Page 129 - Eye of the beholder

The Bhakti movement slowly spread to North India and the leader of this Hindu revivalist movement was Shankaracharya, a great thinker and a distinguished philosopher. Further this movement was propounded by Chaitanya, Namadeva, Tukaram and Jayadeva. The movement's major achievement was its abolition of idol worship.
The development of Bhakti poetry was a natural consequence of the bhasa literature. Bhakti unleashed an emotionalism which classical Indian literature written in Sanskrit had held under strict conventions and rigid social ethics. A unique strategy evolved by the bhasa literature to subvert the rigid conventions of over stylized Sanskrit poetry, to confront the Brahmin monopoly of metaphysics and ethics and to assert the identity of regional aspirations was the premise on which the aesthetics of Bhakti was developed.
Bhakti poetry was the consequence of extraordinary spontaneity, and in several bhasas Bhakti brought with it a radical social philosophy and new metaphysics. It was a movement and not a system with its own dynamics and became intimately related to social life. Bhasa otherwise the Matru bhasa in opposition to Deva bhasa brought about a humanizing force which intimately and personally connected with the devotee.
The concept of Bhakti has received a close attention in a psychoanalytical study of Indian society. Sudhir Kakar a psychoanalyst has commented on Krishna Bhakti in his study of Indian childhood, in which he interprets Bhakti as a means of releasing the chaotic instincts from the inner world. According to him, “The psycho-social meaning of Bhakti is that it provides for, and actually uses democratic fantasies in which the inner and outer repressions exacted by life in a rigidly structured and stratified social order are lifted. Traditional codes of conduct, relationship between various social groups, between generations and especially between the sexes are abrogated in Krishna worship”. Hence Kakar saw Krishna symbolism as a device for releasing anarchic and instinctual forces from the psyche and fulfilling the fantasies of a utopian social order.
Krishna Bhakti was not only kind of devotionalism prevalent during that period, but poets like Tulsidas in Hindi and Ramdas in Marathi felt inspired to follow Rama. However it cannot be denied that the charismatic child Krishna provided the main paradigm for devotionalism. The reason for this was that in the 16th century Krishna worship became popular in North India. Vraja the land of Krishna and Radha became home of a school of poets founded by Vallabhacharya [born 1478] and his son Vithalanatha. Vallabhacharya preached that the God was to be sought not in barren asceticism, nakedness, hunger and solitude but in the enjoyment of lie. He popularized the worship of Gopala Krishna. The blind bard Surdas, the Mewar Princess Mirabai, the Orcha poet Keshav Das and Biharilal, further developed the Krishna cult in their devotional poetry. Love was developed as a religious theme, and the new religion was a delightful amalgam of sensualism and mysticism. The young Krishna represented a supreme deity, the creator from whom all creations was a sportive emanation. Radha on the other hand was the human soul led by religion to offer not her own but her own whole self to God. Thus Bhakti taught an absolute surrender to the God, which it adored and imaged that devotion by human love. Hence the soul’s devotion to deity is pictured by Radha’s self abandonment to her beloved Krishna.
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