Saktism and Tantrism: Embodying Dalit Resistance and Empowerment

When we think about resistance to caste oppression in India, we often think of modern political movements, constitutional protections, or the towering legacy of B.R. Ambedkar. But centuries before these frameworks existed, Dalit communities were already forging paths of defiance – not through legislation, but through spirituality. Among the most powerful of these paths were Saktism and Tantrism: two religious traditions that, at their core, rejected the very hierarchies that Brahmanical orthodoxy was built upon. Understanding how and why these traditions became expressions of Dalit resistance requires us to look closely at what they taught, who they welcomed, and why that mattered so deeply in medieval India.

What are Saktism and Tantrism? 🔗

Saktism is the tradition centered on worshipping Shakti – the divine feminine energy understood as the supreme creative force of the universe. According to Britannica, Shaktism is the worship of Shakti as the active power of the godhead conceived in feminine terms, and it should be understood as distinct from, though closely related to, Tantrism. In Shakta theology, without Shakti, the male divine is inert – it is the goddess who creates, sustains, and destroys. This radical centering of feminine power made Saktism philosophically unlike anything in the Vedic canon.

Tantrism, meanwhile, is a broader spiritual system that emerged as a pan-Indian movement by around the 5th century CE. Encyclopedia.com describes it as derived from non-Vedic religious traditions and connected especially with the worship of the Earth-Mother and her power (Shakti). Crucially, in contrast to earlier Vedic religion – which was largely ascetic and confined to higher castes – Tantrism was open to all castes. Its method involved the use of mantras (sacred words), mudras (symbolic gestures), and mandalas (symbolic designs) as pathways to liberation and spiritual power. Scholars like Gavin Flood note that the pioneers of Tantra were quite possibly non-Brahmanical, likely ascetics from outside the upper-caste fold, suggesting the tradition’s grassroots, non-elite origins from the very beginning.

Brahmanical orthodoxy and its exclusions 🔗

To appreciate why Saktism and Tantrism were so meaningful to Dalit communities, one must understand what Brahmanical orthodoxy actually meant in practice. The Vedic religious system placed Brahmin priests at the center of all sacred knowledge and ritual. Access to the Vedas, temple worship, and the performance of rites were all controlled by caste. Dalits – placed at the very bottom of this hierarchy, often deemed “untouchable” – were systematically excluded. They could not enter temples, could not perform Vedic rituals, and were denied the spiritual authority that higher castes took for granted.

As Oxford historian Alexis Sanderson has noted, tantric pursuits deliberately transgressed orthodox Hindu norms that delimited human agency for the sake of symbolic and ritual purity (shuddhi). Many of the original Tantric rites were performed in cremation grounds – spaces that upper-caste Hindus regarded as polluted and avoided – precisely because Tantrism did not accept the Brahmanical grammar of purity and impurity. As scholars have pointed out, in non-Tantric Sanskrit texts, Vedic rites were designated as suitable for Brahmins and higher classes, while Tantric rites were associated with the lower castes – an ironic acknowledgment that Tantrism belonged to those whom orthodox Hinduism had pushed aside.

Tantrism as a people’s religion 🔗

The phrase “people’s religion” captures something essential about how Tantrism functioned socially. As BA Notes explains, in Tantric circles, a person’s spiritual potential was not determined by birth but by dedication and practice – women could be spiritual teachers, people from lower castes could become adepts, and the usual social barriers dissolved in the pursuit of enlightenment. This was the opposite of Brahmanical logic, which insisted that spiritual access was inherited.

According to historical education materials from eGyanKosh (the National Digital Library of India), Tantrism neither presumed the infallibility of the Vedas nor the social supremacy of its Brahmanical custodians – which is precisely why it was initially condemned by the Puranas. Tantra treated the human body as the epitome of the universe, rejected Vedic asceticism, and placed fertility and lived embodied experience at the center of spiritual life. These were not merely theological positions; they were statements about whose bodies, whose knowledge, and whose lives had sacred worth.

