalism that are based on watertight compartmentalization of identities, rather than as a fluid view of the past which stands as a negation of all that the Bhakti saints stood for. Though this movement occurred in many parts of India over the centuries, there were many regional variations. Sustaining this vibrancy over a vast spatial and temporal canvas was a common thread running through out this movement exemplified in the ways of questioning the existing religious system and promoting socio-religious egalitarianism. The Bhakti saints wanted the religious space to open up and provide alternative spaces to the existing one.

The historical works on Hinduism written prior to the nineteenth century by western scholars did not mention the  term bhakti. From the second half of the nineteenth century different theories were propounded on the character of the movement and its origins. H.H. Wilson first used the term Bhakti to denote Krishna bhakti of the Vaisnavas of Bengal. It was George Grierson who developed the idea of bhakti as a religion, a cult and a doctrine. Orientalists like William Jones, H.T. Colebrook, closely related to the, “Asiatic Society of India” looked back at the glory of the past and covered a wide range of themes in Sanskrit literature, on philosophy and Hindu religion in general. Theorization about Bhakti really started with the Orientalists who conjured up images of an exotic opulence and the othering of India commenced. European constructions of the varied images of Asia started within the context of imperialism as a binary opposite to demarcate the progressive and the backward. It was a period that saw a discourse of power which characterised a particular set of social, economic and political relations between Europe and its colonies. Many of the ideological texts transformed the ideals and normative values of ancient Indians as standard and this led to distortions of reality as there is a fundamental disconnectedness between the text and the context. The Orientalists created Hinduism in their own image. Most of their theoretical formulations were based on contemporary Christian reaction in Europe against explaining God in abstract and personal terms.

In many modern day writings also, the bhakti movement is treated as literary or at best an ideological phenomena which had religion at the basis of its inspiration and more works have been written about this movement by Literateurs than historians. This has mainly happened due to the lack of emphasis on social history and also the lack of analytical tools in history writing till the 1950’s and hence the socio- economic factors that have been responsible for bringing in a change have been ignored. Since most of these saints were from marginalized groups and were composing and writing in the vernacular literature in an oral tradition which was passed down from generations, there is a major problem of sources for the historian as these text presupposed an oral consciousness that is improperly translated when we print the same and is only now being recognized with the interest in consciousness studies. There is very little historical information on these saints and they were not patronized by any kings or court biographers and therefore were outside the established system. Nor is any religious hagiography available about them from the time they deemed to have inhabited. Much of their history has been reconstructed much later by writers and biographers arising from the emerging anglicized middle class. Yet most of these saints are very much alive in the popular culture and the day to day life of India in different regions and are the most important link to the continuities between past and present in Indian culture.

Over the centuries, the transformation of the oral tradition into a textual one saw many accretions and these interpolations served to marginalize, domesticate or valourise certain events and personalties using a plethora of devices but it is still possible for a historian to arrive at the essence of the texts by deconstructing the meanings using an array of methodological tools borrowed from different disciplines. The text is therefore seen in its historical context against the background of larger questions that conditioned the socio- economic and politico-cultural context rather than probing into the literary nuances and niceties since the focus is on broad socio-religious patterns.

There are multiple dynamics of any movement seen in the constant interplay of opposition and co-option and a gendered reading offers us such glimpses where we see alternating phases of radicalism and domestication. We see that bhakti created an alternative space for women by stressing that all were equal in the eyes of God and everyone could realize God. Thus, we had a large number of women who practiced Bhakti. There is a palpable tension that finally comes out in the divergent views of the women who were very outspoken and wanted to lead life on their own terms and conditions and the men who were not willing to provide this space to them, implying that they wanted reform to end at a certain point. While the women wanted to lead life as they pleased, the forces of reaction set in as it would deprive the men of their domestic dominance and these contradictory features manifested to reinforce and reiterate the already existing notions of women, family and their roles.

Doubts have been raised about this movement being a mass movement and if at all the label of movement can be applied to this vastly different streams and practices as they emerged in different parts of India. No doubt there were wide differences regarding the attitude of these saints to scriptures and their agendas of social reform and many of them especially the sagun Bhaktas never challenged the living conditions of the people and the over all aim of the movement was individual salvation and mystical union with God, through the help of a guru, yet it cannot be denied that they did question the existing hierarchies in their own way and were critical of many of the structures and institutions. Regional flavours and complexities only added to finding newer solutions to what was essentially a same problem and thus we find the substance of the Bhakti saints having a remarkable similarity.

A rationale for such a study is too obvious to need any justification for there are many conventional explanations that do not lead us to a holistic understanding of the Bhakti movement. Religion has always played a major role in the establishment of a cultural identity, which is firmly rooted in history. The abiding image of India today as a modern day nation ready to move on to the 21st century and yet rooted in tradition is primarily due to the presence of both old and new in multiple combinations. Socio-cultural continuities and discontinuties resonate in India from the past to the present especially in the arena of religion and culture. The need to see the complex linkages between the large scale socio-economic changes in the Indian subcontinent and the contingent expression of religiosity as intertwined aspects without demarcating them into separate blocs was another need. There is also a need to read the sources in their context otherwise we would end up reading history backwards with an idea of fixed religious boundaries that are commonplace nowadays where as in the medieval period, socio-religious boundaries were being constantly redrawn. One only hopes that through this endeavour, it would be possible to bring out a vibrant tradition in all its complexities giving space to all facets and themes in history.

Rekha Pande