BHAKTI MOVEMENT AND LITERATURE: Re-forming a Tradition

Bhakti movement had been an energizing phenomenon that provided a concrete shape and an identifiable face to the abstractions of Sanskrit scriptures. As counterculture, it embraced into its fold all sections of people breaking the barriers of caste, class, community and gender. It added an inclusive dimension to the hitherto privileged, exclusivist, Upanishadic tradition. A primal instinct for unmitigated attachment, total surrender and craving for freedom are at the root of the bhakti tradition. From within, it performed a subversive, reformatory function that changed the dynamics of worship at religious level and challenged the hierarchies at social level.

Bhakti literature was marked by spontaneity and ecstasy and hence it produced a rich body of verse born of the heart. The bhasa poets from different castes, regions and religions created a bountiful corpus of literature since eighth century AD in the form of metrical compositions, poems, songs, vachanas, bhajans, keertanas and padams. A heterogeneous group, they are distinguished by non-sectarian attitude, vernacular idiom, faith in divinity, dismissal of rituals and caste, and affinity with the underprivileged sections. Rooted in the age and the soil their literature is unique in that each of them bears his/her unique stamp of a distinct idiom in their dialogue with God who is like any other human being as He exchanged the roles of a lover, beloved, companion, benefactor and guide.

Bhakti is as exciting as ever in that it attracts critics into its atmospheric zone over and again, and they come up with multiple interpretations and commentaries. The twenty seven articles in this volume trace the beginnings and growth of bhakti movement and literature as propagated by a number of poet-saints across India up to the twentieth century. The poet-saints discussed in the volume include Andal, Kanakadasa, Mirabai, Kabir, Vemana, Pothana, Annamayya and others.

M. Rajagopalachary is Emeritus Fellow at the Department of English, Kakatiya University, Warangal. Recipient of the State Award for Excellence in teaching, he published books on the fiction of Bernard Malamud and Manohar Malgonkar. He has produced a good deal of teaching material for distance education of different universities in the state. His areas of interest include Literary Criticism and Theory, Classics in Translation, and American and Indian Fiction in English. A scholar with a number of articles to his credit, his contribution to English studies is substantial. His recent jointly edited anthologies with K. Damodar Rao include Postcolonial Indian English Fiction: Decentering the Nation (2016), and Multiculturalism in Indian Tradition and Literature (2016).

K. Damodar Rao is Head, Department of English, Kakatiya University, Warangal. He published a critical work, The Novels of Aye Kwei Armah in 1993, one of the first critical volumes on the Ghanaian novelist. He jointly edited an anthology of critical essays, Postcolonial Theory and Literature (2003). He is the Editor of a critical volume, Mapping English: Recent Studies in Language and Literature (2016). He had been the Associate Editor of Kakatiya Journal of English Studies for nine volumes and is now its Editor. Besides a number of articles on postcolonial literatures, he has translated extensively from Telugu into English. He is a recipient of the Sahitya Akademi prize for translation.