9

VERNACULAR MODERNITY
AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE OF
BHAKTI

Purushottam Agrawal

The term modern and its derivatives are important as markers of his-
torical time, not merely for indicating a certain point in the ongoing
flow, but also for being indicative of the spread of a specific episte-
mological and ethical orientation. This orientation manifests itself in
the emergence of a new kind of consciousness of relationship between
humans, nature and society. This new consciousness privileges an
acquired individual identity over an ascribed one, emphasizes the
empirical nature of ‘proof’ over a ‘scriptural’ one, and endeavors to
evolve a rational ethics and a culture of dialogue. Together, these can
be taken as the defining characteristics of modernity, which are not
confined merely to the European version.
In the past few decades, the Eurocentric notion of modernity has
come under scrutiny. In a recent article, Harbans Mukhia rightly
underlines ‘the increasing discomfort with the received idea of
modernity and therefore all its derivatives’, but he takes this dis-
comfort a bit too far when he claims that terms like modern and
early modern ‘have become more like slogans than helpful analyti-
cal categories’ (2015: 11). This increasing discomfort is obviously
rooted in the fact that modernity per se, both as a historical devel-
opment and a philosophical idea, became the subject of academic
studies and theorization in the post-World War II west. In these
studies, features like differentiation, urbanization, industrialization,
communication and new collectivities bound up with nation–states
were identified as the unique features of the original, i.e., European
modernity (Eisenstadt and Schluchter 1998: 3). Underlying this
identification was what Max Weber (1946) labeled ‘disenchantment
of the world’.

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European modernity as the original modernity naturally leads to

the idea of Europe being the exporter of modernization to the rest of
the world through a historically progressive process, however cruel, of
colonization and imperialism. Modernity outside Europe, then, by def-
inition becomes a derivative of the original European modernity. What
is being increasingly recognized and emphasized now is the contem-
poraneous and non-derivative character of various modernities, with
European modernity being just one of them. And there is a growing
interest in identifying common characteristics along with the specific-
ity of various sites which witnessed the emergence of early modernity
between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries.
It is obviously with reference to European modernity that Bruno
Latour (1993 [1991]) provocatively claims ‘we have never been mod-
ern’, in a book with the same title. Keeping in mind the Weberian
notion of disenchantment, he insists that contemporary matters of
public concern such as global warming, the HIV/AIDS pandemic and
emerging biotechnologies mix politics, science, popular and special-
ist discourse to such a degree that a tidy nature/culture dualism is no
longer possible. In fact, he further claims that the modernist distinc-
tion between nature and culture never existed in history.
The point, however, is that this dualism is not necessarily the moving
force of many moments of early modernity – which were not derivative
of, but rather contemporaneous with, the moment of early modernity
of Europe. Interestingly, Latour’s and other postmodernists’ method
implicitly admits the uniqueness and primacy of European m ­ odernity,
and automatically reduces all other historical moments of early
modernities to either being derivative or inauthentic. The attempts at
­de-centering thus become the reiterations of the centrality of Europe and
its history. The situation is summed up succinctly by Achille Mbembe:

on key matters, the Hegelian, post-Hegelian and Weberian

traditions, philosophies of action and philosophies of de-
construction derived from Nietzsche or Heidegger, share the
representation of distinction between the west and other his-
torical human forms as, largely, the way the individual in the
west has gradually freed her/himself from the sway of tradi-
tions and attained an autonomous capacity to conceive, in the
here and now, the definition of norms and their free formula-
tion by individual wills. These traditions also share, to vary-
ing degrees, the assumption that compared to the west, other
societies are primitive, simple, or traditional in that in them,
the weight of past predetermines individual behavior and

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the term public sphere . . . denotes the existence of arenas that not
only are autonomous from the public order but are also public in
the sense that they are accessible to different sectors of society. . . .
Public Spheres tend to develop dynamics of their own, which,
while closely related to that of the political arena, are not co-ter-
minus with it and are not governed by the dynamics of the latter.
(1998: 10–11)

