How mystic poets Baba Farid, Namdeo, Kabir, and Rahim fostered secular sentiments in their poetry

Humans have always had a remarkable diversity of religious experiences. Across time and cultures, spiritual practices – whether animistic, mystical, ritualistic, or ascetic – owe much to a common human desire to connect with something greater than oneself. These practices include prayer, fasting, sacrifice, self-mortification, festivals, pilgrimage, meditation, art, music, and dance. Whatever the form, such quests for meaning, transcendence, and connection reflect a universal human impulse.

Among these diverse expressions of spirituality, mysticism is prominent in many world religions, particularly in Hinduism (Bhakti), Islam (Sufism), Judaism (Kabbalah), and Eastern Christianity. It has especially thrived in regions from the Middle East to the Indian subcontinent. Scholar and philosopher Majid Fakhry describes mysticism as rooted “in the original matrix of religious experience” – born from an intense awareness of God and the realisation of one’s insignificance without God. This leads the mystic towards a central goal: the dissolution of the ego (fana) and total surrender to God. By shedding their egoistic self and discovering the divine presence within, mystics strive for greater self-realisation. In this transformation, writes Fakhry, “man becomes dead unto himself and alive unto God.”

Scholars trace the origins of both Sufism and Bhakti to the latter half of the first millennium AD. Both mystic traditions have often coexisted uneasily with, and at times stood in opposition to, orthodox religious practices within Islam and Hinduism. Orthodox Islam, for example, relies on the Qur’an to prescribe a complete way of life for the entire community, with a universal code of conduct said to be revealed by God Himself. Similarly, orthodox Hinduism is based on the ideology of Brahmanism, its priests and rituals, and the caste system. Orthodox religiosity tends to be dogmatic and intolerant by its very nature. It makes common cause with authoritarian structures and reinforces social hierarchies and patriarchy. Though ostensibly focused on the afterlife, its mullahs and pandits are deeply invested in shaping worldly norms, dogmas, and rituals. Earthly institutions and power are profoundly important to them, over which they even wage violent conflicts.

Mystics approach religion differently. They believe in God but place less emphasis on orthodoxy and religious rule books. They’re not much into scriptures, temples, mosques, mullahs, and pandits. Instead, mystics experience God as a deeply personal and subjective reality. Through love and devotion – at times expressed in moments of ecstatic union – they seek to bridge the gap between themselves and the divine. Mystics find fulfilment not through material pleasures but by letting go of their egoistic self and surrendering to their beloved deity. In contrast to orthodoxy, mysticism promotes a tolerant, pacifist, and inward faith, often marked by a quiet, dreamy detachment from the material world.

Sufism, or Islamic mysticism, first arose in Syria and Iraq around the 8th century. When Arabs from the Arabian Peninsula had brought Islam a century earlier, these lands already had a long tradition of ascetic thought and Eastern Christian monasticism, which emphasized religious poverty, disdain for worldly pleasures, and a deeper realm of virtue beyond mere obedience to the law. Many early converts to Islam, under the surface of their new faith, retained this prior asceticism and detachment. However, what transformed this into mysticism was something radical: an intense, unashamed love of God. This shift has been symbolically attributed to Rabi’ah al-Adawiyah (d. 801), a woman from Basra, who was among the first known to articulate the idea of a selfless love for God. In one of her famous prayers, she said (translation by AJ Arberry):

“O God, if I worship Thee for fear of Hell, burn me in Hell, and if I worship Thee in hope of Paradise, exclude me from Paradise; but if I worship Thee for Thy own sake, grudge me not Thy everlasting beauty.”

Such views were revolutionary and clashed with orthodox Islamic beliefs. For the orthodox, there was no God but Allah, and reverence, piety, awe and fear were the proper attitudes towards Him. Approaching God with love and intimacy seemed heretical. And so the Sufi goal of directly encountering God, bypassing the Prophet and the Qur’an, angered orthodox Muslims. Early Sufis often had to pretend madness to avoid persecution. The Persian Sufi Mansour al-Hallaj, who proclaimed, “I am the truth”, and “the important thing is to proceed seven times around the Kaaba of one’s heart”, was executed for his “heretical” words by the Abbasid court. A verse attributed to him goes:

I saw my Lord with the eye of the heart.
I asked, “Who are You?”
He replied, “You.”

Sufi thought thus spread slowly at first, in small circles led by sheikhs, or mystical teachers, such as al-Muhasibi of Iraq, Dhul-Nun al-Misri of Egypt, and Bayazid Bastami of Iran. Notably, early Sufis came from all schools of Islamic law and theology, giving Sufism a cross-sectional appeal. Over time, Sufism came to thrive across the Arab, Persianate and Turkic worlds, producing thinkers like al-Ghazali, Ibn al-Arabi, Jalal ad-Din Rumi, and Hafez.

As Sufism gained broader acceptance, some Sufi scholars sought to anchor their mystical ideas in the Qur’an itself. For instance, Ibn al-Arabi identified numerous mystical concepts in the Qur’an and developed an intricate theosophy by reinterpreting both the Qur’an and the Hadith (the sayings and traditions of the Prophet Muhammad). He claimed that the Prophet was a mystic himself. Al-Arabi saw the world as a product of divine self-reflection that prompted God to manifest himself in the things and phenomena of the universe. This was a pantheistic vision that many Sufis would come to share. He then argued that the path to God involves several stages of spiritual growth—repentance, renunciation, trust in the divine, and perseverance – ultimately leading to spiritual awakening and union with God. Al-Arabi believed in the unity of all religious truths, asserting that all prophets revealed the same reality, and that God does not belong to any one creed exclusive of all others. According to him, different faiths worshipped the same God in different forms. This pluralistic outlook became a defining feature of Sufi thought.

