Two examples from mediaeval Odisha’s bhakti tradition show how debates and differences about the sacred were part of devotional practice, and not forced onto us after the institutionalisation of modern, secular, and democratic visions... Each bhakt’s quest toward their own self, or own language, was a gesture to a universal appeal.
Over the last decade or so the idea of religion has been made to go through quick mutations, much more rapidly than in other times. One of those is consciously muting the relationship between historical events and the rise of religious thoughts and praxis. The complex and often dynamic traffic between socio-political events alongside which beliefs, faiths, as well practices of ritual orders in a religion grew, shifted, and renewed themselves have been thwarted.
Instead, religion is presented as an unchanging and ossified category which is ‘sacred’ without any historical, social, or even political foundations. This process has been carried out equally in the political, popular, and academic discourses, and has given rise to lethal consequences for our diverse and plural country: communal tensions and polarisation of ideas in the masses.
The most fertile ground to undertake this ahistorical discourse around religion is prepared is by misreading texts that emerged out of the bhakti traditions and imposing those views anachronistically. The bhakti tradition, which made the discourse of religion more personal, varied, popular, and dialogic by instilling dissent, has now, ironically, created ground for misrepresentations in the hands of fundamentalist and colonialist ideologues. Whatever the case, it is important to grasp the full and comprehensive essence of that religion in general, and bhakti as a theme, to free it from the clutches of misappropriations.
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The primordial trait of the bhakti period in Indian historical continuum is best understood as an assimilation of the knowledges of liberation practices produced in the elite Sanskrit dictions with desi traditions – the language of the people, ones that would later emerge as modern Indian languages: Odia, Bangla, Gujarati, and so on. This assimilation took shape in two specific ways: a stance against religious orthodoxy coupled with a refusal to the cordoning of religious knowledge, and sometimes, popularising the ideology of those Sanskrit texts as most desirable. The bhakti tradition rendered the hitherto difficult to access knowledge of attaining moksha, liberation, to a large section of the populace who were outside the domain of its purview.
With this being its broad progressive stance, the bhakti tradition was a connected yet distinct set of practices that emerged from the southern fringes of the subcontinent and travelled all the way up to the north of India and kept itself alive until the 18th century, bringing with it a new kind of interest in religion for the common masses. Although much interest and scholarship has projected bhakti practices to be a sort of coherent ’movement’, they defied any unitary method of articulating their ideas and remained in a liminal space of being enigmatically personal and at the same time overtly political in their context.
The bhakti poets were essentially regional. They consciously chose to limit their audience to one specific language, although most of them were well versed in the cosmopolitan language of Sanskrit. In that, they were not supporting anything like the ‘sub-nationalism’ of modern times. Instead, each bhakt’s quest toward his own self, or own language, was a gesture to a universal appeal. In this quest, they developed a certain moral philosophy, akin to Immanuel Kant’s “categorical imperative,” which states that humans must work “that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” So too it was for the bhakt, an attempt to not act at all for oneself, but to carve out a space where individual action would undoubtedly be linked to the greater good of every being. This contradictory gesture to the Self was inevitably posited in a view of the Other…..
https://www.theindiaforum.in/society/encountering-bhakt-transformation-religious-thought
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