BackA love affair with ‘bhakti’
Bhakti poetry that crashed class and caste barriers around the 8th century was all about personal equations with god
Premium
Bhakti. For a long time, I thought the word was synonymous with religious sycophancy and spiritual feudalism. It conjured up images of jangling temple bells and glazed-eyed adoration, of mindless, weak-kneed devotion, calendar-art love, the path of the servile, the unthinking, the bovine.
It took me time to see it for the subversive animal that it is. Not weekend spirituality, not armchair spirituality, not institutional spirituality. Instead, a journey in which the seeker stakes her very life, demanding some intensely personal answers to ultimate questions. It took me a long time to see bhakti for the radical, scorching, self-implicating existential quest that it really is.
Love? Certainly. That’s at the heart of it. But not docile, measured, tepid love. This is high-voltage stuff, an urgent, unguarded longing, a passionate human cry for authenticity and belonging: dangerous, ecstatic, self-annihilating. A longing so encompassing that it blurs the divide between the sacred and the profane, union and oblivion, lust and liberation, ecstasy and extinction, more and no more.
“A bhakta", poet-scholar-translator A.K. Ramanujan, says, “is not content to worship a god in word and ritual, nor is he content to grasp him in a theology; he needs to possess him and be possessed by him. He needs also to…embody him in every possible way."
Like every seeker, the bhakta or devotee wants to return to a place of wholeness, of non-fragmentation. But she is not content to be a plodding law-abiding pedestrian. The bhakta doesn’t follow traffic rules; she makes them. She doesn’t accept inherited wisdom; she demands a first-hand one. She doesn’t bow to hierarchy; she stakes her claim to the highest place she knows—the limitless heart of the divine.
And if she isn’t always terribly genteel or servile about it, it’s because she knows that getting where she wants is only a matter of time. God isn’t her boss; he’s her birthright.
Experientially, the condition is as old as time. Historically, it had its identifiable moment of emergence—an exuberant tidal wave of longing that crashed across the great barrier reefs of region, language, caste and class—around the eighth century. Beginning in the south, its inclusive, egalitarian spirit spread rapidly over the subcontinent. And it proclaimed, quite simply, that devotion was the supreme road to the divine.
It was not a unitary movement. The many popular devotional cults were staggeringly varied in belief and practice. The objects of devotion could be embodied or non-figurative, saguna or nirguna. God could have a name, family, pin code and vehicle; s/he could also be transcendent, formless and unnameable.
But what underlay all this plurality (which, admittedly, was not without its contradictions) was the assertion of a direct, fiercely intimate relationship with the divine. To read bhakti poetry—the lyrical outpourings of medieval mystics—is to enter the province of a slippery, feral longing, a non-domesticable love, a roller-coaster ride.
What made bhakti such a vertiginous, topsy-turvy affair?
For one, the bhakta. A changing zeitgeist, converging with the need of lower castes to give voice to their aspirations, gave birth to a new spiritual aspirant. These were men and women of startlingly diverse social contexts—potters, peasants, weavers, cobblers, basket-makers, palanquin-bearers, musicians, milkmen, scholars, tax-collectors, boatmen, blacksmiths, pundits, hangmen, pariahs, plebeians, princesses.
What did they have in common? Not much. Other than a collective feverish thirst. They were anarchic improvisers, not mere inheritors; less God-fearing than God-possessed; less content to receive wisdom than impatient to express their own tempestuous interiority. And since their relationship with God was so ferociously personal, it could brook no intercessor or intermediary. Which explains the bhakta’s habitual scorn for punditry, tradition, ritual and orthodoxy.
Since it was a relationship conducted in the innermost chamber of the heart, the refined, formal cadences of Sanskrit were often abandoned for regional language and dialect. The idiom was vigorous, colloquial, slangy, inventive; the timbre fiercely individual. Take Kabir’s fiery iconoclasm, for instance: O pundit, your hair-splitting’s/So much bullshit. I’m surprised/You still get away with it.
And if the devotee was liberated by this lawless longing, so was the divine. Temple doors swung open. No longer imprisoned in stone or in scripture, gods and goddesses tumbled out in a festive cascade. Free to saunter in and out of hearts at will, they could sulk when neglected, be wooed when peeved, be reprimanded when capricious. They wept with the dispossessed and celebrated with the joyous. They understood lapses in attention, errors in grammar, enjoyed trivia, relished detail and local gossip, revelled in the particular, had no ideological issues with the concrete. You didn’t have to know their language; they already knew yours. You didn’t have to propitiate them with a cargo of coconuts and terror; they were simply waiting for an invitation into your heart. They weren’t snobs.
