Devotion of Dissent: Contesting Hindutva in Bhakti Tradition

Hindutva and its exponents

Hindutva is a political ideology garbed under nationalism. It ‘integrates Hindu religion-based culture with political power to create a polarised society based on the concept of the “Other” and “social exclusivism”’ (Bhambhri, 2003: 6). It seeks to establish Hindu hegemony among people pertaining to social, cultural, religious and national identity within the precinct of a particular geographical location called Hindustan or India. This ideology is codified by V.D. Savarkar (1883–1966) who defines the essentials of Hindutva in his book Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? (1923). According to Savarkar (1969), ‘Hinduism means the system of religious beliefs found common amongst the Hindu people’ (p. 103). However, he is more concerned with the concept of Hindu Rashtra or nation than the mere religious base. He categorically defines that the identity of Hindu nation can be established through common territory, common race and common culture.

We Hindus are not only a Rashtra, a Jati, but as a consequence of being both, own a common Sanskriti expressed, preserved chiefly and originally through Sanskrit, the real mother tongue of our race. Everyone who is a Hindu inherits this Sanskriti and owes his spiritual being to it as truly as he owes his physical one to the land and the blood of his forefathers. (Savarkar, 1969: 99–100)

Savarkar stresses the need for particular blending of culture and language as the essential prerequisite for Hindu identity. ‘The argument that culture, and more specifically, language, uniquely defines a nation is an invention of 19th century European writers’, particularly German philosophers ‘which has been subsequently taken up by nationalist intellectuals of the East’ (Chatterjee, 1986: 9). As a derivative of Western thought Savarkar’s concept of nationality makes us grimly aware of exclusion regarding the non-Aryans who have vernacular language and indigenous cultural roots. They do not share the Vedic knowledge system and is devoid of the ‘Sanskriti’ as pointed out by Savarkar. The importance of language, the language of the Aryan forefathers, that is, Sanskrit, or Hindi, ‘the vernacular language closest to it’ is necessary in the formation of Hindu identity (Jaffrelot, 2019: 86). Savarkar (1969) specifies that ‘the actual essentials of Hindutva’ are ‘the ideal essentials of nationality’ (p. 137) and therefore nationalism can be strengthened by forcibly creating a collective identity of common culture among the people of the land. He does not recognize the ‘Mohammedan or Christian countrymen’ as Hindus (Savarkar, 1969: 113).

Savarkar’s successors worked on this same theoretical base but moved few steps ahead to align Hindutva nationalism with power and physical prowess. M.S. Golwalkar (1906–1973), popularly known as Guruji, is behind the shaping of intellectual and spiritual foundation of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), an organization founded by K. B. Hedgewar in 1925. The RSS is dedicated to ideological and cultural formation to achieve the aim of Hindu Rashtra. Golwalkar, working towards that mission, extols a glorious past of ‘Hindu people’ and their love for nation which verges on romanticism. His proclamation of the existence of Hindu nation since time immemorial through martial acts of violence to save the country’s honour can be traced in the following excerpt:

As the Child of this soil, our well-evolved society has been living here for thousands of years . . . The society has been known, especially in modern times, as the Hindu Society. For, it is the forefathers of the Hindu People that have set up standards and traditions of love and devotion for the motherland. They also prescribed various duties and rites with a view to keeping aglow in our mind a living and complete picture of our motherland and devotion to it as a Divine Entity. And again it is they who shed their blood in defence of its sanctity and integrity. (Golwalker, 1980: 108)

