Dr. Ravi Sinha, Marxist Scholar and author delivered a talk on 'Bhakti Streams of Religious Movements in Medieval North India
Please find pasted below a YouTube link of the lecture.
Main Presentation Part 1
Q & A session Part 2
Q & A session Part 3
Theme : Bhakti Streams of Religious Movements in Medieval North India
Outline
The idea is to take up discussion of the Bhakti Movement as it moves to medieval North India. It is often stated that the Bhakti Movement was born in the Tamil land in the 6th-7th centuries and over the next millennium it made its way to the northern and eastern parts of the subcontinent. In his famous Patel Lectures of 1964, the famous Sanskritist Professor V Raghavan engagingly described the pradakshina yatra (clockwise circumambulation) of the Bharat Bhumi by Bhakti carried on the shoulders of singing saint-poets. Such a narrative, however, can contain only partially the historical truth. It is difficult to locate a singular source of a phenomenon that covered the entire subcontinent and took twelve hundred years to accomplish that. Given its scope and complexity and its temporal span, it is even more difficult to attribute to it a linear historical momentum that would carry it along an identifiable trajectory across the subcontinent.
Our considerations of the Bhakti Movement in the North will primarily focus on the period of 14th-18th centuries, although its antecedents go as far back as the periods of epics, puranas and Bhagavad Gita and its consequences operate and reverberate till today. In North India this movement clearly separates into two streams – the Saguna (worshipping the gods with attributes – invariably anthropomorphic gods) and the Nirguna (worshipping the abstract God without attributes). It is the Saguna stream, represented by the likes of Sur Das, Tulsidas, Mirabai and so on, that claims its ancestry in the Sanskritic era of the epics, the Bhagavad Gita, the Puranas and in the philosophical systems such as the Vedanta. It also fits more easily into the narrative of Bhakti performing the circumambulation of India starting in the Tamil region. The Nirguna stream represented by the likes of Kabir, Ravidas, Nanak and Dadu are more embedded in the North India of 15th-17th centuries, although they too at times claim ancestry in the Sanskritic era. The impact of Islam, especially of the Sufi stream, is clearly identifiable in this stream. Overall, we will attempt to identify the connections of the North Indian Bhakti phenomenon to three separate sources:
- Vedantic and Pauranik (mostly in the case of the Saguna stream)
- Yogic and Tantric (as, for example, the Nath Yogis)
- Influence of Sufi Islam and also of Christianity, Buddhism etc
Time permitting, we will briefly discuss the emergence of a new religion – Sikhism – out of the Nirgun stream of the North Indian Bhakti Movement.
Our discussion will attempt to cover three separate but interconnected aspects of the Bhakti phenomenon:
- Theological-ideological
- Social-cultural
- Civilizational-historical
There exists an enormous corpus of literature on the first two aspects of this phenomenon. We will very briefly summarise the salient features and the debates. It is the third aspect – the civilizational-historical – that brings forth a new flavour to our discussion. Bhakti Movement has often been lauded for its socially progressive impact on Indian culture and civilization. Scholars have contextualized the phenomenon in the social and political settings of medieval North India and many of them have underlined its plebeian and subalternist character that challenged the Brahmanical orthodoxy and the hierarchy of the varnashrama dharma. But the civilizational consequences of the Bhakti Movement have seldom been commented upon. We bring this dimension too into our considerations.
The cultural mind of India and the social fabric at the ground level have been structured and weaved primarily by the Bhakti Movement. It is evident in the role religion plays in personal conduct as well as in the social public sphere. This in turn begins to influence, deeply and widely, the modern political arena of nation, state and democracy. Even if one were to claim that the Bhakti phenomenon played a socially progressive role in medieval India, can one say the same with equal confidence about its ramifications in the contemporary social and political arena?
We ask this question at two different time-scales. On the shorter time-scale of contemporary politics one will have to look at the phenomenon of Communalism. The mainstream of the anti-colonial national movement considered the Bhakti Movement as the harbinger of religious tolerance and syncretism that would help evolve the Indian brand of secularism. The subsequent history, however, paints a mixed picture. A social fabric and a cultural mind weaved by the Bhakti ideologies do not offer the kind of resistance to communalism and sectarianism as was expected of them.
On a longer – millennial – time-scale one can evaluate the aftermath of the Bhakti phenomenon in the civilizational context. One can ask something like the Needham Question – why did the Indian civilization, despite its glory and accomplishments in the ancient and the medieval periods, fail to realize its cultural and scientific potentials? Why was it defeated often and why was it eventually colonized? Why did the West forge ahead, why has India lagged behind? Did the cultural mind and social ethos prepared by the Bhakti Movement play a role in the civilizational decline of India?
Of course, all these are very large and very complex questions. We cannot expect to deal with them in one discussion. But it is important to start looking at the Bhakti Movement in these contexts and in these perspectives. This is what we are trying to do in our series of discussions on this phenomenon.
Short Bibliography
1. David N Lorenzen – “Religious Movements in South Asia – 600-1800”
2. John Stratton Hawley – “A Storm of Songs – India and the Idea of Bhakti Movement”
3. Patton E Burchett – “A Genealogy of Devotion - Bhakti, Tantra, Yoga and Sufism in North India”
4. P Govinda Pillai – “The Bhakti Movement – Renaissance or Revivalism?”
5. Richard M Eaton – “India in the Persianate Age – 1000-1765”
About the Speaker :
Ravi Sinha is an activist-scholar who has been associated with progressive movements for nearly four decades. Trained as a theoretical physicist, Dr. Ravi has a doctoral degree from MIT, Cambridge, USA. He worked as a physicist at University of Maryland, College Park, USA, at Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad and at Gujarat University, Ahmedabad before resigning from the job to devote himself full time to organizing and theorizing. He is the principal author of the book, Globalization of Capital, published in 1997, co-founder of the Hindi journal, Sandhan, and one of the founders and a leading member of New Socialist Initiative.
