Popular Culture Review Vol. 10, No. 2, August 1999 | Page 117

Bhakti as a Popular Religious
and Cultural Movement
in India'
Bhakti is generally translated in the English language as “devotion,” but,
in addition, it is also unconditional surrender to someone who is loved, revered,
and respected. In the mundane sense, sentiments and feelings of Bhakti can be
expressed toward anyone. But in the spiritual sense, Bhakti is love, surrender,
reverence, and devotion toward the Supreme Personality of Godhead and His
multitudes of incarnations and representations.
In the classical Indian tradition, power and prestige were associated with
the elite groups and the masses often found themselves faded into insignificance.
The Bhakti movement changed that by shifting some loci of power and prestige
from the elites to common folk and thus bringing the masses into mainstream
society. This paper describes some early origins of the Bhakti movement in India,
its expansion in the North and the South, and the religious and cultural impacts the
movement had on Indian society. The three main traditions of Bhakti and the con
ceptions of Navadha-Bhakti (nine-fold Bhakti), characteristics of a Bhakta (devo
tee), and Bhakti-yoga (the spiritual path of Bhakti) as explained in the Bhagavad
Gita are also discussed.
Early Origins of the Bhakti Movement
Like many other repositories in the Indian Hindu tradition, the concep
tion and practice of Bhakti also had pre-Aryan origins. Bhakti existed prior to the
Vedic tradition and alongside it. Padampurana indicates the first appearance of
Bhakti movement in the South, from where it spread all over India. Classical San
skrit was the lingua franca of learned and upper classes and all philosophical,
literary, and artistic works in the Hindu tradition were written in Sanskrit. The
masses were not much familiar with Sanskrit and they spoke and conducted their
daily business in the vernacular languages. In North India, a variety of Indo-Aryan
languages, Prakrits, existed. Out of these developed the modem languages of
Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, etc. In South India, people spoke Dravidian languages
(Tamil, Telgu, etc.), which were different from the Indo-Aryan languages of the
North. The indigenous vernacular languages remained the primary medium of com
munication and conducting business for the masses, both in the North and the
South. It was, accordingly, necessary that the existing philosophy, literature, and
artistic creations in the Hindu tradition also be written and presented in the ver
nacular languages to meet the needs of the masses in these areas. A new class of