The tradition’s non-Vedic roots run deep. Scholars researching Tantrism’s origins have traced the worship of the mother goddess to pre-Vedic and Indus Valley civilizations, pointing to terracotta figurines of semi-nude female figures from as far back as the 4th millennium BCE. The non-Aryan peoples described in Vedic literature as Dasas and Dasyus had religious practices that closely resembled Tantric ritual forms. In other words, the very communities that Brahmanical religion sought to subordinate were the original custodians of traditions that would later become Tantrism and Saktism.

The Bhakti movement: A spiritual opening for Dalit communities 🔗

The Bhakti movement, which originated in South India around the 6th century CE and spread northward through the medieval period, created the social and spiritual conditions in which Saktism and Tantrism could resonate even more powerfully with marginalized communities. Wikipedia’s overview of the Bhakti movement notes that most scholars agree the movement provided women and members of Shudra and untouchable communities an inclusive path to spiritual salvation. Salvation, which had once been considered attainable only by men of the three upper varnas, was now declared available to everyone.

The Bhakti movement was not monolithic. As Lotus Arise explains, it was divided into two ideological streams: the Saguna tradition (devotion to a god with form and attributes) and the Nirguna tradition (devotion to a formless, attribute-less divine). Critically, it was the Nirguna stream – the one that explicitly rejected the caste system and Brahmanical authority – that proved most transformative for Dalit communities. Saints like Kabir, Raidas (also known as Ravidas), and others from marginalized backgrounds championed this path. Scholars writing for Countercurrents have argued that only the Nirguna poets consistently opposed the caste system, while the Saguna stream – despite its devotional intensity – largely left caste hierarchies intact.

Britannica notes that devotion to Shiva within Bhakti included the recognition that Shiva could appear as anyone – a tribal hunter, a Dalit, even a Muslim – while devotion to the goddesses was more regional and local, expressed in temples and festivals devoted to forms like Durga, Kali, and Shitala. This goddess-centered devotion formed a natural bridge between popular Bhakti spirituality and Shakta traditions that had long existed at the grassroots level.

Shakti as a symbol of Dalit empowerment 🔗

For Dalit communities, the goddess was never simply a figure of passive worship. She was a symbol of active power, agency, and defiance. The Shakta tradition’s most widely venerated forms – Kali, Durga, Chamunda, Chandi – are fierce, autonomous, and world-transforming. As documented in Shakta traditions, the Kalikula school, dominant in northeastern India and especially Bengal, stands broadly in opposition to the Brahmanical tradition, which they view as overly conservative and as denying the experiential dimension of religion. The main deities of this tradition – Kali, Chandi, Durga – are precisely the forms most widely worshipped among lower-caste and Dalit communities across eastern India.

This is theologically significant. Shakta philosophy declares the goddess to be not just equal to the male divine but ontologically prior to it. The divine masculine without Shakti is inert – a corpse, as one formulation puts it. For communities that had been told their bodies were impure, their labor defiling, and their lives spiritually worthless, the Shakta insistence on embodied, feminine, material power as sacred was nothing less than a philosophical revolution. Local and village goddesses – many of them patron deities of specific Dalit communities – were understood within this framework as manifestations of Shakti, making the goddess worship that had always existed in these communities a form of legitimate, even supreme, spirituality.

Dalit saints and the convergence of Bhakti, Shakta, and Tantric currents 🔗

The figures who most vividly embodied the convergence of Bhakti devotion with the egalitarian principles of Tantrism and Saktism were the Dalit poet-saints themselves. As the International Journal of Humanities and Sustainable Innovation documents, the roots of Dalit consciousness in Indian literature trace back to medieval Bhakti poetry and oral traditions, with poets like Chokhamela and Karmamela in Maharashtra and Tamil Bhakti saints expressing themes of social justice and spiritual equality through vernacular compositions that challenged Brahmanical orthodoxy.

