Bhakti-Sufi Traditions: Siddhas and Lingayats

A recurring trap in this chapter is treating "Bhakti" as one uniform movement with one message. It was not. The Tamil Nayanars and Alvars praised a personal, image-worshipped god (Shiva or Vishnu) inside temples that kings were delighted to fund; the Karnataka Lingayats, five centuries later, rejected image worship and temple ritual altogether, building their movement partly on defying the caste order those same temples upheld. A sharper trap sits inside the Lingayat story itself: the NCERT text describes Basavanna, the movement's twelfth century leader, as a Brahmana who was "initially a Jaina" before turning against both caste hierarchy and idol worship, a detail that cuts against the easy assumption that anti-Brahmanical reform always came from outside the Brahmanical fold. A third trap sits on the Sufi side: the Chishti and Suhrawardi orders get bundled together as "the two big silsilas," but they related to the state in opposite ways, one kept a deliberate distance from political power while accepting unsolicited charity, the other took land grants, wealth and even courtly office. Getting each tradition right on its own terms, rather than flattening them into a single "Bhakti-Sufi movement," is what this chapter tests.

The Nayanars and Alvars: Tamil devotional poetry

The earliest bhakti movements the NCERT text identifies with any precision emerged in Tamil Nadu from around the sixth century CE. They were led by two groups of wandering poet-saints: the Alvars, literally those "immersed" in devotion to Vishnu, and the Nayanars, devotee-leaders of Shiva. Both moved from place to place singing hymns of praise in Tamil, and in doing so they marked out certain sites as sacred abodes of their chosen deity. Many of these sites later grew into major temple complexes and pilgrimage centres, and the saints' own compositions and images were absorbed into the ritual life of those temples.

Historians read the Alvar and Nayanar movements as, at minimum, a challenge to the strict caste ordering that Brahmanical orthodoxy prescribed, since bhaktas came from across the social spectrum, Brahmanas, artisans, cultivators, and people from castes branded "untouchable" all appear among the recognised saints. The prestige their compositions carried is visible in how they were described: the Nalayira Divyaprabandham, an anthology of the compositions of twelve Alvars compiled by the tenth century, came to be called the "Tamil Veda," a direct claim that Tamil devotional verse could stand alongside the Sanskrit Vedas the Brahmanas held sacred. The parallel Shaiva compilation, the Tevaram, gathered and classified the hymns of the Nayanar poets Appar, Sambandar and Sundarar by the tenth century, organised on the basis of the music to which the songs were set.

Women hold a genuinely prominent place in both traditions, not as a footnote but as figures whose work survives and is still sung. Andal, a woman Alvar, composed verses that describe herself as the beloved of Vishnu; her compositions remain widely sung today. Karaikkal Ammaiyar, a Nayanar devotee of Shiva, took the path of extreme asceticism to attain her goal, and her own verses describe herself in deliberately unflattering, demon-like terms, a striking self-image chosen as a rejection of conventional feminine beauty. Neither woman joined an alternative monastic order; both remained within the bhakti tradition itself while defying the domestic roles expected of them.

The relationship between these poet-saints and political power is one of the chapter's clearer, checkable threads. Tamil Nadu saw a run of significant states from the second half of the first millennium CE, including the Pallavas and Pandyas (roughly sixth to ninth centuries), and their bhakti hymns repeatedly attack Buddhism and Jainism, a hostility historians connect to competition among religious traditions for royal patronage. That patronage became explicit and generous under the Chola dynasty (ninth to thirteenth centuries), who built some of the era's most magnificent Shiva temples, including at Chidambaram, Thanjavur and Gangaikondacholapuram, and produced the celebrated bronze images of Shiva as Nataraja from the same period. Inscriptional evidence dated to around 945 CE records that the Chola ruler Parantaka I had metal images of Appar, Sambandar and Sundarar consecrated in a Shiva temple, images that were carried in festival processions. The Chola kings also took the initiative to collect and organise the Tamil Shaiva hymns into the Tevaram and introduced their singing in royal temples, a clear case of a ruling dynasty binding its own legitimacy to popular devotional saints revered by the Vellala peasantry.