Any student of bhakti would testify that the bhakti during the
early modern period was ‘open to all, in contrast to closed or exclu-
sive affairs’, and also ‘was from the very outset an arena of contested
meanings’. This contest manifested itself not only in poetic composi-
tions but also in organized activities, institutions and practices. Diverse
attempts to propagate what were, at times, conflicting ideas regarding
social practices were made through the shared idiom of bhakti,
wherein there was considerable contestation around terms, categories
and meanings – the name Ram was the most keenly contested signifier
of conflicting notions of social and spiritual ideas (Agrawal 1994).
Another interesting case of ‘contested meanings’ is the category of
Kaliyuga. As is well known, Kaliyuga is not only a measure of time-
period but also a signifier of moral decay. From a certain point of view,
from the Vishnu-Purana (third century) to Tulsidas in the ­sixteenth
century, Kaliyuga (i.e., all round decay of social order and moral ­fabric)
expresses itself through the weakening of brahminical a­ uthority and
disobedience on part of the sudra and women. On the other hand, we
have Pipa, the king of Gagrone (in northern Rajasthan) and a junior
contemporary of Kabir, expressing his gratitude to the weaver from
Banaras in these moving words:

But for Kabir in this Kaliyuga

The ways of the world, the force of Kaliyuga
And the Veda
would have destroyed bhakti forever. . .
God in his mercy sent his own man Kabir
Made him sing, the true light spread
And this humble Pipa also got a glimpse of truth.
(Callewaert 1993: 261)2

This is clearly a case of arguing contradictory positions in a shared

idiom. Also note, it is an upper-caste king praising Kabir in a lan-
guage which he did not employ even for his own and Kabir’s guru,
Ramanand. This remarkable change in attitude and the attempt to

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I would not like to criticize Guénon for using a foreign category

to explain the decay in the modern western world and for suggesting
another foreign practice and tradition as the spiritual and social pana-
cea to Europe. His proposals ought to be critiqued on their capacity
to illuminate or lack thereof, not based on the notion of Kaliyuga and
that the practice and ideology of Sufism are not indigenous to Europe.
Any category of analysis needs to be context-sensitive and not nec-
essarily context-specific. Does Kaliyuga as a category for analyzing
decay meet the requirement for such sensitivity? Can it be suitably
modified to fit the notions and practices native to Europe and thus
help us understand the dynamics of the perceived crisis of western
civilization better?
To talk of the public sphere of bhakti is not to talk of a public
sphere that is exactly and strictly European or even of the ‘bourgeois’
variety – a category which is the subject of Habermas’s enquiry (origi-
nal German published in 1962): ‘a historical–sociological account of
the emergence, transformation and disintegration of bourgeois public
sphere’ (1989: xi). But, at the same time, Habermas gives a very basic
definition of ‘public’ – ‘we call events and occasions “public” when
they are open to all, in contrast to closed or exclusive affairs’ – and
explains further:

But as in the expression, ‘public building’, the term need not

refer to general accessibility; the building does not even have
to be open to public traffic. ‘Public buildings’ simply house
the state institutions and as such are public. The state is the
‘public authority’. . . . The ‘public sphere’ itself appears as a
specific domain – the public domain versus the private. Some-
times the public simply appears as that sector of the public
opinion that happens to be opposed to the authorities.
(1989: 1–2)

And, regarding the applicability of this concept, even in the context

of Europe, Mahmood Mamdani points out, ‘critics of Habermas have
tried to disentangle the analytical from the programmatic strands in
his argument by relocating this movement in its historical context’
(1996: 15). He also quotes Geoff Eley: ‘the public sphere was from
the very outset an arena of contested meanings’ (cited in Mamdani
1996: 15). Thus disentangled, the public sphere can be seen ­primarily
as ‘the place of voice rather than of authority’, even outside the
bourgeois class of an industrial society. According to Eisenstadt and
Schluchter:

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time ironically remind us of the validity of Mbembe’s observation,

cited earlier. The objection is not confined to the public sphere alone.
Velcheru Narayana Rao and Sanjay Subrahmanyam note:

it is claimed often enough now that no fit whatsoever existed

between these and other ‘-etic’ categories of the humanities
and social sciences (with their uniquely Western origins and
genealogy) and the highly varied ‘-emic’ notions that may be
found in different locales and times in the world of the past:
a claim that is a source of anxiety for some, a source of indif-
ference for others, and a ground for rejoicing for still others
who see a positive value in ‘incommensurability’, which they
perhaps view as akin to a (necessarily virtuous) claim for spe-
cies diversity.
(2008: 29)

Let me reiterate the simple fact that when all is said and done, human-
kind cannot do without a transcultural notion of human values and a
set of minimum expectations rooted in the same. Such a transcultural
universalism can be imagined and articulated only when we explore
the trajectory of interactions between various cultures and traditions
instead of attributing all yearnings for universal human values to the
European Enlightenment and its export to other societies through
colonization. Moreover, for the purpose of analysis, there has to be
some commonality of concepts and methods – of course, a nuanced
one sensitive to the specificity of each case under analysis. The suit-
ability of any category of analysis does not flow from its geographical
provenance but from its capacity to illuminate the phenomenon under
examination. Many interesting and thought-provoking tools of analy-
sis are more or less capable of being disentangled from their specific
social contexts; otherwise, no dialogue across civilizations could have
been possible. Definitions arrived at in the context of a particular his-
torical experience get expanded when applied to other, similar (not
exactly the same) experiences. More important than the issue of etic
and emic categories is the potential of a category for illuminating the
phenomenon under examination. For instance, René Guénon, who
is credited with developing the ‘traditionalist’ critique of the modern
world and had a great influence on Ananda Coomaraswamy, used the
Hindu notion of Kaliyuga (the fourth (present) age of the world, char-
acterized by total decadence and depravity) as an analytical category
to explain the decay of the modern western world and proposed Sufi
Islam as an antidote to this decay.1

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Ramvilas Sharma (1961, 1981, 1996) made path-breaking contri-

butions to the theme. But the most crucial aspect of this vernacular
modernity, namely the emergence of the public sphere of bhakti (devo-
tional theisms which became popular in early modern India; originat-
ing in South India around the eighth century, they swept over east and
north India from the fifteenth century onwards), has not attracted any
attention. It is through the public sphere of bhakti that the ‘cultural
production – manifest in the popular religious movements of northern
India’ – circulated and created impact beyond the communities and
networks of bhaktas (devotees) themselves. The idea of an individual
with an ‘autonomous capacity to conceive’ was articulated and reit-
erated in the public sphere of bhakti. The new norms of perception
and behavior gradually made their presence felt in society through this
public sphere. I have, for quite some time now, been arguing for the
exploration of the public sphere of bhakti and its impact on the nature
of vernacular modernity, particularly in north India (Agrawal 2009).
There is obvious resistance to the employment of the category of
public sphere as such with reference to pre-British India. C. A. Bayly,
describing the indigenous public sphere in eighteenth-century India as
the Indian ecumene, observes that

recent polemics against the derivative character of modern

Indian political ideology have not even begun to characterize
indigenous political theory and practice, individuality, ration-
ality and social communication in the Indian context. These,
of course, are all essential elements in the concept of critical
politics which developed in the west and they all find a place
in Jurgen Habermas’s influential discussion of the ‘public
sphere’. All had analogues within the north Indian ecumene.
(1999: 181)

Criticizing Bayly, for what he sees as an ‘absence of meaningful con-

ceptual distinction’, Partha Chatterjee says that ‘attribution of a
Habermasian public sphere to the literary world of eighteenth century
north India is too quick’ (2008: 3).
Another objection is also often raised: can we really employ a foreign
category (i.e., public sphere) of analysis while arguing for the existence
of an indigenous, vernacular or alternative modernity? It is interesting
to note that this objection to the use of etic categories and insistence on
using only emic notions to analyze indigenous phenomena comes from
not only nativist and postmodernist quarters but also certain Marx-
ists as well, who seem to forget their own etic status and at the same