The above statement suggests two conclusions – first, like Savarkar, there is sharp denial of communities other than Hindus; a conscious erasure of non-Hindu societies having ethno-cultural traditions and who have equally contributed to the rich heritage of Indian civilization. Second, there is a utopian exaggeration of pre-existing stability with an image of a golden age. The ideological underpinning of Hindutva is evident from this idealistic assumption. By adopting influential rhetorical gambit RSS promulgates the narrative of ram rajya (an ideal state) which has been interrupted by the barbaric Muslim invasions. Invariably this has led to a construction of crisis ‘in relation to not only Muslims (ontologized as troublesome foreigners) but also other Hindus [like the Dalits] who are held responsible for the emasculation of [upper caste] Hindus’ (Chakraborty, 2011: 172). Therefore, to sustain a privileged position and encounter imaginary enemies Hindutva theory presents physical body as the site for ideological interlocution. There has been conscious effort to reconstruct Hindu manhood ‘if they are to protect their women, their property and their rights’ which could be done by instilling ‘fear among the non-Hindus who live with them’ (Pandey, 1991: 3005). With an objective to goad male pride, Golwalkar exhorts that, ‘Mother needs such men – young, intelligent, dedicated and more than all virile and masculine’. For him ‘the men who make history’ are the ‘men with capital “M”’ (Golwalkar, 1980: 336).

With this forceful assertion, Golwalkar valorizes masculinity to establish a single religious creed. Underneath this call for blatant militant aggression lies an intense fear of effeminacy. Effeminacy pertains to ‘a failure of the public form of manliness’ (King, 2004: 65). The alleged crisis in masculinity is redeemed through violence. Violence is normalized because ‘masculinity is achieved and negotiated through acts of aggression’ (Feather and Thomas, 2013: 3). The persistent valorization of masculine aggression in Hindutva is seen as natural defence against assumed Muslim brutality. Consequently, there is assertion of pride in bloodshed in the name of preserving the sanctity of motherland, to justify unjust anger, hatred and retaliation against minorities. In its insistence to uphold ‘a cultural essence’, by wiping out all dissidents and create a ‘Hindu Rashtra’, Hindutva is ‘no different from the cultural chauvinisms of other countries’ (Vanaik, 2017: 195).

However, such militant conceptualization of a nation is contested by many scholars because associating religion with the concept of nationhood is complicated. Gail Omvedt observes that ‘identification of the Indian subcontinent’ with the single religion of Hinduism ‘as a national religion centring on Rama’ is a ‘recent history’. In an extremely heterogeneous country like India, numerous gods and goddesses sustain in local religious pockets as part of popular religious culture. ‘Brahmanic Hinduism . . . arose out of only one of many consolidations within a diverse subcontinental cultural tradition’. It has reworked, absorbed various indigenous traditions and has fiercely contended with Buddhism and Jainism before attaining ‘social and political hegemony’ (Omvedt, 2011b: 1, 2). It is supposed that due to paucity of systematic record ‘the reconstruction of early Indian history by European scholars were drawn from contemporary European historiography’ (Thapar, 2013: 20) but this was limited in range and gave prominence only to ‘upper caste Hinduism’. It presented only one aspect of history while eluding its important features like ‘the tension or the changes implicit in the evolution of sects, or their relations with particular castes’ (Thapar, 2013: 23). This one-sided idea led to the construction of Hindu identity from Brahmanical perspective with the sources limited to Sanskrit texts only. The Europeans developed fascination for Vedas, Sanskrit scriptures, yoga and mysticism and lent a romantic aura to Hinduism owing to its difference from other semitic religions. Nineteenth-century Indian elites like Narayan B. Pavgee and Bal Gangadhar Tilak, prized upon the foreign construction of Hinduism and adopted the theory of racial superiority of upper caste Hindus as descendants of Aryans. Tilak views Artic region as the home of the Vedas and Aryan language which conferred a sense of antiquity to the Aryans. ‘Such implications would certainly have energizing impact on the nationalist movement rooted in the Brahmanical tradition’ (Deshpande, 2009: 44). Besides this Tilak contributed towards the formation of national identities. He valorized the image of Shivaji ‘as a pre-eminent symbol of “Hindu” militancy’. This re-casting of Maratha nationalism ‘supplied intoxicating symbols for the Hindu nationalist imaginary and served to fire hostility against the Muslims’ (Krishan, 2011: 73).

It is inevitable that prior to India’s independence, Hindutva worked actively for the construction of Hindu identity with a mission to realize one nation theory. But this process was hindered following the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi on 30 January 1948 when RSS was declared illegal and its activities lay dormant for a short time from 4 February 1948 to 12 July 1949. No sooner than the ban was lifted RSS began to work on its initial motive to achieve ethnonationalism and over the following decades this indoctrination has become so overwhelming that at times state collude with Hindutva agents to enforce ultra nationalist agendas resorting to violent means.