Basavanna and the Virashaiva movement

The twelfth century saw a distinct and more overtly anti-caste movement take shape further west, in Karnataka. Its leader was Basavanna (1106 to 1168), described in the NCERT text as a Brahmana who was initially a Jaina and who served as a minister in the court of a regional king before breaking with both the caste order and image worship he had been raised in. His followers came to be called Virashaivas ("heroes of Shiva") or Lingayats ("wearers of the linga"), and Lingayats remain a significant community in Karnataka today.

The core of Lingayat practice was the personal worship of Shiva in the form of a linga, which male devotees carried as a small linga enclosed in a silver case, strung on a loop over the left shoulder rather than housed in a temple. Wandering monks known as jangamas were held in particular reverence. Lingayats held that on death a true devotee would be united with Shiva and would not return to the world, a belief that led them to reject cremation, the funerary rite prescribed by the Dharmashastras, in favour of ceremonial burial of their dead.

The social content of the movement was as sharp as its theology. Lingayats directly challenged the idea of caste and the notion of ritual "pollution" that Brahmanas attached to particular groups, and they questioned the doctrine of rebirth itself. This combination won the movement followers from precisely those social groups marginalised by the Brahmanical order. Lingayats also actively encouraged practices the Dharmashastras disapproved of, most notably post-puberty marriage and the remarriage of widows, both direct inversions of orthodox Brahmanical prescription.

What survives of this movement's own voice comes almost entirely through the vachana, literally "saying," a short, direct form of Kannada devotional poetry composed by both women and men who joined the movement. One vachana attributed to Basavanna captures the Lingayat critique of empty ritual precisely: it contrasts how people pour milk over a stone carving of a serpent while threatening to kill a real serpent that appears, and how they offer food to a lifeless idol while turning away a hungry servant of god who could actually eat it, an argument for devotion measured by ethical conduct rather than ritual gesture. It is worth noting, as a matter of exam precision, that the vachana form and the Lingayat movement's social content are what the NCERT text verifies directly; it does not draw an explicit organisational link between the Lingayats and the Siddha tradition covered next, even though this chapter's own alias groups the two together.

The Siddha tradition

Where the Tamil and Karnataka movements developed within, or in direct confrontation with, the Brahmanical temple order, a different and more diffuse religious current was taking shape across north India during roughly the same centuries: the Naths, Jogis and Siddhas. The NCERT text places them explicitly outside the orthodox Brahmanical framework, noting that many of their adherents came from artisanal groups, weavers prominent among them, whose economic importance was growing alongside organised craft production and long-distance trade with Central Asia and West Asia. Like the Lingayats, these religious leaders questioned the authority of the Vedas and expressed themselves in the languages spoken by ordinary people rather than in Sanskrit. Unlike the Chola-patronised Nayanars, however, the text is explicit that despite their popularity these leaders were not, in this period, in a position to win the support of ruling elites.

This broad north Indian current is generally identified with the Nath sampradaya, whose two legendary founding figures, Matsyendranath and his disciple Gorakhnath, are associated with a lineage of yogic masters conventionally credited with originating the tradition. Gorakhnath in particular is remembered as the figure who systematised the tradition's ascetic and yogic techniques into what became known as hatha yoga, redirecting an older tantric inheritance toward a disciplined regime of bodily and breath practice aimed at spiritual realisation. Followers of this current appear under several overlapping names in the sources, including Nath Yogis, Nath Panthis, Jogis and Siddhas.

The tradition's persistence and eventual imperial visibility is well documented in the Mughal period, well after its emergence. A Mughal painting depicts the emperor Jahangir with a Jogi, and a letter written by Aurangzeb in 1661 to 1662 addresses a Jogi named Guru Anand Nath as "Shiv Murat" ("the embodiment of Shiva"), sending a ceremonial offering of cloth and money, a striking record of imperial deference toward a Nath ascetic centuries after the tradition's north Indian emergence. The NCERT text also records that Kabir's mystical vocabulary, terms such as shabda (sound) and shunya (emptiness), was drawn directly from yogic traditions, and that his ideas likely crystallised through dialogue with sufis and yogis in the Awadh region, showing the Siddha current feeding into later nirguna bhakti rather than remaining sealed off from it.