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Modernity is historically a global and conjunctural phenom-

enon, not a virus that spreads from one place to another. It is
located in a series of historical processes that brought hitherto
relatively isolated societies into contact, and we must seek its
roots in a set of diverse phenomena – the Mongol dream of
world conquest, European voyages of exploration, activities
of Indian textile traders in the diaspora, the ‘globalization of
microbes’ that historians of the 1960s were fond of discussing
and so on.
(1998: 99–100; emphasis in original)

John F. Richards (1997) identifies several material factors to account

for early modern (1500–1800) as distinct from the Middle Ages that
preceded it and the modern nineteenth and twentieth centuries that
followed it. These factors were the creation of global sea passages, the
rise of a world economy, the growth of large, stable states, the growth
of the world population, intensification of land use and diffusion of
new technologies, and none of these left India untouched – hence the
question and the caution:

Can we infer that the circulation of people, commodities, and

ideas became more dense and rapid over the early modern
centuries? Surely new cultural production – manifest in the
popular religious movements of northern India – increased in
size, intensity, and variety. Wrapping our minds around the
notion of change demands a conscious effort. Most of us still
operate with an unstated assumption that precolonial India
was nearly static. . . . We must put aside our knowledge of the
colonial outcome and look with fresh eyes at new institutions,
new social forms, new cultural expression, and new produc-
tivity in the early modern period.
(1997: 208–09; emphasis added)

The emergence of ‘new institutions, new social forms, new cultural

expressions and new productivity’ is best evidenced through the ver-
nacular sources in the early modernities of both Europe and India.
Scholars like Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman and Sanjay
Subrahmanyam (2001), Satya P. Mohanty (2008), Allison Busch
(2011), John S. Hawley (2005), David Lorenzen (2006) and Sheldon
Pollock (1998, 2003, 2006) have produced exciting works exploring
the process of vernacularization and the emergence of early moder-
nity in India. Earlier, eminent Hindi critic and historian of literature

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limits the areas of choice – as if it were a priori. The formula-

tion of norms in these latter societies has nothing to do with
reasoned public deliberation, since the setting of norms by a
process of argument is a specific invention of modern Europe.
(2001: 10–11; emphasis added)

The idea of an individual freeing her/himself from the a priori limits of

choice and thus attaining the ‘autonomous capacity to conceive’ new
norms of perception and behavior (of course, in varying degrees) is at
the crux of the notion of modernity. That is why the idea of modernity
is important philosophically as well as historically. This autonomy can
be achieved in different ways in different cultural contexts, and by the
same logic through diverse forms of rationality. And in order to examine
and compare the diverse historical sites of modernity, or even the impact
of European modernity on non-European societies, it is important to
revise the received theory of modernity. As Sudipta Kaviraj puts it:

How should a theory of modernity cope with the historical

difference? My dissatisfaction with received modernization
theories has been driven by parochial interest in Indian his-
tory, just as that theory was devised by the need to understand
the equally parochial interests – making sense of primarily
European history. . . . It is certainly necessary to understand
the history of modernity in other settings, but also to ask
what shape should the theory assume if it is to deal with this
expanding historical diversity.
(2005: 497)

Diversity does not rule out inter-connectivity. Historically speaking,

the emergence of disenchantment strictly of the European variety
alone cannot be taken as the prerequisite of modernity. It is also useful
to remember that though intertwined, modernity and industrializa-
tion are not synonymous with each other. After all, even in Europe
modernization of ideas and attitudes – ‘enlightened’ interrogation of
‘traditional’ ideas and practices – preceded the industrialization and
not vice versa. Mexican historian Enrique Dussel reminds his readers
of Max Weber’s ‘intuition’ that ‘if Europe [had] not been the region
most prepared to carry out the Industrial Revolution, it would have
been China or Hindustan’ (2006: 168).
As a matter of fact, European modernity itself, far from being unique
and indicating an inherent superiority, was a result of global processes.
To recall the telling metaphor used by Sanjay Subrahmanyam:

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infuse available categories like Kaliyuga with an entirely new con-

notation is indicative of a space which belongs more to voice than
to authority. This is the public sphere of bhakti, which facilitates the
dynamics of this shared idiom and enables it to come into being and
spread beyond local practices, specific publics and various networks.
The notion of the public sphere of bhakti is not and cannot be a rep-
lica of the public sphere of the bourgeois, but merchants and artisans
most certainly play a crucial part here. The interactive dynamics of
notions, ideas, institutions and practices that made possible percep-
tible change in attitudes and practices in early modern north India is
taking place here.
The public nature of the vernacular bhakti cannot be missed, but
theoretical hesitation persists in the application of the notion of ‘public
sphere’ to bhakti. In a recent study of Namdev, Christian Lee Novtezke
(2008) restricts use of the term ‘public’ to the analysis of ‘public
­performance’ of bhakti and its ‘memory’, and in contradistinction to
‘private’. He distinguishes his own work from other ‘excellent litera-
tures’, which are in line with his argument but ‘tend to take modernity
as a prerequisite for the existence of the publics’. As opposed to such
literatures, Novtezke uses the idea of public ‘without allegiance to any
reigning theoretical formulation of the term but rather in whatever
way it might heuristically serve to draw a clear picture of the cultural
history of the memory of Namdev in Maharashtra’ (2008: 14).
The vernacular bhakti was public not merely in the sense of perfor-
mance of devotion but also in its intent and impact. Keeping this in
view, John S. Hawley (2015), while historicizing and problematizing
the category of the ‘Bhakti movement’, proposes ‘network theory’ and
sees various bhakti moments in vernacular languages as the ‘networks’
consisting of temple and math (monastery) leaders, family members
and even the hagiographies of various bhaktas. A major aim of his
network theory is ‘to displace the illusion that individual actors are
the engines of history, and this surely resonates with bhakti despite its
personalist focus’ (2015: 296).
Hawley is quite right in interrogating the idea of ‘movement’ and the
‘personalist focus’. The question, however, is: do the ideas of bhakti as
public performance and as network(s) really satisfactorily illuminate
the role of bhakti and its overall impact on the making of the early
vernacular modernity of India?
The most perceptive observation on both the public nature of the
bhakti and its social impact in north India was made by William
Crooke at the close of the nineteenth century. In his ethnographic
survey of the tribes and castes of the North-Western provinces and

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Oudh published in 1896, Crooke had this to say about the ‘creation of
­so-called new castes’ engaged in various professions and ‘industries’:

the process is facilitated by the creation of new religious

groups, which base their association on the common belief in
the teachings of some saint or reformer. Most of these sects
are connected with the Vaishnava side of Hinduism [one of
the major traditions in Hinduism along with Shaiva, Shakta
and Smarta], and are devoted to the solution of the religious
questions which beset the searcher after truth in western
lands. All naturally aim at the abolition of the privileges and
pretensions of the Brahmin Levite and the establishment of a
purer and more intellectual form of public worship.
(2005 [1896]: cixix)