Realizing the vision

It is worthwhile at this point to analyse how the vision of Hindutva works through regressive fundamentalism and belligerency. The unification of Hindus is strengthened by the symbol of saffron in which Rama is projected as the icon of Hindu religion. Rama, the seventh incarnation of Lord Vishnu, is a major deity in Hindu pantheon. In the Rāmāyaṇa and other Hindu religious texts Ayodhya is the holy seat of Lord Rama’s kingdom. Ayodhya is a small town in Uttar Pradesh, where the first Mughal ruler Zahiruddin Mohammad Babar has built the Babri Masjid in the 16th century. The right-wing saffron brigades claimed that the mosque was constructed on the same site after demolishing a Hindu temple that previously situated there marking Rama’s birthplace. The sacrilege of the Hindu temple could be amended only by bringing down the mosque and establish the Lord’s temple in His janmabhoomi. To the supporters of Hindutva, it was like a liberation of Hindu sacred space. The demolition of the Babri Masjid on 6 December 1992 was launched through the Hindu movement to ‘recapture Hindu pride through construction of a new Ram Janambhoomi temple’ (Islam, 2007: 346). The Vishwa Hindu Parishad, a right-wing organization to consolidate and protect Hindu society and Hindu dharma, respectively, argued that ‘the site was traditionally associated with sacred events and characters’ and that it was treated as sacred by Rama devotees ‘should be enough to command respect, regardless of the historical basis of this claim to sacredness’ (Elst, 2002: 150). The Ayodhya dispute created a massive furore, it caused communal violence in the country taking toll of many lives. The demolition of the mosque is a major step towards the realization of creating Hindu Rashtra based on ethno-religious sentiments. A nationwide movement of reconstructing the Rama temple in its old site took momentum under the political patronage based essentially on Hindu nationalist theory. The chariot-procession or rath-yatra undertaken by Mr. Lal Krishna Advani, a veteran leader of Bhratiya Janata Party, the political wing of RSS, was a clear message towards this end. The chariot was designed to give a mythical impression of Arjun’s chariot from Mahābhārata bearing golden colour with sacred emblems of Hindu religion, embellished with lotus flowers and the insignia of ‘Om’. The posters printed for this occasion depicted elaborate temple structure identified as the Rama temple to be constructed in the Lord’s birthplace and a life-size image of the Lord Himself. It is remarkable that here Rama is projected as a virile Hindu deity without his consort Sita otherwise displayed in the print images and widely worshipped in Indian households. In the posters of chariot procession that toured the country prior to the demolition of Babri masjid, Rama is anything but the benevolent god showering blessings on the devotees with a graceful smile and a slightly raised right hand. Richard H Davis (1996) observes:

. . . the light-blue complexioned god Rama, wearing a saffron dhoti and a red cummerbund, arose from the clouds. The posters portrayed Rama striding forward, his left hand holding his strung bow and his right bearing a sharp tipped arrow, a look of divine confidence on his face. He seemed to be facing a storm, for his hair and dhoti fluttered behind him and the clouds were dark blue-grey. (p. 27)

The ‘storm’ and ‘dark blue-grey’ clouds forebodes some impending apocalypse. The masquerade of muscular Rama with his muscles tensed holding weapons is constructed as an angry crusader out to defend Hindu religion from the clutches of Muslim aggressors, the potential enemies of Hindus. Usually, in Hinduism, male gods are worshipped with their consorts, the female counterparts are integral to the male deities like Prakiti–Purush, Shiv–Parvati, Laxmi–Narayan, and Rama–Sita because, ‘If the male god is conceived as powerful, the consort goddess tends to be conceived as the embodiment of the god’s power or energy, his sakti’ (Vaudeville, 1984: 1). Also, the gods appear as graceful figures showering blissful kindness. But the Hindutva extremists transform the traditional portrait of Rama without Sita, into a stern looking angry God; an aggressive and ready to combat image who marches forward with ‘divine confidence’ to slay demons who are obviously the dissenting voices. ‘The almost androgynous, unmuscled, somewhat disengaged body that marked earlier portrayals is superseded by this masculine figure’ (Kapur, 1993: 104). There is a complete makeover, a cultural appropriation of Rama to a wrathful God, specifically a national hero. This shift in the imagination of God if implanted in Hindu religious mind will have detrimental impact which is beyond the philosophical ethics of Hinduism. It is interesting to note Seldon Pollock’s (2005) observation about how the myth of Rama is politically established, simultaneously creating a counterpart whereby the ‘Other’ is demonized and categorically condemned:

