The objective of this project is to probe how the social imagination fostered by the egalitarian thrust of the Bhakti movement facilitated easy accommodation of interpretations of freedom and equality that came into the subcontinent owing to the encounter with colonialism, thereby paving the way for the emergence of a secular democratic social imaginary in colonial India. To that end, I want to consider how the conceptual resources of Bhakti – expressible through what Fred Dallmayr calls “the standard of castelessness, nonhierarchy and caring human fellowship” – contributed to the process of translation of ethical ideals in colonial India to yield a spirited assertion against the type of intragroup (and intra-religious) domination entrenched through Hinduism’s caste order by key figures such as Jotiba Phule, M G Ranade and B R Ambedkar.

My study will involve a critical analysis of the corpus of normative resources generated by the Bhakti movement in the Maharashtra region in the period between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries. For this, I will engage the writings of Bhakti saints (women and men) such as Jnandev, Namdev, Muktabai, Janabai, Tukaram and Bahenabai. I will also draw critically on the scholarship of Jayant Lele, Eleanor Zelliot and Fred Dallmayr on aspects of the Bhakti movement. As well, the project will involve an analytical exposition of the content of some of the important political notions espoused by Phule, Ranade and Ambedkar. All three were influenced both by Maharashtrian Bhakti thought and by interpretations of equality and freedom associated with the modern west that were rendered familiar because of the encounter with colonialism.

The eventual aim is to interrogate whether the constitutionally instituted model of independent India’s secularism, especially with regard to this model’s commitment to not only intergroup but also intragroup freedom (freedom for Hindus from the impediments imposed by caste, for example), has drawn on a social imaginary whose emergence was facilitated by the Bhakti movement. The basis for this interrogation relates to my hunch – demonstrable from an initial foray into this domain – about a clear connection between the emphasis by some strands of Bhakti on the importance of the notion of “togetherness,” and the kinds of value that key intellectuals in colonial India attached to themes of “brotherhood” (Phule), bonds of friendship and fellowship (Ranade), and “likemindedness” among and within groups in a polity (Ambedkar). It appears that colonial India – especially Maharashtra – became a crucial site for the coming together of the normative content of Bhakti with the corpus of thought associated with modern western interpretations of values such as freedom and equality. Through the proposed project, I want to suggest that a careful study of the processes through which these different normative visions got woven together can explain the choice in independent India of a modern (but distinctively Indian) secular and liberal-democratic institutional order to offset caste- and sex-based hierarchies sanctioned by religion.