all awareness of themselves as separate, in an experience akin to possession by
the divine beloved. This passionate and intoxicating love may be spontaneous,
seeming to take the devotee by storm, but it is also cultivated through ritual and
song (Ramanujan 1993: 103–69; Martin 1999a).
The religious movements that were marked by such love left behind
ritual action carried out by priests to focus on personal relationships between
individuals and God, with more mature devotees, saints of the past, and even
God understood to serve as gurus to those who would deepen this relation. Some
movements were radically iconoclastic while others were closely connected to
local temples and manifestations of the divine, mapping out mythic events on
the regional landscape. In all of them religious expression shifted away from the
elite language of Sanskrit to the intimacy of local vernacular languages.
Leadership within the community was based on religious experience rather
than heredity (at least in the early stages of the movements), and these leaders
composed songs of love, complaint, and praise to their chosen forms of God.
Among their number were untouchables and women as well as brahmans. All
people were recognized as equal in the eyes of God and across rebirths, and
communities worshipped and ate together, defying caste rules of purity,
although actual social experiments of egalitarian living on a larger scale were
admittedly few. The most significant attempt occurred among the Vı ̄ras ́aivas in
the twelfth century in the Kannada-speaking region (present day Karnataka)
where a community more than one hundred and ninety thousand strong sought
to live without caste distinction, though the wider society did not tolerate this
for long (Ramanujan 1973: 62–4). Low-caste saints sometimes had to defend
their right to worship and prove their worthiness before God in trials engineered
by brahmanpriests outside the movements who felt their own religious author-
ity was being threatened, and women saints faced similar trials before male reli-
gious leaders even within the bhakti fold, according to the hagiographic
accounts.
Institutional structures took shape with time, and hierarchies re-entered.
Sects that initially refuted caste became like castes themselves, as their members
married only other members and passed religion down as a family heritage
rather than an individual choice. Formal liturgies including the songs of par-
ticular saints solidified, and elaborate rituals of devotion developed. Lineages of
leadership also took hold, sometimes hereditary, sometimes based on a guru’s
choosing of a successor.
Vis.n.u and S ́iva emerged as the primary focus of such devotion, with this same
type of organized devotion to the supreme Goddess or Devı ̄ developing some-
what later. After the Tamil A ̄l.va ̄rs, Vis.n.u himself was largely supplanted in direct
worship by his avata ̄rs– the amorous Kr.s.n.a (who takes birth in Vr.nda ̄van among
the cowherding people of Braj as detailed in Sanskrit in the Bha ̄gavata Pura ̄n.a
and who is also the charioteer of Arjuna in the famous dialogue of the Bhagavad
Gı ̄ta ̄) and Ra ̄ma (the upholder of the social and religious order and the hero of
the epic Ra ̄ma ̄yan.awho must rescue his wife Sı ̄ta ̄ from the demon king Ra ̄van.a).
Still others speak of God as beyond form of any kind under the name of Ra ̄m,
the Formless One, the Imperceptible, and reject images, myths, and the rituals
184 nancy m. martin