Art & Culture

The Bhakti movement as it originated in South India in the eighth century refers to the religious movement during the medieval period, which propagated the concept of Bhakti i.e., intense love and devotion to God while condemning rituals, ceremonies and superstitions. It sought to bring religious reforms to all strata of society by adopting the method of devotion to achieve salvation. It achieved a great deal of popularity through the poems of the Alvars and Nayanars, the Vaishnavite and Shaivite poets.

Its origin and spread can be traced as following

• An earlier type of Bhakti that preaches a personal devotion, contemplative and sober, to a personal Lord can be found expressed in the Bhagavad Gita.
• Though exact time of beginning of Bhakti is uncertain, the earliest devotional bhakti poetry of Tamil precedes the coming of Islam. The divination of Krishna and Rama emerged around the beginning of the Christian era. Stories about Krishna were added to the Puranas, thus transforming the Krishna myth and leading to slow transformation of Bhakti itself.
• From the seventh to the tenth centuries a very extensive hymnal literature came to light. The collections of these hymns acquired immense importance and soon came to be considered as the ‘Tamil Veda’.
• The first clear manifestation of the new form of bhakti which was emotional, ardent, ecstatic, often using erotic imagery- appears in the Tamil country in the early seventh century, in the poems of the Nayanars and of the Alvars.
  • Nayannars: They composed hymns in the praise of Lord Shiva.
  • Alvars: Alvars, which literally means “those immersed in God”, were Vaishnava poet-saints who sang praises of Vishnu or Krishna as they travelled from one place to another.
  • Virashaiva Movement: They emerged in the 12th Century AD in Karnataka during the reign of Kalachuri dynasty. They opposed the elaborate rituals prescribed by Hindu priests.
  • Various saints: In the ninth century, Shankaracharya, born in Kerala, started a Hindu revivalist movement giving a new orientation to Hinduism. In the twelfth century, Ramanuja, born near modern Chennai, preached Vishishtadvaita. In the thirteenth century, Madhavacharya from the Kannada region propagated Dvaita or dualism of Jivatma and Paramatma.

Thus, the Bhakti movement spread in South India through various saints who denounced rigidities of Hinduism. The vernacular language of the south depicts the Bhakti movement in following form:

• In the Tamil region the hymns of the Alvars and the Nayannars soon gained the status of divine scripture.
  • Nayannars wrote ‘Tevaram’, which is also called the Dravida Veda.
  • Alvars composed hymns in the praise of Vishnu and his avatars, which are compiled in the ‘Divya Prabandha’.
• Virasaivas invented a new kind of Kannada literature called – the vachana. These were little pieces of rhythmic prose sermons, meant for the people and inculcating bhakti to Shiva. The Lingayats also left collections of hymns, and a hagiographic literature in praise of their saints.
  • During Vijayanagar kingdom, the Mahabharata and other Sanskrit texts were translated into vernacular. These were often followed by popular songs composed and sung by the dasas, or mendicant singers.
• Telugu literature follows closely the pattern of development of Kannada literature. Nannaya translated part of the Mahabharata, which was later continued by Tikkana, and finished by Yerraprgada o Vemana wrote ‘sataka’ . The Ramanayan and the great Puranas too were soon transposed into Telugu.
  • Vemana wrote ‘sataka’ is a collection of gnomic verse with sarcastic attacks on the brahmans, on polytheism, idolatry and pilgrimages. The Bhakti was a mass movement, hence the saint poets chose vernacular as its vehicle to which the common people could easily relate to.