Journey
Bhakti poets across regions
Six poets in six languages between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, with no organisation between them and one thing in common: they wrote about god in the language people spoke, and in doing so made Gujarati, Braj, Awadhi, Assamese, Rajasthani and Hindi into literary languages. None of them wrote in Sanskrit and all of them are still sung, which is the whole argument of the set.
Stops (6)
- Narsinh Mehtā · Narsinh Mehtā — Gujarati, 15th century
The first great Gujarati poet, a Nagar Brahmin of Junāgadh outcast for singing with untouchable Harijans. Vaishnava jana to, his definition of a good person as one who feels another's pain, was Gandhi's daily prayer and is sung at every state occasion in Gujarat. His songs invented the language's literary register.
- Sūrdās · Sūrdās — Braj Bhāshā, 16th century
The blind poet of the Pushti Mārga whose Sūrsāgar runs to thousands of padas on Krishna's childhood — the butter theft, the mothers' complaints, Yashodā counting his teeth. He made Braj Bhāshā the standard literary language of north India for three hundred years, and almost nothing certain is known about his life.
- Tulsīdās · Tulsīdās — Awadhi, 16th century
His Rāmcharitmānas retold the Rāmāyana in Awadhi rather than Sanskrit, and was attacked at Banāras for it. It became the most widely read book in north India and the script of the Rāmlīlā performed in thousands of towns every autumn — a single poem doing more for a language than any court could.
- Shankaradeva · Shankaradeva — Assamese, 15th–16th century
He built a whole culture rather than a corpus: the sattra monasteries, the namghar prayer halls in every village, Borgeet songs, Sattriya dance and Ankiyā Bhāonā drama. Assamese neo-Vaishnavism is unusual in having no image worship at all — the book on a pedestal is the object of devotion.
- Mīrābāī · Mīrābāī — Rajasthani and Braj, 16th century
A Rathore princess who refused her Sisodia marriage, called herself Krishna's wife and sang in public — which for a woman of her rank meant giving up caste, household and protection. Some thirteen hundred padas circulate under her name; scholars accept a fraction as certainly hers, which is itself a measure of how far she travelled.
- Kabīr · Kabīr — Hindi, 15th century
A Banāras weaver, raised Muslim, whose couplets attack Hindu ritual and Islamic ritual with equal contempt and insist god has no form and no name. He is in the Guru Granth Sāhib, in the Kabīrpanth's Bījak and in oral circulation everywhere — claimed by three religions and comfortable in none.