When Bhakt And Bhakti Had A Different Connotation

“He’s just another bhakt,” I overheard someone say recently, in the course of a heated political debate. I will admit the oft-repeated phrase still makes me wince. I know what she meant, of course. I know that it was her way of describing an uncritical groupie, someone who kowtowed to the politics of the far Right.

In my day, we called such a person, quite simply, a chamcha—a servile wretch who oozed blandishment because he lacked the spine to be his own person. A chamcha is a lackey, an acolyte, a people-pleaser. A fine, serviceable word. Chamcha has, however, been replaced by bhakt in local parlance. And, to my mind, it is a deeply unsatisfactory synonym.

Why?

Quite simply, because a bhakt, or a bhakta, as the non-Hindi speakers amongst us would say, or a bhaktin (the female version) is not a chamcha. A bhakta or a bhaktin is, in fact, a person of nerve, of spine, of spirit. A passionate, robust, wise being who has discovered the power and potential of the path of the heart.

Redefining the word bhakti or ‘devotion’ is, I believe, a matter of urgency.

Growing up, I was no different from those who viewed devotees as simple-minded, often sanctimonious. I believed devotion was for those who walked around with constipated smiles, offering vanilla cliches about God being Love. I thought it was about ringing bells, spouting scriptural bromides and diving at the feet of gurus. About simple hierarchies between the leader and the led.

As my preoccupation with sacred journeys deepened, however, I rediscovered the Bhakti poets of India and found many of my assumptions punctured. Where I expected a bunch of obsequious songsters, I found a community of feisty iconoclasts. I found poets whose work overturned hierarchies. Questioned power equations. Chose spirited dialogue over meek obedience. Poets who refused to worship their gods, but sought instead to consume them. To embody them. To become them. Those who would settle for nothing else.

In short, I found my tribe.

Here are some of the insights the Bhakti poets of this subcontinent have offered me.

Most importantly, they tell me that devotion does not mean enslavement. Bhakti is not a feudal relationship between zamindar and serf. The deity is not a dictator. The bhakta or the bhaktin is not a slave. Even when bhaktas sound slavish, it is only to surrender to love, never to authority. There is nothing sycophantic about devotion.

What’s more, these poets quarrel with their gods with impunity. Namdev, the 13th century Marathi saint, adorns his precious god with a garland of cuss words: ‘Shame on you! You have no pedigree!’ he says. Tukaram, the 17th century mystic, describes his god as a fellow-grocer, dismissing his mercantile abilities: ‘The whole transaction is a fraud./ I will have nothing more to do with you.../ Look! I am a grocer by profession./ You can’t cheat me at a bargain.’ The 18th century Bengali poet, Ramprasad Sen, tells his Kali quite plainly: ‘Either you eat me or I eat you,/ We must decide on one’. Kamala­kanta Bhattacharya taunts his naked Maa Kali for her disgraceful dress sense: ‘Are you going to rescue Kamalakanta/ in this outfit?’

These poets are free to fight with their gods for one simple reason: they love them. Love makes every disagreement a family squabble, not a war between good and evil. In an age where the ‘us’ and ‘them’ rhetoric has taken on near-religious overtones even in political discourse, the Bhakti poets are a wonderful reminder that in the realm of the spirit, there is no distinction between the believer and infidel, the insider and outsider. The bhakta/bhaktin is both lover and sceptic, ardent paramour and argumentative friend, all at once.

Most importantly, these poets tell us that it is perfectly legitimate to doubt. They frequently wonder if their gods really exist, or if they are merely figments of their own imagination. ‘Love, says Surdas, ‘is an awkward thing./ It ripples the mind with waves.’ ‘She’s thinking so much about him, and missing him/ that when he comes to her door…/ she doesn’t hear,’ writes the 15th century poet Annamacharya. Faith, for the bhaktas, is a journey potholed by doubt. Unthinking obedience is emphatically not their thing.