Sufi silsilas: Chishti and Suhrawardi

Sufism grew out of an early current within Islam that turned toward asceticism and mysticism, in protest against what its adherents saw as the growing materialism of the Caliphate and the dry, scholastic methods theologians used to interpret the Qur'an. By the eleventh century it had matured into a well-developed movement with its own body of literature, and sufis began organising themselves around the hospice, or khanqah, led by a teaching master known as shaikh in Arabic, or pir and murshid in Persian. The master enrolled disciples, called murids, and appointed a successor, the khalifa.

Sufi lineages, or silsilas, literally "chains," began crystallising in the Islamic world from around the twelfth century, each claiming an unbroken spiritual genealogy stretching back to the Prophet Muhammad through which spiritual power and blessing passed. When a shaikh died, his tomb, the dargah, became the focus of continuing devotion, and pilgrimage to it, ziyarat, was undertaken particularly on the death anniversary, or urs, since death was understood to bring the saint even closer to God than life had. Some sufi movements pushed this asceticism further still, scorning the khanqah altogether for a mendicant, celibate life of extreme austerity; these groups, known variously as Qalandars, Madaris, Malangs and Haidaris, were called be-shari'a for their deliberate defiance of Islamic law, in contrast to the law-observant, ba-shari'a majority.

Among the sufi groups that migrated into the subcontinent from the late twelfth century, the Chishtis were the most influential, largely because they adapted successfully to the local devotional environment. The order's five great early teachers and their dargahs, as recorded in the NCERT text, were Shaikh Muinuddin Sijzi (died 1235, buried at Ajmer, Rajasthan), Khwaja Qutbuddin Bakhtiyar Kaki (died 1235, Delhi), Shaikh Fariduddin Ganj-i Shakar (died 1265, Ajodhan, now in Pakistan), Shaikh Nizamuddin Auliya (died 1325, Delhi) and Shaikh Nasiruddin Chiragh-i Dehli (died 1356, Delhi). Nizamuddin's own khanqah, on the banks of the Yamuna at Ghiyaspur on the outskirts of Delhi, was documented as the centre of a bustling social life, running an open kitchen, the langar, funded entirely by unasked-for charity, or futuh, and drawing visitors from every social stratum, soldiers, slaves, singers, merchants, Hindu jogis and qalandars among them.

Of the Chishti dargahs, the most revered was that of Khwaja Muinuddin, popularly known as "Gharib Nawaz," comforter of the poor, at Ajmer. The earliest textual references to his dargah date only to the fourteenth century; Muhammad bin Tughlaq (ruled 1324 to 1351) was the first Sultan recorded visiting the shrine, though the earliest structure built to house the tomb was funded considerably later, in the late fifteenth century, by Sultan Ghiyasuddin Khalji of Malwa. Its location on the Delhi-Gujarat trade route helped its popularity grow, and by the sixteenth century Akbar visited the shrine fourteen times, seeking blessings for conquests, vows fulfilled and the birth of sons, a practice he kept up until 1580 and marked with lavish gifts, including a large cooking cauldron, or degh, presented in 1568. Central to Chishti devotional practice was sama, music and mystical chant used to evoke divine ecstasy, which the poet Amir Khusrau (1253 to 1325), a disciple of Nizamuddin Auliya, shaped further by introducing the qaul, a hymn sung at the opening or close of qawwali.

The Suhrawardi silsila offers a genuine, verified contrast to the Chishti pattern. It originated in Baghdad under Shihabuddin Abu Hafs Umar Suhrawardi and was carried into the subcontinent by Bahauddin Zakariya, who settled in Multan in 1222 and died around 1262, establishing Multan as such a significant centre of learning that it came to be called the "Baghdad of the East." Where the Chishtis maintained a studied distance from worldly power even while accepting unsolicited donations, the Suhrawardis engaged directly with political authority: Bahauddin Zakariya backed Iltutmish, the Mamluk Sultan of Delhi, in his conflict with Multan's own ruler in 1228, and was rewarded with the title Shaikh-ul-Islam, overseeing the state's spiritual affairs. The NCERT text confirms this contrast in general terms, noting that the Suhrawardis under the Delhi Sultans, like the Naqshbandis under the Mughals later, were associated with the state in ways that differed from the Chishtis, and that in some cases sufis of these orders accepted courtly office outright.

