Q1.
Why do you think music and dance played a significant role in spreading the message of bhakti?
Answer
Because a sung message needs no reader, no teacher, no permission and no copy — and it spreads by being enjoyed. Five reasons, each of which the chapter supplies evidence for.
- It did not require literacy. Most people could not read, and manuscripts were few and expensive. A bhajan is learnt by hearing it once or twice. That single fact decides who a movement can reach.
- It was in the local language. “Verses and songs were composed in local languages, expressing love, compassion, and equality.” A teaching in Sanskrit reached those trained in Sanskrit; a teaching in Bhojpuri, Braj, Marathi, Bengali or Kannada reached the street.
- It gathered people, and gathering is the message. “People from all sections of society participated in gatherings where these bhajans were sung accompanied by musical instruments and dancing.” Bhakti taught the equality and oneness of all — and the kīrtan itself put that teaching into practice, because everyone in the circle was singing the same line. The form demonstrated the content.
- Melody makes words stick, and travel. A tune is a container. Set to music, a verse survives repetition without changing, and moves with singers, pilgrims, travelling bards and puppeteers from village to village. The chapter’s own test of this is that the bhajans “composed during that time continue to be sung today”, six centuries later.
- It matched what bhakti actually is. The bhakti mārga is devotion, and it needs no rituals or priests. Devotion is felt before it is argued. Song and dance carry feeling directly — Fig. 8.7 shows Chaitanya Mahaprabhu dancing surrounded by his followers — where a sermon would only describe it.
The same logic worked on the Sufi side: Sufi saints “sang devotional songs called qawwālīs”, and Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti and Nizamuddin Auliya “encouraged music as a way to connect with god”. Two different traditions, reaching for the same tool, for the same reason — and that shared tool is part of why they came to overlap.
Check it yourself: the paintings in this chapter were made almost two centuries after the lives of the sants, and in them the saints are still shown holding instruments (Fig. 8.5, Fig. 8.7, Fig. 8.8). Even the pictures remember bhakti as something sung.