Introduction

The Bhakti movement in South India initially emerged as a dissent tradition against the orthodox Vedic Brahmanism and stood for social equality. But at a certain point in time, bhakti becamean ideological instrument in the hands of ruling elites and justified social inequalities. For the sake of its survival, the radical flavour of the Bhakti movement gradually receded to the background and the movement came to depend upon the patronage of ruling elites. The essay explores how the cittar or siddha tradition, which nurtured radical views against social injustice, came to fill the vacuum created by the degenerate Bhakti movement and of how such voices dissent eventually gave birth to an alternative value system and a new mode of devotion. It is argued that the cittar tradition cannot be studied alone as a theological response to bhakti but there is a need to understand how it represented the overall contemporary discontent of the common man against the socio-political institutions created by the bhakti ideology. Hence, the essay also studies epigraphic references to people's resistances against socio-political institutions and thus looks at their relevance to the dissents in cittar literatures.

Bhakti and Ideological Subjugation

The picture of society indicated in the early Tamil literatures shows us that kin relations and the ideology of heroism defined the early social formation. But the dominant scenarios of early social formation withered away by the beginning of the first millennium AD. The characteristics and practices of early social formation, such as predatory politics, cattle raids and warfare, sharing food with commoners and even kinship bonds in production, had lost their grip. Conversely, a new social formation, structured by the ethos of plough agriculture, began to develop. As production activity was modelled more on the agrarian economy, values and institutions of the agrarian social relations were produced and reproduced. This led to the growth of composite social relations in which the state and religion were integral.