South Asia

This chapter introduces a representative poet from the late phase of the medieval bhakti (meaning “devotion”) movement in India. While there are many notable works from this period, the bhakti movement is perhaps the most representative of the meeting of two civilizations, Islam and Hinduism, a major factor in South Asia during the Middle Ages.

Arab traders brought Islam to India as early as the seventh century C.E. However, the greater influence of Islam in South Asia took place from the twelfth century on, when Muhammad of Ghor (modern-day Afghanistan) took over the northern part of India and established the Delhi Sultanate (a Sultan is a sovereign of a Muslim state). There have been interactions between Islamic and Hindu cultures from that point on, if not earlier. Further, from the early sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century, most of northern India was ruled by the Mughal (also spelled Mogul) dynasty, a Muslim dynasty of Turkic-Mongol origin. During the two centuries of rule over much of India, the Mughals, who were Muslims, made attempts to integrate Hindus and Muslims into a united Indian state.

The bhakti movement is a prominent example of the interaction between Islam and Hinduism, which began from the twelfth century. The bhakti movement, which emphasized commitment and devotion to one chosen god out of many in the Hindu religion, was a movement to reform aspects of Hinduism, for example, asserting that moksha, or liberation, is attainable by everyone, unlike the views and practices of classical Hindu religion based on caste hierarchy. Under the influence of Islam, bhakti showed characteristics of monotheism, iconoclasm, and egalitarianism. Despite the synthesis of two religions, bhakti still emphasized the Hindu concepts of moksha and karma (the idea that good or bad actions determine the future modes of an individual’s existence). Whereas earlier bhakti poets like Kabir from northern India in the fifteenth century shows the mixing of Hindu and Muslim ideas, Tukaram from western Indian in the seventeenth century, while still part of the bhakti movement, focuses on reen- ergizing Hindusim in his regions.

Although Tukaram is from the seventeenth century, selected poems by Tukaram in this chapter are good examples of the medieval bhakti movement, a result of the crossroads of Islam and Hinduism in South Asia’s Middle Ages.

AS YOU READ, CONSIDER THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS:

  • How do Tukaram’s poems seem to convey such Hindu concepts as karma and moksha?
  • Can you point out the influence of the synthesis of Hindu and Muslim ideas, or the bhakti movement, in Tukaram’s poems?
  • Select specific poems by Tukaram and develop your own interpretive thesis statement for each poem, along with supporting ideas.

 

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Written by Kyounghye Kwon

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World Literature Copyright © by Anita Turlington; Rhonda Kelley; Matthew Horton; Laura Ng; Kyounghye Kwon; Laura Getty; Karen Dodson; and Douglas Thomson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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