Bhakti Movement and Literature

Journal of Asian and African Studies, 1980

Madhya Bharti, 2023

The thinking of any particular nation is the essence of its civilizational and cultural upward trend. Thinking is the symbolic depiction of the conceptual cultural facts and events of every era and the investigation presented to solve the truly experienced problems of eternal values etc. Thoughts arise from our memory, imagination and intellectual activity. In a huge country like India, Hindu religion is like an ocean from the point of view of thinking, in which four major sects of Vaishnav religion originated and became prevalent. The large number of followers of Vaishnav religion shows its popularity in the country and abroad. Under this sect, among the Trinity, Lord Vishnu, the sustainer of the universe, is considered worshipable. There are many opinions prevalent regarding the origin, development of Vaishnav religion and its practice in different parts of the country. Different concepts related to each name like Vishnu, Narayan, Vasudev and Krishna are prevalent among the common people. Verses related to Vishnu are also found in the Vedas, but mainly in the medieval period, when the country was in a state of cultural transition, during the Bhakti movement, the religious and philosophical aspects of Vaishnavism became very popular and developed among the people. Bhakti as a religious concept means devotional surrender to a Supreme God of personal design to achieve salvation. The origins of this doctrine lie in the Brahmanical and Buddhist traditions of ancient India and various scriptures such as the Bhagvat Gita. 1 But it was the first time in south India, between the 7 th and 10 th centuries that Bhakti moved from a simple religious doctrine to a mass movement based on religious equality and social participation widely. The movement led by famous saint-poets reached its peak in the 10th century, then began to decline. But it was revived as a philosophical and ideological movement by a series of wandering scholars or acharyas, starting with Ramanuja in the 12th century. 2 The establishment of the Delhi Sultanate in the early 13th century saw the great upsurge of many diverse and widespread socio-religious movements in many parts of the country, based on the concepts of Bhakti. 3 These movements are considered a continuation or revival of the ancient South Indian Bhakti movement. But each subsequent movement that developed during the Kingdom period had its own historical context and particularities. Furthermore, one of them, namely the non-conformist monotheistic movement associated with Kabir and other 'low caste' saints, has only superficial similarities with variants of the movement. Its social origins, its ideology, the social composition of its leaders and even its conception of Bhakti and God fundamentally distinguish it from the older Bhakti movement in South India as well as the rest of the later Bhakti movements. In this article the origin and development of Vaishnavism and Bhakti movement in North India has discussed with sociological perspective.

Abstract The Bhakti Movement of India and its vernacular songs provide the country with a sense of shared richness. Bhakti literature puts forth a spirit of tolerance for everyone and a tendency to encompass rather than exclude. Bhakti tradition paints a panorama of India’s democratic instincts without distinction of language, religion, cast, community or sex. This research paper discusses various elements or aspects of Bhakti Movement which consolidate different expressions of Bhakti into a single, seemingly definitive narrative. This paper explores how Bhakti poets of all regions and periods share a narrative entirely unaffected from linguistic, social and cultural boundaries. The paper analyzes and contextualizes the undercurrents of Bhakti Movement which paved the way for preparing ground for evolution of increasing sense of equality and cultural unity through local languages. Key Words: Bhakti, Linguistic Inclusion, Community, National Integration, Religious Unity

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2014

The Bhakti movement was a Hindu religious movement of the medieval period that promoted the belief that salvation was attainable by everyone. The movement is closely related to Islamic Sufism, which appeared around the same time: both advocated that a personal expression of devotion to God is the way to become at one with him. Bhakti movement swept through central and northern India, initiated by a loosely associated group of sants. Ramananda,

It was during the Bhakti Movement, the idea of Moksha, which is fundamental to Indian religious thought, experiences a profound metamorphosis. In stark contrast to their earlier ideas based on ritual renunciation or monistic abstraction, Bhakti intellectuals from various regions and sects re conceived liberation as a relational, emotional, and corporeal experience. Therefore, emancipation becomes less about escaping the world and more about maintaining a relationship with the divine, the community, and oneself. This provides a humanized and transforming alternative to traditional metaphysical liberation. The study engages how devotional surrender in bhakti parallels the idea of productive love-a mode of being that affirms life and breaks the alienation of the modern self. The paper positions Bhakti liberation not only as a spiritual emancipation but as a existential freedom rooted in relational being. In doing so, it bridges mystical devotion and modern humanistic thought, offering a cross cultural rethinking of what it means to be free.

