The Revolutionary Philosophy of Bhakti in Popular Literature

In medieval India, religious knowledge was a gated institution. Sacred texts were written in Sanskrit – a language monopolized by Brahmin priests – and the spiritual world was effectively closed to anyone outside the upper castes. Dalits, positioned at the very bottom of the caste hierarchy, were not just excluded from temples; they were excluded from the idea that they could be spiritually equal to anyone. The Bhakti movement broke that wall. It did so not through institutional reform or theological debate, but through something far more powerful and far more accessible: popular literature – songs, poems, and devotional hymns composed in the language of the street, the farm, and the workshop.

What made Bhakti literature revolutionary 🔗

The Bhakti movement, which originated in Tamil Nadu around the 6th century CE and spread northward to reach its peak between the 15th and 17th centuries, was built on a deceptively simple premise: that devotion to God required no priest, no Sanskrit, and no caste credential. What made this idea incendiary was the medium through which it was expressed. A hymn can travel where a philosophical treatise cannot, and that is precisely what Bhakti poets understood.

While orthodox Hinduism relied on Sanskrit scripture to regulate access to the sacred, Bhakti poets chose vernacular languages – Marathi, Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil, Bengali – to carry their message. This linguistic choice was not incidental. It was deeply political, democratizing spiritual knowledge and making divine wisdom accessible to all, regardless of birth or education. For Dalit communities who had been systematically denied access to formal learning and religious rites, this was not just a poetic shift – it was a philosophical opening.

The forms Bhakti poets used – the abhanga, the doha, the bhajan – were not elite literary genres. They were oral, performative, and communal. They were sung during pilgrimages, in fields, and at community gatherings. Pilgrimage routes, temple networks, trade routes, oral performance, and community singing all carried Bhakti ideas beyond courts and monasteries. This gave Bhakti literature a reach no Sanskrit treatise could match.

The philosophy embedded in the poetry 🔗

Bhakti literature was not merely devotional in the personal sense. It carried a systematic critique of the social and religious order. Some Bhakti poets challenged caste arrogance directly, condemned hollow ritualism, and rejected the idea that priestly mediation was the only path to salvation. At the core of this philosophy was the concept of nirguna – a formless, casteless, attribute-free God who belonged to no one group. If God had no caste, the argument ran, then why should access to God be determined by caste?

This was egalitarian philosophy expressed through artistic form. It argued, through verse and song, that human dignity was intrinsic – not something granted by birth or withheld by social rank. The Bhakti movement’s literary output thus occupied a unique space: it created a philosophical base for social equality and set in motion a new trend toward social and spiritual equality that the formal religious establishment had never permitted.

Voices from the margins: key poet-saints 🔗

Kabir: the weaver who questioned everything 🔗

Kabir, traditionally associated with the julaha (weaver) community of Varanasi, is perhaps the most well-known voice of radical dissent in Bhakti literature. His poetry prioritizes inner devotion and truth over inherited status, and his short two-line dohas compressed enormous philosophical weight into language everyone could understand. He attacked both Hindu and Muslim religious formalism, questioning the logic of rituals that were performed without inner sincerity. His verses ridicule empty ritual, sectarian pride, and the assumption that God belongs to one community.

What distinguished Kabir was his refusal to stay within the boundaries of any one tradition. Before Ambedkar, it was Kabir who pointed out that dividing men into castes does no good to them. His verses were staunchly anti-caste, and scholars have noted a striking ideological kinship between Kabir’s critique of Brahmanical hierarchy and Ambedkar’s later political philosophy – both rejecting a divinely ordained social order in favor of human dignity. Kabir the weaver, like Tukaram the farmer and Namdev the tailor, was never marginalised in the real life of vernacular communities – it was only elite academic traditions that sidelined these voices.

Ravidas: envisioning Begumpura 🔗

Ravidas, born into the chamar (leather-worker) community – one of the communities classified as “untouchable” – took Bhakti philosophy in a more directly visionary direction. Through his nirguna devotional philosophy, his poetry imagines a just spiritual order in which dignity is not determined by birth. His most enduring contribution may be the concept of Begumpura – a city without sorrow, without caste, without discrimination. Ravidas envisioned a utopian world without discrimination and inequality in the 15th-16th century, hundreds of years before Karl Marx.

Ravidas also made a deliberately political statement through his continued practice of leather work even as a revered poet-saint. His tremendous pride in his caste identity and its associated work was meant to dismiss the notion of any work being hierarchized as inferior or superior. This was philosophy in action – his biography was itself a text challenging the idea that spiritual authority required upper-caste birth. His hymns were later included in the Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh holy scripture, testifying to the cross-community authority his poetry commanded.

Chokhamela and the Varkari tradition 🔗

In Maharashtra, Chokhamela, born in a Mahar family in the 14th century, became the leading Dalit voice of the Bhakti movement in the region. His poetry, composed in the abhanga form in Marathi, described the concrete reality of being barred from temples, of living outside the village boundary, of a life shaped entirely by the logic of untouchability. Yet he directed these experiences toward the divine, making his suffering a form of spiritual testimony rather than silent acceptance.

