Q1.
Have you ever heard the term ‘bhakti’? What does it mean to you? Choose a bhakti saint from any part of India and learn about their life, their teachings, and the message they shared. You can also find one of their poems or bhajans and share it with your classmates.
Answer
Bhakti, as the chapter defines it, is devotion to the divine or to a particular deity. Between the 7th and the 17th centuries, saints and seekers across India chose this path for spiritual upliftment in preference to merely external ritualism — and, crucially, they composed in the languages of the masses rather than only in Sanskrit, which is why their message travelled so far.
Why bhakti spread so widely: it removed two barriers at once. It said that devotion, not ritual correctness, was what counted; and it spoke in Marathi, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Punjabi or Bengali, so an ordinary farmer or weaver could understand and sing it. The saints came ‘from diverse sections of society’, so their audience did too.
How to do this activity
- Pick one saint — from Maharashtra the chapter itself names Dnyaneshwar, Namdev, Tukaram and Ramdas; from elsewhere you might take Kabir, Mirabai, Surdas, Guru Nanak, Basavanna, Andal, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu or Shankaradeva of Assam.
- Find three things: where and when they lived, what they taught, and who they were speaking to.
- Choose one short poem or bhajan. Read it aloud in the original language first, then give the meaning in your own words.
- End with one sentence on what still speaks to you in it.
Sample answer: Sant Tukaram (17th century)
- Life: Tukaram lived at Dehu, near Pune, in the 17th century — the same century in which Chhatrapati Shivaji rose to power. He was a grain trader who lost his family and his trade in a famine, and turned to the worship of Vitthal of Pandharpur. He belongs to the Varkari tradition, whose pilgrims still walk to Pandharpur every year. The chapter shows a postal stamp of him in Fig. 3.4.
- Teaching: he composed abhangas — short devotional verses in everyday Marathi. He held that God is reached through love and honest living, not through display, and he was sharply critical of hypocrisy in religion.
- Message: that the test of holiness is compassion. One of his best-known abhangas says: ‘जे का रंजले गांजले, त्यांसी म्हणे जो आपुले, तोचि साधु ओळखावा, देव तेथेचि जाणावा’ — ‘Whoever calls the worn-out and the oppressed his own, know him alone to be a saint; know that God is there.’
- Why it matters here: this is exactly the ‘solid cultural foundation’ the chapter describes. A society that had been singing such verses in its own language for four centuries was already used to thinking of itself as one people — which is what made political unity possible later.
Try this: if you choose a saint from your own region, ask an elder at home whether they know a bhajan of that saint by heart. Songs that were never written down have often survived only in memory — collecting one is real historical work.