Bhakti and Sufi Movement in India

Bhakti as a religious concept means devotional surrender to a personally conceived supreme God for attaining salvation. The origin of this doctrine has been traced to both the Brahmanical and Buddhist traditions of ancient India and to various scriptures such as the Gita. But it was for the first time in South India between the 7th and the 10th century that bhakti emerged from a mere religious doctrine into a popular movement based on religious equality and broad-based social participation. The movement which was spearheaded by popular saint-poets reached its apex in the 10th century after which it began to decline. However, it was revamped as a philosophical and ideological movement by a series of ambulatory scholars or acharyas, beginning with Ramanuja in the 11th century. The establishment of the Sultanate of Delhi coincided with many widespread socio-religious movements in various parts of the country drawing upon the concepts of bhakti. These movements have been perceived as revival of the older South Indian bhakti movement. But each one of these later movements had a historical context of its own and its own peculiarities.