If the Ramayana has served for 1000 years as a code in which proto-communalist relations could be activated and theocratic legitimation could be rendered – if it constitutes an imaginary within which the public sphere is not sundered from the religious, and at the same time cannot be conceptualized without the concomitant demonization of some other – it makes sense that it would be through this mytheme par excellence that reactionary politics in India today would find expression in the interests of a theocratization of the state and the creation of an internal enemy as necessary antithesis. (p. 193)

The chariot procession was the validation of this observation; it was a flagrant show of masculine aggression tempered with imaginary resentment. Violence followed the rath-yatra, obvious enough, for the incident was aimed to acquire political edge based on pseudo religious sentiments. It can be ascertained that through Rama iconography ‘versions of the Hindu past and masculine images were reworked, recreated and remoulded by a section of the Hindus themselves’. New definitions of Hinduism ‘were being worked out, altered and reified’ and ‘a full bodied Hindu masculine male in opposition to the image of the emasculated/effeminate Hindu male’ was constructed (Gupta, 1998: 727). Such framed perception of militancy and masculinity was formed to erase the preconceived notion of moral weakness in the Hindus. The anxiety of effeminacy of Indian male in relation to the colonizing male ‘plagued the leading nineteenth-century male figures’ who looked for ‘elaborate and creative responses to the perceived crisis of masculinity’ (Sinha, 2012: 43). With this aim, the famous Bengali novelist and satirist Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (1838–1894) subverts the rhetoric of femininity of Indian men by appropriating the image of Lord Krishna. He also influenced in the making of nationalist culture by projecting the idea of masculinity in a famous text named ‘Kṛṣṇacarita’ in which Bankim Chandra Chatterjee ‘reinterpreted traditional godhead – to the new model of Hinduism’ (Nandy, 1983: 23). Lord Krishna is purged of his feminine playfulness and restructured as an icon of masculinity and rationality.

It becomes quite obvious that Hindutva’s purpose to strengthen upper caste hegemony works through exclusion, separatism, religious polarization under the pretext of Hinduism. By redefining history, it is out to formulate an erasure, a social amnesia where the presence of the other ethnic groups is obliterated. It influences not only the Muslims or Christians but has implications on Dalit Hindus as well. With their revisionist ideology drawn from Western model, Hindutva warriors assault the idea of India as civilization by confining it within the contours of geographical boundaries with robust nationalism etched in saffron colour. Hindutva uses the religious faith of Hinduism as political weaponry for the benefit of handful few leaving the teeming millions to wallow in darkness. The polymorphic pluralistic voices of people’s undated wisdom that have gone into Hinduism over centuries are vigorously capsuled and cramped into a narrowed singular version of monotheism of one God, one religion and one language. It is hard to fit Hinduism within the frame of definitional stricture of Hindutva. In this context, Asish Nandy (1991) notes that,

The death of Hinduism in India will be celebrated by all votaries of Hindutva. Hinduism is a faith and a way of life. Hindutva is an ideology for those whose Hinduism has worn off. Hindutva is built on the tenets of reformed Hinduism of the nineteenth century. Reformed according to the reading of those who saw Hinduism as inferior to the Semitic creeds, in turn seen as well-bounded, monolithic, well-organized, masculine, and capable of sustaining the ideology of an imperial state. (p. 91)