Crooke is reporting a process which had been going on for quite some
time on account of the spread of commerce and the growth of purer
and more intellectual forms of worship with the advent of vernacu-
lar early modernity. It is through the category of the public sphere
of bhakti that the dynamics of the caste-system as it actually oper-
ated in pre-British India can be better grasped. Bayly notes that in the
context of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ‘Bhakti devotion
bridged these divides of status, and the sects were becoming increas-
ingly respectable and market-centered’ (1999: 211).
Harbans Mukhia (2016), in his reappraisal of Abu’l Fazl’s rational-
ity, explains that ‘his “reason” was indeed deeply embedded in another
dichotomy he was postulating, one between a universal God and denomi-
national, sectarian gods, between a universal religiosity and denomina-
tional, sectarian religions’. Comparing Abu’l Fazl’s search for universal
religiosity with that of Kabir, and naturally aware of the fact that ‘it would
be hard to isolate one single source or thinker that shaped the mind of
such an outstanding scholar’, Mukhia underlines Kabir as ‘a major inspi-
ration for Abu’l Fazl’ and reminds his readers of the historically impor-
tant fact that this inspiration, for the ideas of ‘one of the Mughal Empire’s
greatest courtier-intellectuals, came right from the ground level’.
The question is: what enabled ideas ‘from the ground level’ to reach
up and permeate the air of the royal court of Akbar, Abu’l Fazl’s patron?
Did the idea of the Universal God as opposed to the denominational,
sectarian god become so popular as to reach the royal scholar? Was it
necessary for Abu’l Fazl to have directly met a guru of Kabirpanth to
get an idea of Kabir’s thinking? Could the increasingly respectable and
market-centered bhakti sects have played some role in this?

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It would be useful to recall here that Banaras, the city of Kabir,

has traditionally been a major center of trade and commerce, and
the Kabirpanthi maths in general were established in similar cent-
ers in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat. The Kabirchaura branch of
the Kabirpanth at Banaras was founded by Surati Gopal, a Brahmin
believed to be a direct disciple of Kabir. The founder of the Dam-
akheda branch of Kabirpanth, Dharamdas was a merchant and
attracted a major segment of his following from the artisan and mer-
chant caste groups.
The perceptible presence of merchants can be noted among the fol-
lowers of other nirgun poets (those who believe in God in an unmani-
fested (without form or attributes) form as opposed to the saguna,
who believe in God in a manifested (with attributes) form as well.
Jana Gopal, the author of Dadu’s biography Dadu Janam Lila (com-
posed in 1620), was himself a mahajan – a merchant – and mentions
at least nine other mahajans among Dadu’s disciples. Many more are
stated to be engaged in commerce even though they did not belong
to bania or mahajan castes. He mentions Dadu’s rejection of the Var-
nashrama ideology, Hindu–Muslim strife and many prevalent reli-
gious practices, but most importantly he also reports Dadu’s fierce
opposition to the custom of child marriage, which had been prevalent
in Rajasthan and about which the modern British Raj hardly bothered
(Callewaert 1988: 109–10).
At the other end of the country, we have Chaitanya Mahaprabhu,
whose sampradaya (sect) treats vernacular works reporting his life and
miracles as the prasthan trayi (three sources or axioms); this has cre-
ated a cadre of teachers who, regardless of their background, are called
goswami (literally, one who has mastered senses) and are revered as
such. Bipan Chandra Pal, the great nationalist leader, writing in 1933,
noted Chaitanya’s ‘modernity’ in abolishing (for the Vaishnavas) the
‘old rules against caste discrimination and the remarriage of widows’
(cited in Hawley 2015: 258). The influence of this sampradaya spread
much beyond Bengal due to the organized enthusiasm and zeal of the
founder and other leaders. Operating in the public sphere of bhakti,
they won not only popular support but also the admiration and alle-
giance of the elite, so much so that in the eighteenth century, Sawai Jai
Singh of Jaipur sought the approval of the Chaitnyaite goswamis for
his religious reforms. His ‘reforms’, however, were not liberal and pro-
gressive, particularly with reference to Ramanandis and Radhavallab-
his (Meetal 2008: 210–11, 340; Horstmann 2006: 73). The point here
is, however, the extent of the reach of the public sphere of bhakti. Hav-
ing consolidated their position through influence on various players

