Which one of the following does ‘Nirguna Bhakti’ refer to ?

The Commission dropped this question. Its final key prints an X where every other item carries a letter, and records that one question was dropped and 119 taken for scoring, so no option is credited here and there is nothing on this page to mark right or wrong. Nothing on the printed booklet says so — the item is set exactly like its neighbours, and a candidate sitting the paper answered it like any other — and the Commission does not publish its reasons, so the withdrawal is a fact about the marking and not a verdict on any of the four printed phrases. What follows is therefore the subject taught for its own sake, because the material is standard and appears in every syllabus that covers the medieval devotional traditions. 'Nirguna' is a Sanskrit compound: 'nir' meaning without and 'guna' meaning attribute or quality. Nirguna bhakti is devotion directed to the divine conceived as having no attributes, no form, no name of its own and no birth in the world — a reality beyond image, gender and description, approached inwardly through the guru, through the repetition of the divine name and through song rather than through temple, idol or priestly ritual. It stands against saguna bhakti, devotion to the divine 'with attributes': a God who takes form, bears a name and a story, and can be pictured, dressed, fed and adored in an image — Rama, Krishna, Shiva, Durga. The distinction is older than the devotional movements themselves and comes out of Vedanta, where nirguna Brahman, reality without qualities, is set beside saguna Brahman or Ishvara, the same reality made accessible to worship. In the medieval centuries the nirguna position was carried by the sants: Kabir, whose verses survive in the Bijak, the Kabir Granthavali and the Adi Granth; Guru Nanak, who taught a formless creator summed up in the words Ik Onkar; Ravidas; Dadu Dayal; and others who wrote in the spoken languages of northern India, drew on both Vaishnava devotion and Nathpanthi yoga alongside Sufi ideas, and were sharply critical of caste, ritual and the authority of the Sanskrit scriptures. Note, so that the material is not learnt too neatly, that the two categories cut across sectarian lines rather than aligning with them: Kabir's 'Rama' is a Vaishnava name used in a formless sense, the Shaiva tradition has both image worship and strongly aniconic and philosophical strands, and the same poet may sound saguna in one composition and nirguna in another. The four phrases the booklet prints belong to different levels of that vocabulary — two of them name sectarian traditions, one names a mode of worship and one describes a conception of the divine — and that mixture is worth noticing when reading any question on this topic.

The bhakti traditions of medieval India are usually taught along two axes, and this question touches the first of them. The first axis is how the divine is conceived: saguna, with attributes and form, and nirguna, without them. Saguna devotion attaches to a named deity with a mythology and an image — the Rama of Tulsidas, the Krishna of Surdas, Mirabai, Chaitanya and Vallabhacharya, the Vitthal of the Varkari poets Jnaneshwar, Namdev, Eknath and Tukaram — and its practice includes darshan, image worship, pilgrimage and festival. Nirguna devotion attaches to a formless absolute and its practice is interior: remembrance of the name, the word of the guru, and songs in the vernacular. The second axis is social. The nirguna sants were largely artisans and men and women of low caste — Kabir a weaver, Ravidas a leather worker, Namdev a tailor, Sena a barber — and their teaching attacked caste hierarchy, ritual specialists and the exclusive claims of Sanskrit learning, while saguna devotion, though also open to all, sat more comfortably with brahminical practice. Both drew on and fed into other currents: the Alvar and Nayanar poets of the Tamil country from the sixth century onwards, the Virashaiva or Lingayat movement of Basavanna in twelfth-century Karnataka, the philosophies of Shankara, Ramanuja, Madhva and Vallabha, and the Sufi silsilas whose emphasis on love, the pir and vernacular song ran parallel to the sants'. Kabir and Nanak are the figures on whom questions about nirguna bhakti almost always turn, and the compositions of both, along with those of Ravidas, Namdev and several Sufi voices, were gathered into the Adi Granth compiled by Guru Arjan in 1604.

Key facts

• 'Nirguna' means without attributes or qualities; 'saguna' means with attributes. The pair describes how the divine is conceived, not which sect a devotee belongs to.
• Nirguna bhakti worships a formless, imageless absolute approached through the guru, the divine name and inner remembrance rather than through image, temple or ritual.
• Saguna bhakti worships the divine in form — Rama, Krishna, Shiva, Devi — with image worship, mythology and incarnation as its natural vocabulary.
• The distinction comes from Vedanta, where nirguna Brahman is reality without qualities and saguna Brahman or Ishvara is the same reality with them.
• The principal nirguna sants of northern India were Kabir, Guru Nanak, Ravidas and Dadu Dayal; the principal saguna poets were Tulsidas, Surdas, Mirabai and Chaitanya.
• Kabir's verses survive in the Bijak, the Kabir Granthavali and the Adi Granth; Guru Nanak's teaching of a formless creator is summed up in the phrase Ik Onkar.
• Many nirguna sants came from artisan and low-caste backgrounds and composed in vernacular languages, attacking caste, ritual and the authority of Sanskrit scripture.
• The Adi Granth, compiled by Guru Arjan in 1604, gathers compositions of the Sikh Gurus together with those of Kabir, Ravidas, Namdev and other sants and Sufis.

Common traps

• Reversing nirguna and saguna. Break the words apart: 'nir' is without, 'sa' is with, and 'guna' is attribute.
• Assuming a devotee's sect settles the question. Shaiva and Vaishnava traditions both contain image worship and formless conceptions, and the sants often used Vaishnava names for a formless God.
• Treating the bhakti movement as a single organisation with a founder. It is a set of loosely connected regional traditions spread across many centuries.
• Confusing bhakti with the nineteenth-century reform movements. The social criticism is comparable, but the periods and the causes are not.
• Assuming every low-caste sant was nirguna and every brahmin poet saguna; the correspondence is a tendency, not a rule.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following saints is associated with the nirguna tradition of bhakti ?

  • (a)Tulsidas
  • (b)Surdas
  • (c)Kabir
  • (d)Mirabai

  Answer(c) Kabir

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The compositions of Kabir, Ravidas, Namdev and the Sikh Gurus were compiled in 1604 into which one of the following ?

  • (a)The Bijak
  • (b)The Adi Granth
  • (c)The Sursagar
  • (d)The Ramcharitmanas

  Answer(b) The Adi Granth