Bhakti and Sufi Movements: Saints, Orders and Ideas

Between the seventh and the seventeenth centuries a wave of devotional religion moved across India. Hindu saints preached bhakti, personal love for a single god that needed no priest and no Sanskrit; Muslim mystics preached tasawwuf, the inner path to God that later travellers called Sufism. The two movements grew separately but met in the same towns, used the same spoken languages and attacked the same targets: ritual for its own sake, the monopoly of the learned, and the barriers of caste and birth. Together they gave India its first great body of literature in the regional languages.

The beginnings of the Bhakti movement

The earliest bhakti saints were the Alvars and the Nayanars of the Tamil country, active roughly between the sixth and the ninth centuries. The twelve Alvars sang of Vishnu and the sixty-three Nayanars of Shiva; they travelled from shrine to shrine and composed in Tamil rather than Sanskrit. Andal was the woman among the Alvars and Karaikkal Ammaiyar among the Nayanars, and their presence shows that the movement opened a door that orthodoxy had kept shut. The philosophers who followed gave bhakti its systems. Shankaracharya, in the eighth century, taught Advaita or non-dualism. Ramanuja, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, taught Vishishtadvaita, qualified non-dualism, and made devotion to Vishnu the road to release. Madhvacharya taught Dvaita or dualism, Nimbarka taught Dvaitadvaita and Vallabhacharya taught Shuddhadvaita, the pure non-dualism of the Pushtimarg.

Nirguna and saguna saints of the north

From Ramananda, who taught in Hindi and took disciples without asking their caste, the movement passed into the northern plains. It split into two streams. The nirguna saints worshipped a god without form or attributes. Kabir, a weaver of Kashi, attacked idol worship, pilgrimage and the claims of both pandit and mullah; his dohas and the Bijak remain in daily speech, and a body of his verse was included in the Sikh scripture. Guru Nanak, born in 1469 at Talwandi, preached one formless God, the remembrance of the divine name and honest labour, and founded the community that became Sikhism. Ravidas, Dadu Dayal and Namdev belong to the same stream. Basavanna, in twelfth-century Karnataka, founded the Virashaiva or Lingayat tradition and wrote vachanas in Kannada against caste and temple ritual.

The saguna saints worshipped god with form. Surdas sang of the child Krishna in Braj, Mirabai of Rajasthan gave up a royal household for Krishna, and Tulsidas retold the story of Rama in Awadhi in the Ramcharitmanas, the single most-read devotional work of north India. In Bengal, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu made congregational singing, or kirtan, the centre of worship and inspired the Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition. In Assam, Shankaradeva founded the Ekasarana dharma and built the sattras and namghars. In Maharashtra the Varkari tradition ran from Jnaneshwar, whose Jnaneshwari explained the Gita in Marathi, through Namdev and Eknath to Tukaram, whose abhangas are still sung on the pilgrimage to Pandharpur. Narsinh Mehta of Gujarat wrote the hymn beginning "Vaishnav Jan To", and Lal Ded of Kashmir composed vakhs.

Sufism and the silsilas

Sufism reached India with the Turkish conquests and organised itself into silsilas, orders descending from a founding master. The Chishti order, brought by Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti, who settled at Ajmer, was the most popular; the Suhrawardi order, established at Multan by Bahauddin Zakariya, was the most closely tied to the state. The Qadiri, Naqshbandi and Firdausi orders came later. A Sufi master was called a pir or shaikh and his disciple a murid; teaching took place in a khanqah, a hospice open to visitors of every faith. The Chishtis refused state grants and lived on futuh, unasked offerings, while the Suhrawardis accepted land and office. Sama, devotional music, was central to Chishti practice and disputed by others. The death anniversary of a saint is his urs, and his tomb, the dargah, became a place of pilgrimage for Hindus and Muslims alike.

The great Chishti masters

Amir Khusrau, poet and musician at the court of several Delhi sultans, was a disciple of Nizamuddin Auliya. He is called the Tuti-i-Hind, the parrot of India, is credited by tradition with shaping qawwali, and wrote in Persian and in the early Hindavi from which Hindi and Urdu grew.

What the movements achieved

Bhakti and Sufi teachers made religion a matter of the heart rather than of learning. They wrote in Tamil, Kannada, Marathi, Braj, Awadhi, Punjabi, Bengali and Assamese, and so created the earliest literature in those languages. They admitted women, artisans and the lowest castes as disciples. They softened the distance between Hindu and Muslim believers in a shared vocabulary of love and surrender, and the syncretic teaching of saints such as Kabir and Guru Nanak drew from both worlds.