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in this sphere, including the powerful king of Jaipur, the Chaitnyaites

could adjudicate on matters of other bhakti sampradayas. Jai Singh
also fancied himself as bringing doctrinal unity among all the Vedic
sects and wrote Siddhantekya Prakashika for the purpose. Here again,
he wanted approval from as many pundits as possible, but more, espe-
cially, from the Vaishnavas of Bengal (Bahura and Singh 1988: vii, 182–
83). Further into Assam, Sri Sankardev is credited with initiating the
Vaishnava movement in a somewhat missionary mode in the fifteenth
century and establishing the institutions of satra (Vaishnavite monas-
tery) and naamghar (prayer house). These institutions are reported to
have played a social role much beyond merely religious one. In fact,
they have functioned as centers of community reflection and action on
issues of social and even political import (Chaliha 1998).
Whatever the orientation of ideas and attitudes of a particu-
lar bhakta, sampradaya or lay follower might be, the public sphere
of bhakti provided an arena of contest as well as a space of resist-
ance – not directly involved with the political powers but not entirely
indifferent to political patronage. Apart from the Bengali Vaishnavas
discussed above, the Pushti-Marga of Vallabhacharya is well known
for its systematic attempts to win over the support of influential politi-
cal figures of the time. The public sphere of bhakti was not only an
arena in which there was intense competition for patronage, but also
a site of serious political reflection. The Ramcharitmanas of Tulsidas
contains both a social lamentation and an imagination of utopia from
the varnashrama point of view, and given the number of manuscripts
copied, it had become hugely popular by the seventeenth century.
While there were no conscious attempts to effect a change in the
political power structure, at least in some cases, as with the rise of
Sikhism in Punjab and Satnamis in central India, the ideas and prac-
tices circulating in the public sphere of bhakti led to a degree of politi-
cal upheaval.
The public sphere of bhakti celebrated the bhaktas’ acquired
identities, ignoring ascribed identities. Kabir, Dadu and Dariya of Bihar
were born Muslims, but this fact did not stand in the way of all three
being revered by their Hindu followers. It was only after the advent of
colonial modernity that their ‘Hindu’ origin myths were popularized.
It is also indicative of the notion of community then prevalent that
Tulsidas, while conducting a bitter polemic against the Nirguna bhak-
tas, never refers to them or their kind of bhakti as of ‘foreign origin’,
as did twentieth-century historians of Hindi literature. The vernacular
turn in India indeed had its distinctions from Europe. As Sheldon Pol-
lock puts it:

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Indian vernacular cultures demonstrate little concern for the

Herderian ‘uniqueness’ over which national cultures of the
present are obsessed. . . . The vernacular turn was not a quest
for authenticity, nor was it informed by any kind of vision,
historicist or other, of tribal unity.
(Pollock 1998: 64)

The impact of the vernacular bhakti went much beyond its own spe-
cific publics and networks. The media and institutions of this spread
were: the panths, maths, satsangs (gathering of bhaktas, which were
not just open to the public but actually tried to win it over to the
bhakti worldview) and hagiographic accounts composed in the genres
of bhaktmals, charits, parchais and gosthi (‘reports’ of the dialogues
between bhaktas – real or imaginary).
It was through the activities of the bhaktas and their admirers that
the public sphere of the bhakti was created and the memory was trans-
formed into legacy. The ecumene described by Bayly obviously con-
sists of the most enlightened intelligentsia belonging to the elite classes
but which possessed ‘a deep historical lineage in the popular critique
of Brahmin pretensions in the earlier centuries’ (Bayly 1999: 211).
Parallel to this ecumene of the elite in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, the public sphere of the bhakti evolved over the preceding
centuries was also quite active. The advent of the printing press made
the activities taking place in the bhakti public sphere more documenta-
ble and perceptible. To cite a telling example, one can recall the publi-
cation of the Pakhand-Khandini Tika on Kabir Bijak. It was composed
and published by Vishvanath Singh Ju Dev in 1868 in response to the
Puran Sahib’s Trija. Trija was ‘published’ mechanically (printed) only
in 1910, 42 years after the Pakhand-Khandini, but was actually writ-
ten in 1837 and was ‘published in the public sphere of bhakti’, i.e.,
circulated among the sadhus and larger public ever since. It caused
such an impact that ‘Kabir himself ordered Vishvanath Singh Ju Dev
to attack this heresy – pakhand and thus save the innocent souls from
the sin’ (Agrawal 2009: 229–30).
What needs to be properly grasped is the fact that the bhaktas – both
saguna and nirguna – were neither self-contained sadhakas (spiritual
initiates or aspirants who practice a particular spiritual path to real-
ize their ultimate ideals), indifferent to society around them, nor were
they merely public performers of the act of worship, which hitherto
belonged to the private sphere of household. They were trying to influ-
ence people and win followers in a society, which was quite ‘literacy
aware’ (as Bayly puts it) in spite of the absence of printing technology.