Which brings me to my third misconception. I’d believed that the devotional poets were somewhat challenged on the cerebral front. They seemed too crazy, too volatile to enter the club of tranquil meditators, which is where I aspired to gain entry. But then I began to realise that there was nothing spiritually juvenile about these poems. Instead, these were sharply intelligent voices that consciously plunged into the dangerous dance of duality between the human and the divine. ‘Don’t you take on this thing called bhakti,’ warns the 12th century poet, Basavanna. ‘Only someone struck by it/ knows the pain,’ echoes Kabir three centuries later.

‘Isn’t it funny/ that though she’s mother of the universe/ we warble/ about her lotus-bud breasts?’ asks the 19th century goddess devotee, Abhirami Bhattar. It is clear that these poets address an embodied god not because of the jingoism of their spiritual orientations but because they know that falling in love with an embodied ‘Other’ is often the most pleasurable and direct route to their truest selves. What’s more, they know that the divine can be perceived in any form they chose. ‘If you look for a tree,/ he’s a tree…./ If you look for empty space,/ he appears as space…/ God is what you have in your mind,’ says Annamacharya.

Finally, I discovered that bhakti is emphatically not anti-flesh either. The best poets sing unapologetically of bodily appetite and instinct: Nammalvar speaks of ‘eating god’, Soyarabai speaks of the life-giving nature of menstrual blood, while a host of others speak of making love to the divine. Intimacy is the basis of bhakti. The god of bhakti poetry pines for the love of the devotee.  And the devotee knows that god, for all his magnificence, is still incomplete without her. This assumed reciprocity empowers the bhaktas/bhaktins to rebuke their gods, woo them, make love to them, and even, on occasion, dismiss them.

Intimacy has its own politics. The bhakta is not unaware of this. ‘Unless I want it myself, it doesn’t count as love,’ the female speaker pertly reminds her god in an Annamacharya poem. The implication is clear: love must be mutual. If it is one-sided, it is unacceptable. When he is deeply engaged in his work, the cobbler, Dhoolaiah, is empowered to tell even his beloved Shiva to come back when he’s less busy! Likewise, the Kannada poet, Sule Sankavva—devotee and sex worker—asks her god to return later because she’s busy with a client. Nothing is out of bounds in this heart-felt dialogue, because its basis is love. What’s more, god is not the stainless absolute, but the stained ally—soiled and human, without ceasing for a moment to be sublime. This is a deeply endearing divinity.

We live in a world divided on the basis of multiple variables, whether of caste, class, race, gender, ideology or faith. Even as we fight injustice on one front, we often find reverse hierarchies staining our gaze. As we oscillate between judgements of superiority and inferiority, between acts of indulgence and repression, we experience the simultaneous pain of tyranny and victimhood. At the heart of the problem is the fact that we are encouraged to see some emotional states as respectable and others as shameful.

This is where Sankavva’s glorious definition of the divine as Nirlajjeshwara, or ‘One Without Shame’, becomes inspirational. When the divine is without shame, how can there be room for human guilt? By inviting us to journey into every dark closet of the heart, the bhakti poets remind us that every demon, and indeed every deity, is simply our own face looking out at ourselves. Devotion, they know, can transform the density of pain, rage, fear, doubt, jealousy and power politics into luminosity, through the sheer alchemy of non-judgmental attention.

We inhabit a world that often mistakes fanaticism for faith. But devotion, these poets tell us, is not fundamentalism. It is instead a single-pointed commitment to self-discovery over self-definition. Even at the end of their journeys, these poets do not offer us certitudes or commandments. Instead, they tell us it is possible to live spiritedly, joyfully, and even serenely, in states of uncertainty.

In a memorable ‘breakthrough’ poem, the poet Tukaram does not speak of finding god. Instead, he speaks of an even more profound discovery: a way to abide in himself. ‘For me,’ he says, ‘God is dead…/ I shall speak of him no more…/ We have slain each other…/ Now I would like to sit still.’

(Views expressed are personal)

Arundhathi Subramaniam is a poet and writer

(This appeared in the print edition as "The Grounded Ecstasy of Devotion")