The Deccan supplies a genuine, textually confirmed bridge between this chapter's Sufi and Bhakti strands. Around the town of Bijapur in Karnataka, Chishti sufis of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries composed short devotional poems in Dakhani, a variant of Urdu, often sung by women performing everyday household chores such as grinding grain and spinning. The NCERT text states plainly that these compositions were likely inspired by the pre-existing bhakti traditions of the region, specifically naming the Kannada vachanas of the Lingayats and the Marathi abhangs of the Pandharpur sants, and that it was through this shared idiom that Islam gradually gained a foothold in the villages of the Deccan.

Quick revision points

• Alvars (devotees of Vishnu) and Nayanars (devotees of Shiva): earliest Tamil bhakti movements, from c. sixth century. Anthologies: Nalayira Divyaprabandham (12 Alvars, compiled by the tenth century, called the "Tamil Veda"); Tevaram (Appar, Sambandar, Sundarar, compiled and classified by the tenth century).
• Women saints: Andal (Alvar, devotee of Vishnu) and Karaikkal Ammaiyar (Nayanar, devotee of Shiva, path of extreme asceticism).
• Chola patronage (ninth to thirteenth centuries): temples at Chidambaram, Thanjavur, Gangaikondacholapuram; Chola ruler Parantaka I consecrated metal images of Appar, Sambandar and Sundarar (inscriptional evidence, c. 945 CE).
• Basavanna (1106 to 1168): Brahmana, initially a Jaina, minister at a regional court; founded the Virashaiva/Lingayat movement in twelfth-century Karnataka. Rejected caste, ritual "pollution," rebirth, and temple idol worship; worshipped Shiva as a personal linga; ceremonial burial, not cremation; supported post-puberty marriage and widow remarriage. Core textual source: the vachana, Kannada devotional sayings composed by both women and men.
• Naths, Jogis, Siddhas: north Indian religious current outside the Brahmanical framework, many from artisanal (especially weaver) backgrounds, questioning Vedic authority; associated with the Nath sampradaya of Matsyendranath and Gorakhnath, and with the systematisation of hatha yoga. Persisted into the Mughal period (Aurangzeb's 1661 to 1662 letter to a Jogi named Guru Anand Nath).
• Sufi vocabulary: khanqah (hospice), shaikh/pir/murshid (master), murid (disciple), khalifa (successor), silsila (chain of spiritual descent), dargah (tomb-shrine), ziyarat (pilgrimage to a shrine), urs (death anniversary), sama (mystical music), be-shari'a versus ba-shari'a (defiance of versus compliance with Islamic law).
• Chishti order: most influential in the subcontinent from the late twelfth century. Five great early teachers: Muinuddin Sijzi (d. 1235, Ajmer), Qutbuddin Bakhtiyar Kaki (d. 1235, Delhi), Fariduddin Ganj-i Shakar (d. 1265, Ajodhan), Nizamuddin Auliya (d. 1325, Delhi), Nasiruddin Chiragh-i Dehli (d. 1356, Delhi). Kept distance from political power while accepting unsolicited charity (futuh). Amir Khusrau (1253 to 1325) introduced the qaul into qawwali.
• Suhrawardi order: founded in Baghdad, brought to Multan by Bahauddin Zakariya (settled 1222, died c. 1262); backed Iltutmish in 1228 and received the title Shaikh-ul-Islam. Unlike the Chishtis, accepted land, wealth and courtly office; associated with the Delhi Sultans, as the Naqshbandi order was later with the Mughals.
• Deccan bridge: Dakhani sufi poetry composed around Bijapur, Karnataka (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), directly inspired by the Kannada vachanas of the Lingayats and the Marathi abhangs of the Pandharpur sants.

The thread worth holding onto across every strand here is that "devotion" never meant one fixed relationship to caste, ritual or the state; it meant a different, specific bargain each time, and this chapter rewards knowing which saint struck which one.