The bhakti tradition

The bhakti movement began as a ‘reform movement through its emphasis on feeling and its criticism of caste’ (Prentiss, 1999: 3). It laid a rich cultural tradition which questions everything that Hindutva imposes as ideology. In the words of Biardeau (2002), bhakti ‘aroused religious movements of opposition to the Brahmans, tending to deny all hierarchy’ (p. 108). It opposed the Sanskritic culture and established localized culture where women and untouchable saints and poets obtain space for themselves. The songs of the medieval saint poets of India have become immortal. Their contemporaneity is evident from the explicit egalitarian messages expressed in fluid cadence with essence of universalism. The bhakti movement with its radicalism brought ‘together women and men of low caste to proclaim equality and reject Brahmanic ritualism and caste hierarchy’ (Omvedt and Bharat, 2003: 277). Rohini Mokashi-Punekar (2005) described bhakti as a ‘deeply spiritual and democratizing movement’ which is characteristically ‘revolutionary in spirit’ and centred on

a questioning of the orthodox and repressive Brahmanical understanding of Hinduism, [which] as such made it possible for the lower castes and women to give a form to their religious aspirations, emphasizing devotion and love, not knowledge, as a means of salvation. (pp. 123–24)

A study of the meaning of ‘bhakti’ along with the songs of some bhakti saint poets will help to gauze the pretentious hollowness and fallacy underlying Hindutva ideology.

Bhakti suggests devotion. It involves total surrender to a personal deity to realize absolute spiritual contentment. In bhakti, the bhakta (the votary or the lover) becomes intoxicated by divine love and experiences spiritual ecstasy. With the individual relationship with God comes the rejection of social conventions, religious authority and scriptural conviction. Bhakti movement commenced in South India around the 6th century of the Common Era and then spread to the other parts of the country in the subsequent centuries. The two major strands, Shaivism and Vaishnavism, of what later came to be known as Hinduism vied with Buddhism and Jainism for royal patronage for survival. Initiated as opposition to Buddhists and other shramana trends bhakti movement later became vigorous in its articulation to resist the perpetual system of caste, class, gender, that were inherent within the Vedic culture. In bhakti ‘driven by spiritual hunger, a fierce desire for spiritual freedom, and long-simmering demands for social or economic equality, bhakti poets issued forth in dozens of languages’ (Schelling, 2011: xiv) questioning the authority of the Brahmans and Sanskrit.

Bhakti contesting masculinity

Bhakti as a movement brought liberation. It entailed on the devotees to break the shackles of laws, custom, norms that tend to bound people to certain code of convictions. Weber (1958) comments that, ‘Bhakti could be achieved only through piapatti, unconditional devotion to God out of a feeling of complete helplessness’ (p. 311). It ushered the tendency to revisit traditions imposed since ages. The ideas of Brahmans with sole authority to reach out to God and that he mediated between God and lowly placed illiterate masses were challenged. Notions of privilege and punditry were seen as obstacles in the way of realization of God. Bhakti demanded total surrender; one had to shorn off one’s ego, that of gender, knowledge, and of individual self to an extent of absolute involvement with God. A. K. Ramanujan (1992), the famous scholar, poet, folklorist and translator thinks that, in bhakti tradition ‘to be male is not to be specially privileged . . . being male, like other kinds of privilege, is an obstacle in spiritual experience, in attaining true inwardness’ (p. 55). The concept of masculinity pivotal to radical Hindutva is denied in bhakti with a ‘double-edged, bisexual’ expression –

Sometimes I am man,

sometimes I am woman.

O lord of the meeting rivers

I’ll make wars for you,

but I’ll be your devotees’ bride.     (Ramanujan, 1993: 11)

The restrictive gendered identity is thus diffused in bhakti poetry. There is no honour in assuming manliness; in fact, the male saints yearn for female personae; they relinquish their masculine self to adopt a voice that is characteristically feminine in nature, similar to a woman desirous for her lover. The division between male and female is satirized by the male saint poets because possessing masculine superiority is an impediment towards realization of God – ‘The male saint yearns to achieve a woman’s state in his society, so he can yearn for and couple with god – to accept the feminine side of himself, as Jung would say, shedding his machismo’ (Ramanujan, 2004: 290).

