The Bhakti and Sufi Movements

Bhakti began among the Tamil saints — the Vaishnava Alvars and the Shaiva Nayanars (c. 6th–9th centuries) — who sang direct, passionate love of God in Tamil, defying caste and priestcraft, and filled the Pallava and Chola temples with hymns. Ramanuja (11th century) gave the emotion philosophy: his Vishishtadvaita made devotion to a personal God the road to liberation and opened the temples' doors, in principle, to all.

Carried north by Ramananda, bhakti split into two streams. The saguna saints adored God with form: Tulsidas retold the Rama story in Avadhi as the Ramcharitmanas — the single most influential book of north Indian devotion — while Surdas sang of Krishna's childhood, Mirabai of her mystic marriage to him, and Chaitanya swept Bengal into dance and kirtan behind the truth that love, not ritual, saves.

The nirguna saints worshipped God without form and questioned all orthodoxy. Kabir — the weaver of Banaras claimed by Hindus and Muslims at his death — mocked pandit and mullah alike in verses still sung today, and taught a direct path of the heart. Guru Nanak (1469–1539) founded Sikhism on the oneness of God, the equality of all humans, honest work and the community kitchen (langar) — a creed whose scripture, the Adi Granth, was compiled by Guru Arjan in 1604.

Islam in India found its popular voice in the Sufis, who sought God through love, music and the guidance of a pir. The Chishti silsila — Muinuddin Chishti of Ajmer, Baba Farid, and Nizamuddin Auliya of Delhi — kept aloof from courts and opened its khanqahs to all comers, while the Suhrawardi order of Bahauddin Zakariya of Multan accepted royal favours. Sama (spiritual music) and the Urdu language grew up around the dargahs.

Together, Bhakti and Sufi created the shared world of medieval India: vernacular literatures in Hindi, Bengali, Marathi and Punjabi; the sant tradition of common devotion; and a vocabulary — prem, ishq, pir, guru — in which two religions could speak to each other. When the Mughal prince Dara Shikoh later translated the Upanishads as the Sirr-i-Akbar, he was only drawing out a synthesis the saints had sung for centuries.