In recent years, there has been a surge in bhakti literature and this is evident from the recent developments in Indian writing in English. Bhakti transcends geographical, sociocultural and literary boundaries and the same can be said about bhakti literature as well. India is known for its spiritual and bhakti culture and tradition. Whenever the balance of the universe is disturbed by external interference from any of its parts, the redeemer, as the power of eternal balancing, appears for the protection of those who are in harmony and the rectification of everything disharmonious. This dharma, i.e., the religion of God, the Sanatana Dharma, the eternal religion, has survived even as Abrahamic religions and atheism spread across the world in the last 1000 years primarily because of its inherent patriotism. It is on this that the whole idea of the religion is based. The religion treats the nation as mother. The roots of nationalism can be traced to its spiritual and bhakti traditions. In this Kaliyuga, the means attaining salvation is bhakti alone. The aim of the present paper is to outline the relevance of bhakti literature and its implications to nationalism. Further, it discusses the contribution of Kerala’s bhakti literature in general and Poonthanam’s and Melpathur’s literary contribution in particular to Indian nationalism.

Religious Individualisation, 2019

'The author remains a mettlesome subject in late modernism', writes Christian Novetzke, 'confounding a simple definition of what it is to be an author' (Novetzke 2003, 214).1 Novetzke skilfully unravels the distinct layers of authorship that went into the conferral of 'authority' on one particular figure, Namdev, in traditions 'not born of modernity yet fully present in the modern world'. In doing so, he argues against the modern notion of the author as a solitary, creative figure. In this chapter, I seek to extend his insights about 'corporate authorship' to an examination of the interface and mutual imbrication of individuality, individualisation, and institutionalisation of authors and texts in Odisha, eastern India in 'medieval' and 'modern' times. The confounding and conflation of the individual and the collective, and the medieval and the modern, also underlies bhakti (devotion). Bhakti or the spirit of bhakti, widely accepted as the hallmark of medieval India, particularly the north, is simultaneously personal and communitarian. Often represented as a female being and usually translated as devotion, bhakti is 'heart religion'; it emanates from divine encounter of individuals with the divine, an encounter that engulfs them with love, passion and joy, and inspires them to break out in poems and songs. Their exhilaration infects others with effervescent enthusiasm, resulting in a 'glorious disease of the collective heart' (Hawley 2015, 2). Bhakti's effervescence makes the individual and the collective, and autonomy and heteronomy, mingle in intriguing ways. Bhakti is intensely personal but hinges on sharing and communion. It is also liberating -from societal hierarchies, sectarian rivalries, and Sanskritic supremacy. How then should we classify bhakti? As medieval or as modern? Is it medieval because the sensibility is entirely religious, inflected by the miraculous? Or is it modern because it is individual, autonomous, and emancipatory? What is the sense of the 'individual' and the 'person' we assume when we call bhakti individual and personal? Does bhakti encompass and supersede the modern? Or do we need to find different ways to think about the ancient, the medieval, the early modern, and the modern? Is it possible to think of the inextricable blends

IJELLH (International Journal of English Language, Literature in Humanities), 2018

The bhakti movement is among the most forceful instruments of change in the Indian history.The movement signaled the end of a worn out epoch and did much to subvert hierarchies by substituting the concept of redemption through devotion in place of ritualistic orthodoxy. It carried sublime philosophy, to the common masses, of the so-called lower classes, in vernacular languages and open doors for women poets. The movement continues to inspire our generation and enjoys prominence in terms of its reach, magnitude, popularity and spacio-temporal significance. The poetic tradition of this school is marked by a distinctive proclivity for introspection; out of the two schools:nirguna and saguna; the nirguna school of bhakti poetry shows a greater tendency towards introspection. The nirguna group of poets led by Kabir, promote the technique of introspective reflectionas the key to self-realisation and god-realisation. This approach is significant as it breaks away from the convention of ri...