This is illustrated by the 6th-century classical Nayaṉmar poet Mānikkāvacakar who ‘co-opted imageries of love and sexuality to describe the relationship with the divine’. His experience to be ‘possessed’ by the God was no less than a form of lunacy, of transcendental bliss. The ‘poet was like the beloved who was offered love (aṉpu) by the god and united with God as if in sexual union’. Mānnikkāvacakar’s feminine persona says:

He grabbed me

lest I go astray

Wax before an unspent fire,

mind melted,

body trembled.

I bowed, I wept,

danced, cried aloud,

I sang, and I praised Him.

It is evident that gender is a social construction where male or female identity is created through certain performative acts of sexuality in which some behavioural patterns are prioritized over the other and considered to be foundational. To eschew the stigma of femininity with which the Hindu people have been identified by the colonial masters, hyper-masculinity is espoused by ardent Hindutva followers. Hinduism, however, celebrates the fluidity of gender. The Goddess Kali is worshipped as Shakti, an essential male quality. There is the union of both male and female selves in the same body as Ardhanārīśvara, because without ‘the creative energy represented by the goddess, Shiva is like a corpse (shava), incapable of acting, of revealing himself, of accomplishing his ideation of the world’ (Daniélou, 1992: 76). Again, two males in the forms of Shiva and Vishnu are fused in Harihara to signify the principle of oneness in Advaita Vedanta of Hindu philosophy. All these pertain to theological heterodoxy in Hinduism. The tradition of multiple sexual identities has coexisted in Hindu religiosity without any sign of anxiety and so the denial of dichotomies attached with male-female differences is not uncommon:

but, look, the self that hovers

in between

is neither man

nor woman

O Ramanatha

The 16th-century bhakti saint poet Surdas fiercely ridicules male arrogance in his verse. Surdas is a saguṇa poet, he identifies with one of the personal forms of the God. The songs of Surdas are ‘piercing expressions of the painful emotions experienced by human beings when for all their devotion, the God to whom they have dedicated themselves seems unavailable’ (Hawley and Juergensmeyer, 2004: 99). Surdas chiefly captures lord Krishna’s childhood with minute details. But there are poems where Surdas ‘projects himself into the persona of a gopi lost in love for Krishna’ (Hawley and Juergensmeyer, 2004: 99) to draw Krishna’s playful amorous life. These songs of intense love and longing voice the vicissitudes of emotion with a passion that is inherent to a beloved:

Away! Go back to where you spent the night!

Manmohan, what clues are you trying to erase?

Signs of tight embraces are not so quick hid.

. . .

Teethmarks, nailmarks: oh what you’ve endured

to have your fill of passion in that other woman’s lair.

The poem is steeped with anguish; the female voice rings with complaint and anger caused by sufferings from ‘tortured feelings of longing’ in the beloved. The images of ‘lust-hardened breasts’, ‘teethmarks, nailmarks’ have sexual undertone, the visual imageries border on eroticism. The woman is jealous of a rival; the feeling of betrayal provokes anger. Such human passions associated with the beloved male God are unfathomable in Vedic cult. In yet another poem, strong sexual connotations focus on physicality. The beloved sees her lover Hari and offers herself as she is absolutely helpless in His divine presence.

Now the great shame of it sprouts within my mind

when I sense what my soul has done:

How my blouse tore open, baring the pitchers of my breasts

as my bodice-string snapped with the strain.

The erotic images express an impassioned desire that drives the bhakta (devotee) towards bhagwan (God) – the desire is to experience an embodied union with the lord. In this blissful eroticism, the devotee (be it male or female) is always in the role of female and God is decidedly male. In one of the famous tales, Mirabai, the venerated saint and a great devotee of Lord Krishna from Mewar, visited Vrindavan, the leela-bhoomi of the Lord and desired to meet Sri Chaitanya’s disciple Jiva Goswami. He declined to meet Mirabai on the ruse that he vowed to avoid female company. Meera sent back the message expressing her surprise that another male apart from Sri Krishna resided in Vrindavan. She had the impression that all souls being feminine in nature were entangled in amorous relationship with the only male that is Lord Krishna. Jiva Goswami understood the implication and came to meet Mirabai immediately (Martin, 2007: 243). In bhakti tradition, the ‘cross-gender’ rhetoric is quite common. It enables to surpass the frame of physicality for realization of spiritual sublimity. In Vrindavan, the male devotees often dressed in elaborate costumes are seen to dance emulating Rāsa Līlā ⁵ and identify with female mythical characters as gopis (the female cowherds of Braj) to experience sublimated femininity.