Above all, the place where one encounters the upside downness of bhakti is in the poetry itself.
First, there is the delicious shock of discovering just how erotic, even carnal, sacred verse can be. There’s nothing tame or lily-livered about this longing. In the work of Telugu poet Annamacharya, for instance, the male seeker’s voice is tormented and imploring; in contrast, the woman seeker (a goddess in her own right) speaks in a voice that is bold, playful, fearlessly sensual. She reminds us that there is nothing anaemic or asexual about spiritual hunger; that the erotic and the existential, the physical and the metaphysical, are, in fact, deeply linked.
In the finest verse, there are in fact no easy hierarchies between flesh and spirit either. The body is often a shrine, a sanctum worthy of worship, the locus of wisdom, an instrument of knowing. Basavanna reminds us that the body is “the moving temple"; Chandidas proclaims that “man is the greatest Truth of all", confident that this in no way contradicts his love for Krishna. And courageous woman mystic Soyarabai affirms that bhakti is not bloodless: If menstrual blood makes me impure/tell me who was not born of that blood?
Then, if you thought bhakti was about God as zamindar (landowner) and devotee as bonded labour, think again. Each time you think you’ve figured out the hierarchy here, you’re ambushed by the unexpected. Devotee and God shared a bond of such intimacy that it made every tone permissible—rebuke, banter, humour, lust, entreaty, indignation, rage. God could be addressed the way one might speak to a beloved, if habitually disobedient, member of one’s household. You could reproach him, hurl the choicest cuss words at him, personalize him, infantilize him, cannibalize him, knowing all along that he was the sustainer of life and the world.
Interestingly, although the devotee is often presented as female, you won’t find pat gender equations either. So, if you’re looking for tropes of passive female bhaktas and dynamic male gods, it’s best to look elsewhere. As you approach the rising temperature of the bedchamber, power equations are in hectic flux. The female devotee is no demure bride: She’s capable of tying her lover’s arms to the bedpost (Narsinh Mehta), kicking him out of bed (Salabega), imperiously designating him her slave (Annamacharya). And God, as we see in Jayadeva, pines for his beloved in a way that can be poignant and heart-rending. He is creditor and debtor, conqueror and conquered, boss and serf (in Mehta’s verse, he even shows an occasional propensity for cross-dressing, adding an exciting twist to the recipe).
Any notions about sacred verse being peaceful and serene are also recurrently challenged. The bhaktas’ imagery can be violent, at times brutal. In their poems, they show a readiness to wreck homes and marriages, commit adultery and suicide, turn homicidal and cannibalistic with impunity, as long as it brings them closer to the objects of their desire. Take these husbands who die,/decay, and feed them/to your kitchen fires! cries Kannada woman mystic Akka Mahadevi. Tamil bhakta Nammalvar warns God of his intention even more plainly: If I see you anywhere/I’ll gather you/ and eat you up.
Finally, for those who believe that bhakti is dumb love, there are huge surprises in store. Reading these mystic poets is a reminder that bhakti is not (as many suppose) a state of imbecilic joy or emotional jingoism. There’s psychological complexity in abundance—nuances, subtexts, humour, startling undercurrents. The bhakta was not a plaster saint; she was a rebel, fully aware of the perils of the border game she was playing. Her devotion had its own deep intelligence. It was often a conscious strategy, a tool. For it is in the experience of devotion that the alchemy of self-transformation lies, not in the content—and bhaktas intuitively know this.
Bhakti isn’t neurotic love. It isn’t the desperate resort of the overwrought and the high-strung. Nor are these poems starry-eyed song and comfort food. The finest poets remind us, instead, that it is a technology of unmaking, an ecstatic device of self-dismantling. They remind us that bhakti is the deepest science of the heart.
Arundhathi Subramaniam is the editor of Eating God: A Book Of Bhakti Poetry, and recently released her own book of poems, When God Is A Traveller.
Unlock a world of Benefits! From insightful newsletters to real-time stock tracking, breaking news and a personalized newsfeed – it's all here, just a click away! Login Now!