Within the Varkari devotional tradition of Maharashtra, the abhanga was the primary literary medium for expressing both devotion and dissent. The tradition’s most notable feature, as scholar Rohini Mokashi-Punekar observed, was the complete absence of priestly mediation – no elaborate rituals were needed, making it a code most suited to poor, illiterate, labouring castes and peasants who could afford neither money nor leisure nor learning. Chokhamela’s abhangas, sung to this day during the Pandharpur pilgrimage, represent one of the earliest and most sustained bodies of Dalit literary expression in the Indian tradition. Dr. B. R. Ambedkar dedicated his book The Untouchables to the memory of Chokhamela, Nandanar, and Ravidas, acknowledging their pioneering role.

Women saints: Soyarabai and Janabai 🔗

Bhakti popular literature also created unusual space for Dalit women’s voices. In the 13th century, Soyarabai – wife of Chokhamela – was writing devotional poetry about Vitthal, the very deity whose temple she was not permitted to enter because she was a Dalit. Janabai, another Dalit woman saint of the same tradition, composed over 300 abhangas, many of which are still sung during the Pandharpur foot processions. Both women challenged the popular notion that only certain castes had the privilege to worship God, asserting that all were considered fit for this privilege. Their literary contribution reminds us that Bhakti’s egalitarianism was not confined to caste alone – it also created, however tentatively, openings across gender lines.

Bridging elite discourse and lived reality 🔗

What separated Bhakti popular literature from elite religious philosophy was not just its language or form, but its subject matter. The Upanishads and the great Sanskrit commentaries engaged with abstract metaphysics. Bhakti poets wrote about the threshold of a temple they could not cross, about the food left over after the upper castes had eaten, about the grinding reality of caste in everyday life. In regions like Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, and Odisha, Bhakti literature by Dalit poets reflected the pain of caste oppression and invoked a vision of social equality. These were not abstract claims about human dignity – they were specific, embodied, and inseparable from the poets’ own lives.

This is what gave Bhakti literature its peculiar philosophical power. It did not argue for equality in the language of formal logic. It demonstrated equality through the act of composition itself – by showing that those deemed spiritually inferior could produce work of extraordinary depth and beauty. Dalit literature empowers the marginalized by retrieving the voices, spaces, and identities silenced or suppressed by casteist powers, and Bhakti literature was the first major instance of this retrieval in the Indian tradition.

A contested legacy 🔗

The Bhakti movement’s relationship with Dalit liberation is not without its complications, and it is worth being clear-eyed about them. Ambedkar himself, while acknowledging the poets, was sceptical about whether the movement produced lasting structural change. At a gathering in Maharashtra in 1928, he stated that “the struggle of the saints did not have any effect on society,” arguing that spiritual equality, however movingly expressed, did not translate automatically into social and political equality.

Additionally, the Bhakti movement did not abolish social hierarchy everywhere, and it should not be romanticized as a uniform revolution. Some Bhakti figures worked within existing temple structures; others operated in contexts where caste discrimination continued unabated around them. Chokhamela’s abhangas remained within a devotional framework that still sought divine acceptance rather than outright rejection of the entire system. Ambedkar’s later call for conversion to Buddhism reflected, in part, his conclusion that working within Hindu devotional traditions had limits as a strategy for Dalit liberation.

Yet these tensions do not diminish the significance of what Bhakti literature achieved. It created a vernacular philosophical tradition – accessible, oral, widely circulated – that made the case for human equality centuries before modern political philosophy did so in India. These bhakti saints remain a basis of motivation for anti-caste agitations and movements across India, and the literary forms they pioneered – the abhanga, the doha, the bhajan – became templates for later Dalit literary and political expression.

The enduring significance 🔗

The Bhakti movement’s use of popular literature to carry its egalitarian philosophy was, at its core, a philosophical intervention about who gets to speak, in what language, and to whom. By choosing the vernacular over Sanskrit, the song over the treatise, and the lived experience over abstract theology, Bhakti poets fundamentally democratized spiritual and philosophical discourse in medieval India. For Dalit communities, this mattered enormously – not just as religious consolation, but as an assertion that their inner lives, their suffering, and their vision of a just society were worthy of literary expression and philosophical weight.

Modern Dalit writing received strong impetus through the writings of reformers like Jyotirao Phule and B. R. Ambedkar, but the roots of a Dalit literary consciousness reach back to Chokhamela’s abhangas in 14th-century Maharashtra and Ravidas’s hymns in 15th-century Varanasi. The Bhakti poets did not just write poems – they established the radical idea that truth spoken from the margins is still truth, and that beauty crafted by the excluded is still beauty.

What do you think? If popular literature – songs, poems, oral performance – was the primary vehicle for challenging caste hierarchy in medieval India, what does that tell us about the limitations of formal institutional channels for producing social change? And how should we evaluate a movement that gave Dalit communities profound spiritual dignity but did not dismantle the material structures of caste oppression?

References

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11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chokhamela
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