Love is a cornerstone of bhakti, aptly describing the profound emotional commitment a devotee makes to God or to a guru, yet bhakti is not an idealized love; it is a love that is ever inflected with ordinary human experience.
Bhakti is often glossed as the Sanskrit word for “devotion,” which speaks to the centrality of its emotional aspect, but tends to obscure the depth of thoughtfulness that characterizes the bhakti path (bhaktimarga), from Arjuna’s seemingly endless questions to Krishna on the true nature of God and humankind in the Sanskrit classic, the Bhagavad Gita (ca. 200 BCE-200 CE), to the literary skill of the famous classical bhakti poet-saints in the regional languages of India (ca. seventh to sixteenth centuries CE), including Cuntarar, Mahadevi Akka, and Nammalvar from south India, and Mirabai, Kabir, and Sur Das from north India.
Although historically bhakti did seem to spread from south India, where poet-saints extolled it in the seventh century, to north India, where poet-saints sang of it in the sixteenth century, bhakti is better characterized as a religious perspective than a social movement, for it has multiple centers. Bhakti was and is an influential perspective; it never became an official school or sect (sampradaya) with a uniformly established leader, beliefs, and practices. It is found across the sectarian lines of the worship of Siva, Visnu, and the Goddess within Hinduism, and it is highly developed in both Hinduism and Sikhism. Bhakti is a structural possibility in many theistic religious traditions, for example, Christian devotional-ism and Islamic Sufism. New research indicates that bhakti is an established mode in nonthe-istic traditions, such as Jainism, in which bhakti is directed toward the Jinas and gurus, and in Buddhism, centering on the bodhisattva figure.
The bhakti perspective celebrates unity within diversity, affirming both. The center of bhakti is the human heart; its thesis is that all human hearts have the capacity to experience love of God. Bhakti describes the human response to God. Significantly, many of the Indian languages use the same word for heart and mind, underscoring both the emotional and intellectual practice of bhakti. The capacity for love of God is not determined by caste, gender, or class, but bhakti traditions do acknowledge that the conditions of embodiment will inform an individual’s experience and expression of bhakti. Bhakti thus has the elasticity to celebrate a considerable diversity in terms of who is participating in the path, the nature of the divinity who is worshipped, and the practices of worship.
Bhakti’s celebration of unity in diversity thus allows for a plurality of perspectives. For example, there is considerable diversity in the way authors of bhakti literature envision God: Some view God as having attributes (saguna), such as Mahadevi Akka’s imagination of her lord as her lover who is “white as jasmine.” Others imagine God without attributes (nir-guna), such as Guru Nanak, whose poetry encourages humankind to ponder the divine name. The climactic eleventh chapter of the Bhagavad Gita posits a relationship between the formless and formed aspects of God, foregrounding Arjuna’s human response.
There is also a diversity of perspective in terms of the love of God that is possible in bhakti. Using the model of human relationships, the bhakti authors imagine diverse human stances with respect to God. One such relationship is that of child to parent; for example, the child saint Campantar received the milk of knowledge (jnana) from the breast of Goddess Uma. This relationship can also be imagined as that of servant to master; for example, St. Appar speaks of his desire to serve the Lord fully at all times. Another relationship is that of friend to friend; for example, St. Cuntarar both teased and argued with the Lord in what seemed at times a battle of wills. Bhakti can also be envisioned as the love of a parent to a child. The most famous example of this type of relationship would be devotees’ love for the baby Krishna, such as is found in the poetry of Sur Das. Beloved to lover is yet another type of relationship that finds expression in bhakti. The poetry of Sur Das, Mirabai, Antal, and Mahadevi Akka is passionate in nature, in the sense of a love that is imbued with the self-sacrifice of renunciation rather than self-interest. The famous Sanskrit text, Jaya-deva’s Gitagovinda (twelfth century), extols the love between Radha and Krishna.
The preponderance of female poets in the category of love poetry raises the issue of gender. Whereas female bhakti poets do not always speak in a bridal voice—Karaikkal Ammaiyar and Lalla are notable exceptions—they most frequently do, and in fact, male poets such as Kabir, Sur Das, Appar, and Nammalvar at times take on a female voice in their poetry. The bhakti poets all spoke a language of love, so there is considerable overlap in their poetic expressions; however, it is important to understand that the audience comes to the poetry knowing the hagiographies of the bhakti saints, for writing the biographies of the bhakti saints has been a major literary activity since medieval times. The bodies of the poets inscribe their poems in public consciousness. Moreover, through the hagiographies many categories of people are represented as bhakti saints, though they may not be authors—untouchable, brahmin, princess, merchant, hunter, and housewife, to name but a few, are represented as leaders in the bhakti biographical literature.
Bhakti’s emphasis on the embodiment of the saints validates the devotional practices of ordinary devotees. The extensive bhakti literature insists that the path is open to all, a perspective that informs current expressions of bhakti through a variety of widely practiced participatory devotional activities, including the singing of devotional songs, ritual worship, and pilgrimage.
