A loose, centuries-long family of devotional movements that reshaped Hinduism through vernacular song. Sung in everyday languages rather than Sanskrit, it placed personal love of God above ritual and priestly mediation, and often above caste, making the divine reachable by the low-caste, the illiterate, and women — even as it was also carried by temple worship and royal patronage. Traced from the Tamil south of roughly the sixth century, it spread across India over the next thousand years and remains the dominant mode of popular Hindu worship.
A Rajput princess walked out of her palace to dance and sing in the streets for a god she called her husband, and her royal in-laws, the story goes, tried to poison her for the shame of it. Mirabai's god was Krishna, and her love poems to him are still sung today. She was one of a galaxy of poet-saints who, over many centuries, remade Hinduism by insisting on a startling idea: that you reach God not only through Sanskrit learning or priestly ritual, but through naked love, sung in your own tongue. The movement they made put that love within reach of people whom Sanskrit learning, priestly gatekeeping, and caste had long pushed aside.