Similar note of yearning to unite with God through female persona rings in Kabir’s poetry. Kabir is a 16th-century saint poet of nirguṇ tradition from North India. He is an iconoclast, a sharp critic of religious and social conventions who defies ritualism in both Hindu and Islamic traditions. What strikes about Kabir the most is the direct urgency of his tone; he addresses the reader with a fierce courage to impart practical wisdom which have relevance till today. However, there are poems where Kabir’s love for his God is akin to the gopi’s love for Krishna. It is intensely passionate:

I don’t find peace:

As woman is dear to the lecher, as water to the thirsty,

so are you to me! Re!

The poet, like a lovelorn wife, suffers pangs of separation from her beloved husband. This distress is akin to death. To Kabir, the wife is the portrayal of Jivathma, the self who longs to be united with the husband that is Paramathma, who is none other than God Himself. The agony at being neglected and abandoned moves to a pathetic tone in the pain of separation in yet another pada:

The love-lorn stands at the road edge,

Runs when a passerby she sees,

Just say a word about my Love,

When will He come me to meet?

The poet’s soul, shorn off masculine pride, is similar to a female bride who pines for union with God. He declares passionately, ‘You were my Husband / I was always Your wife’ (Vaudeville, 1997: 272). There is an acute longing for consummation of souls which will deliver him from the cycle of birth and death. This role-play of a languished bride pining for her husband’s attention explores love at a different level when the poetic persona talks about her illicit love, ‘My eyes turned out so clever . . . / Forgetting about the in-laws, brother and father, they stuck to my beloved / Hari! (Refrain)’ (Callewaert et al., 2000). The in-laws stand for the duties and conventions of the worldly life that keep one tied to the world of ‘maya’ and prevent the union of the lover and the beloved – the mystic union of souls.

Regarding the assumption of femininity by Kabir’s poetic persona Galina Rousseva-Sokolova thinks that Kabir follows a popular poetic convention of his time and ‘fully endorses the emotions of a female lover as an expression of his longing for the absolute’. Also, there are symbolic overtones through which ‘elements of a female narrator’s world can be interpreted in the light of the doctrines and world view of the Sant’ (Sokolova, 2019: 196).

If we analyse Hindutva’s projection of an overbearing God in the perspective of bhakti philosophy, we see through the discrepancy of a false narrative in which Rama iconography is politicized for nationalism. The bhakti saint poets have shown the path of liberation by embracing femininity; ‘a number of practices for “feminization” are prescribed by the gurus in order to achieve the sought after naribhab’. In Vaishnava tradition, it is through the identification and imitation of the ‘Sakhi (cowgirl friends of Radha, Krishna’s consort) the male practitioner is supposed to become that which he is performing’ (Lorea, 2018: 180). Hinduism relates to this androgyny. In this context Ramanujan says: ‘This taking on of a woman’s persona by male poets and saints has, [thus,] multiple meanings: to become bisexual, whole and androgynous like the gods themselves (Puruṣa, Śiva, and Viṣṇu)’. This guise helps to ‘abase and reverse oneself, rid oneself of machismo, to enter a liminal confusion, become open and receptive as a woman to god; and it is possibly also a poetic expression of the male envy and admiration of woman’ (Ramanujan, 2004: 293). Masculinity has never been fundamental to religious firmament of Hindu culture and this is well demonstrated in bhakti literature. The pursuance of divinity recognizes the gender fluidity in human soul which alternately subverts the Hindutva propaganda of masculinity as the prerequisite of Hindu character.

