Reclaiming Devotion: The Bhakti Movement as Indigenous Enlightenment and Cultural Resistance

– The Bhakti Movement, active across the Indian subcontinent between the seventh and seventeenth centuries, constituted a sustained challenge to religious hierarchy, social exclusion, and epistemic control. Bhakti poets such as Kabir, Tulsidas, Namdev, and Meera Bai articulated a spiritual philosophy that displaced ritual authority and caste privilege with ethical devotion, emotional immediacy, and human equality. Expressed through regional languages and transmitted via oral and folkloric traditions, Bhakti literature created a shared cultural domain accessible to communities excluded from elite institutions. In contemporary postcolonial scholarship, Bhakti has gained renewed attention as a form of cultural decolonization, preserving indigenous ways of knowing that contest colonial historiography and inherited social hierarchies. This paper argues that Bhakti constitutes a distinct indigenous enlightenment, one that foregrounds vernacular expression, subaltern memory, and spiritual democracy. By examining Bhakti through the lenses of postcolonial theory, cultural studies, and subaltern historiography, the study demonstrates how Bhakti continues to offer alternative frameworks for identity, resistance, and social justice in modern India.