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The contest being played out in the public sphere of bhakti clearly
reflects and is related to the contradiction between normative injunc-
tions and real everyday practices in matters of caste and other things.
Due to the rise in commerce and consequent social mobility, the frame-
work of the fourfold Varna order was under constant and ever increas-
ing stress. As a matter of fact, the Varna order has always been just a
theoretical framework, not an empirical reality. It is only in the era of
Orientalist scholarship and its invention or construction of a highly
textual notion of Hindu tradition that the idea of the Varna system
as an eternal empirical reality gained ground. Such an invention of
ahistorical India naturally distorted the reality on the ground, wherein
self-conscious people were acquiring the status of individual and col-
lective historical actors through their interactions with one another.
Raymond Schwab reminded his readers way back in 1950 that, ‘unlike
a unique model, India had always the same problems but had not
approached them in the same way’ (1984: 6).
‘Not in the same way’ – the difference lies in the dialogic traditions
of the ‘argumentative Indian’, a phrase made famous by Amartya Sen
(2005). In early modern India, these traditions were being articulated
and also further reinforced in the idiom and public sphere of bhakti.
Not only were traditionally available names like Ram being given a
new meaning, but new, interrogative versions of available Puranic nar-
ratives were also being created and propagated. The various Puranas
are usually supposed to have appropriated the subaltern voices into
the brahminical hegemony, but the Lakshmi Purana composed by the
sixteenth-century Odia saint–poet Balaram Das is clearly a counter-
hegemonic text, as is shown by Satya P. Mohanty in this volume.
Such contests and debates around these concepts and practices were
conducted from Assam to Rajasthan through media like satsangs,
maths and sampradayas. Neither all the bhaktas nor the sampradayas
agreed on everything. In fact, they competed with each other to win
over ordinary people and powerful persons. The competition some-
times turned bitter, even violent. The point is that while the bhaktas
and their sampradayas did not have a well-defined, common goal, they
certainly did have common idioms, practices and institutions through
which they sought to validate their respective ideas and positions.
The practice was to propose a new reading of the spiritual and social
experience through the shared idiom of bhakti, in terms of adhy-
atama (spirituality). In fact, Banarasidas – a Jain and the author of
Ardhakathanak (Half a Tale), an autobiography – also established a
new panth in the idiom of bhakti, the Adhyatama Panth. The most
important aspect of his life and work is a clear indication of the

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emergence of the notion of the individual,3 as is the case with Kabir

and so many others.
The texts and practices of bhakti clearly indicate the emergence
of the individual as distinct from the type, but one can notice this
and other such significant processes only if one looks carefully at the
vernacular expressions of Indian modernity. In fact, vernacular (i.e.,
Deshaj in Hindi) is the most apt expression for the modernity we see
emerging through the public sphere of bhakti – a space of voice, which
is distinct from private space and autonomous from but not indifferent
to the political arena.

Notes
1 For a fascinating account, see Mark Sedgwick (2004).
2 जौ कलिनाम कबीर न होते/तौ लोक बेद अरु कलिजुग मिलि करि भगति रसातल देत/े . . . भगति प्रतापि राखिबे कारनिनि
जन आप पठाया/नाम कबीरा साच प्रकासा तहाँ पीपै कु छ पाया।
3 A very good translation along with the original text and an introduction
has been prepared by Mukund Lath, Half a Tale: A Study in the Interrela-
tionship Between Biography and History (Jaipur: Rajasthan Prakrit Bharti
Sansthan, 1981). For a critical appraisal of the text, see Vasudha Dalmia
(2008).

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