Bhakti movement also contests the ardent political agendas of Hindutva through realization of the vision of an egalitarian society without any divisiveness. Bhakti tradition is based on questioning, rejecting and fomenting new ideology against authority, institution and stratified social structures that captivate humanity. The diverse voices of bhakti saint poets sing to accommodate multifarious concepts of humanity and challenge the notion of one nation in which one language will subsist through singular culture of Hindu hegemony.

Bhakti contesting social hegemony

Bhakti movement operated at various levels; different trajectories merge to add to the rich texture of bhakti culture. As a social movement bhakti contends the tradition of exclusion; the practice of prohibition of untouchables, women and the ‘other’ to experience spiritual liberation. It conceives of a place where there will be equal space for all:

The regal realm with the sorrowless name:

They call it Queen City, a place with no pain,

No taxes or cares, none owns property there,

No wrongdoing, worry, terror or torture.

This vision of ‘regal realm’ of Ravidas, an untouchable 16th-century bhakti poet from Banaras, is unlike the Ramrajya of Hindutva. Begumpura is the city without sorrow (‘be’ in Hindi signifies no, ‘gum’ means sorrow and ‘pura’ refers to a place) – a place where prevails equality and prosperity. The earthly Utopia ‘is in many ways quite “modern”: no property, no taxes, no political torture, no king and no temple . . .’ (Omvedt, 2011: 107). This place is not demarcated by geographical contours or based on militant dictatorship which seeks to determine who belongs to this land and who does not? Begumpura critiques the pseudo-utopia of right-wing imagery where prevails Hindu extremism, overt patriotism, fundamentalism and revivalism – all being encoded in Hindutva. Contrarily, in Ravidas’s Begumpura ‘a divine political order’ is ‘neutralized for a secular society by such reinterpretations as that of Mohandas Gandhi, for whom “Ramraj means rule of the people”’ (Pollock, 2005: 194). Similar view of ideal society was envisioned by Tukaram (1608–1649), the Marathi saint poet. His visionary city is Pandharpur, the centre of varkari sampradaya of Maharashtra where resides Lord Vithoba.

A city sits on the banks of the Bhima

its name is Pandharpur!

. . .

The good sants have opened up shops,

whatever you want is there –

food and liberty, all for free,

no one even looks their way!

Both the markets are jammed with wealth

uncounted varkaris meet there;

We won’t settle in Vaikuntha, say

those who have seen Pandhari.

Tuka’s Pandhari is more alluring than ‘Vaikuntha’, eternal abode of Lord Vishnu, the heavenly paradise where human soul aspires to merge with Ultimate Soul. It is the city of joy where devotees dance in divine ecstasy, where liberty is free for all. Pandharpur is marked by ‘solidarity and collectivity of the sants’, and ‘not the actual city with its priest- controlled temple, but rather a city beyond time and death’ (Omvedt, 2011: 123).

Such is the ideal state in bhakti imagination; a place where happiness reigns, with no sign of pain and torment. The imaginary ‘Begumpura’ reminds us of the anguish and afflictions of the immediate world, where everything is not right. Here, one is made painfully conscious of religious intolerance, where people live under constant terror, where segregation is done on the basis of caste, religion, gender, where property and privilege are hoarded by few and the rest are burdened with taxes. In the poet’s vision this inequality is straightened in a world ‘where none are third or second – all are one’ (Hawley and Juergensmeyer, 2004: 32).

In the same vein, Kabir denounces the religious profligacy of fanatics and questions the legitimacy for spiritual experience. He calls to do away with vanity and conceits that deter the path to spirituality and clutters the mind with unnecessary ego: ‘Reading and pondering on the Veda, the Pandits went astray:/the mystery of their own self, they never pierced!’ (Vaudeville, 1997: 149).

However, Kabir’s role is not confined to moral policing with a mission to purge society of its sectarian evils. As we have seen earlier, a polyphonic voice rings in his verse for he touches upon every aspect of human emotions. In tune with the bhakti tradition, Kabir states that knowledge and erudition have no value unless one is filled with the essence of love. Love is the keyword; love for the God surpasses all learning of the world:

Reading books and reading books the world died,

But none a pundit could become.

One who reads monosyllabic

‘Love’ a pundit he doth become.