Chokhamela (13th-14th century), from the Mahar community of Maharashtra, worshipped Vithoba at Pandharpur – a devotion that was simultaneously Bhakti in form and socially transgressive in effect. Scholarly analysis of Chokhamela and Ravidas finds that while Chokhamela’s critique of caste was often implicit, expressed through personal anguish and devotional pleas, his very attainment of sainthood stood as a testament to spiritual achievement from the margins – a direct challenge to the Brahmanical claim that the sacred was off-limits to the lowborn. Ravidas (Raidas), from the Chamar community in North India, went further, explicitly envisioning Begumpura – a utopian society entirely free from caste and class. His hymns, preserved in the Sikh Guru Granth Sahib, articulated a theology of universal equality grounded in direct communion with the divine, with no priestly mediation required.

As educational resources on the Bhakti movement note, Bhakti philosophy rejected complex rituals and priestly mediation entirely, asserting that salvation was attainable through direct, personal connection with the divine – a core principle shared with both Tantric and Shakta traditions. The Bhakti saints, particularly those from Dalit backgrounds, did not need to explicitly invoke Tantric or Shakta theology by name; they were expressing its essential logic: that spiritual authority belongs to the practitioner, not the priest; that the divine is directly accessible; and that caste is irrelevant to liberation.

The egalitarian logic of Tantrism and its limits 🔗

It would be incomplete to present Tantrism as an uncomplicated vehicle of Dalit liberation. Historical accounts from eGyanKosh point out that Tantrism, in its later phase, began to discriminate devotees on the basis of class, privileging those with access to texts and literacy, and that it gradually received royal and political patronage – processes through which it became more hierarchical and less accessible to ordinary people. Similarly, Wikipedia’s entry on Shaktism documents a long dispute within Hindu Tantrism between the Kaula school – which maintained more transgressive, non-Brahmanical practices – and the Samaya school, which attempted to reform Tantric practice in ways that aligned it with high-caste Brahmanical norms. This internal tension reflects the broader pattern in Indian religious history: movements that begin as radical challenges to hierarchy are often gradually absorbed or domesticated by the dominant order.

Nevertheless, the subversive potential of these traditions – their insistence on personal spiritual experience, embodied practice, and the sacredness of the non-Vedic – remained alive, especially at the village and community level where Dalit goddess worship continued largely outside Brahmanical supervision. New World Encyclopedia’s account of Shaktism notes that there are thousands of goddess forms associated with particular temples, geographic entities, or individual villages, and that the Brahmanical idea of Shakti became fused with many local traditions. This fusion was never a simple assimilation; it was often a site of negotiation in which local, non-Brahmanical religious identities persisted within the wider framework of goddess worship.

A living legacy 🔗

The tradition of Saktism and Tantrism as expressions of popular, grassroots, and ultimately anti-hierarchical spirituality did not end in the medieval period. The Kalikula traditions of Bengal, the goddess cults of village India, and the continuing veneration of Dalit saint-poets across Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, and beyond all carry forward the essential insight that liberation is not the property of the priestly class. When Dalit communities today assert their right to their own religious practices, their own goddess traditions, and their own spiritual authority, they are drawing – even if not always consciously – on a very long history. As scholarly analyses of Bhakti have noted, influences from Tantra added ecstatic elements – dance, song, and direct communal experience – to the Bhakti tradition, creating forms of worship that belonged to the people, not the temple establishment.

Saktism and Tantrism, at their most radical, proposed something that orthodox Hinduism could never fully accommodate: that the sacred is available to everyone, that the body is not a site of pollution but of power, and that the divine feminine – embodied in village goddesses, in Kali, in the very earth – belongs to the marginalized as much as to anyone. For Dalit communities navigating centuries of spiritual exclusion, this was not just theology. It was resistance.

What do you think? If traditions like Saktism and Tantrism carried the seeds of spiritual egalitarianism, why do caste-based exclusions from religious spaces persist in India even today? And can the philosophy of the goddess traditions – with their insistence on embodied power and direct access to the divine – offer something meaningful to contemporary movements for Dalit dignity and social justice?

References

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