By the 13th century, a time of political instability caused by Mongol invasions, Sufism had become the dominant spiritual force in much of West Asia. Wandering mystics spread Sufi teachings to rural communities, where their faith became more vibrant and less bound by orthodox theology. Sufi brotherhoods, such as the Naqshbandiyya, played a key role in this dissemination. Sufi poets like Rumi used rich metaphors to describe the seeker’s yearning for union with God. Others used Bacchic and erotic imagery to symbolise their mystical experience. Some Sufi orders, or tariqas, used music, song, and dance to achieve spiritual focus, such as the whirling dervishes. Their pirs (holy men) became revered figures among the people. Even the One Thousand and One Nights, compiled in the Abbasid era, abounds with wise and gentle dervishes always interceding on behalf of the underdog.

When trade, conquest, and migration opened new routes to India, Sufism arrived with missionaries and found a welcoming environment. It blended naturally with the Bhakti movement, which too emphasized personal devotion and union with the divine. Many early Sufi masters in India, like Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti of Ajmer, Baba Farid of Punjab, and Nizamuddin Auliya of Delhi, belonged to the Chishti order. Moinuddin Chishti, known as “Gharib Nawaz” or “comforter of the poor,” established the Chishti Sufi order in India. The Chishti tradition of serving free meals to all through communal kitchens, or langars, later became institutionalised in Sikhism but didn’t sway orthodox Hindus, who were mired in taboos of purity/pollution that barred eating with lower-caste Hindus and foreigners – taboos vividly described by the 11th-century Persian traveller Alberuni.

Baba Farid’s poetic compositions in Punjabi elevated the language’s literary status. He urged people to renounce materialism and focus on piety, service, and meditation. Nizamuddin Auliya, known for his deep love for God, saw this love as inseparable from his love for humanity. His spiritual disciple, the poet and musician Amir Khusrau, pioneered the musical traditions of Qawwali and Ghazal, which played a key role in spreading Sufi-inflected Islam across India. Sufi ideas, poetry and music resonated with the lower castes and classes, while also captivating emperors like Akbar and Jahangir. One of the nine gems (navaratnas) of Akbar’s royal court was the poet and scholar Abdul Rahim, who managed to combine his passion for Sufi ideas with military responsibilities. Rahim would gain fame for his dohas (“couplets”), including several in praise of the Hindu gods Rama and Krishna.

The Bhakti Movement began in Tamil Nadu in the 7th–8th centuries AD. It emphasized personal devotion and an emotional connection with a personal deity, as opposed to the ritualistic, caste-based practices of Vedic Brahmanism. Its earliest expressions came from Tamil poet-saints of two key strands of Puranic Hinduism: The Alvars (Vaishnava) and the Nayanars (Shaiva). While some of these figures were Brahmins, many were from lower castes, including untouchables and women. They went from village to village singing in people’s languages and worshipping personal gods – typically older local deities of non-Aryan origin, such as Murugan and Perumal, who had also been reinterpreted as a son of Shiva and a form of Vishnu, the central deities of Puranic Hinduism.

These Bhakti thinkers rejected the idea that only Brahmins could mediate between people and the divine. They asserted that anyone, regardless of birth or social status, could connect with God through devotion. They created a grassroots movement that sometimes mocked the hierarchical systems of caste and gender but didn’t collectively organise or agitate to dismantle them. Instead, Bhakti fostered an alternative system and social vision, where people of all castes, classes and genders were welcome. This inclusivity echoed the Shramana traditions of Buddhism and Jainism, with which Bhakti often competed for patrons and followers, often successfully. In fact, the rise of Bhakti contributed to the decline of Buddhism and Jainism in the subcontinent, especially in South India.

The concept of bhakti dates back to much older Sanskrit religious texts, including the Bhagavad Gita (300 BC–100 AD), in which the bhakti marg advocates surrender and devotion to a supreme deity as one of the three paths to spiritual salvation. However, any connection between this form of philosophical bhakti and the later Bhakti movement in Tamil Nadu is tenuous. In the Gita, the object of bhakti is a universal supreme deity within a Brahmanical framework, while the Tamil Bhakti movement focuses on a more emotional, expressive, and egalitarian devotion to a local or personal deity. Rather than drawing from the Gita, the Tamil Bhakti movement is rooted in distinct, intense folk sentiments, which, as historian Wendy Doniger notes, emphasise a more personal confrontation with the divine, involving a passionate need for physical and visual presence, and creating a deep emotional connection.

However, as the early Bhakti movement became a social force to reckon with, the Brahmanical establishment got more involved and created a theological framework around it. This was best articulated in the 10th-century Sanskrit text, the Bhagavata Purana, which integrated Bhakti notions about the nature of the divine – such as nirguna (formless) and saguna (with form) – with Vedantic concepts of nondualism, dualism, Brahman and Atman, wrapping it around a seductive cosmology, mythology, and other cultural stories. From this point on, Bhakti saints varied in their attitudes towards the hierarchical Brahmanical order, with some making peace with it and others rejecting or mocking it.

Doniger notes that the Bhakti movement “imagined a god who combined the awesome powers of a supreme deity with the compassion of an intimate friend". Its early poet-saints were part of a cultural milieu teeming with many alternative spiritual ideas, including Tantrism, which seamlessly integrated older ideas of fertility and sexuality with spiritual beliefs, influencing all Puranic sects and producing amorous and erotic art on temple walls across India. Early Bhakti poetry, drawing from this milieu, was therefore also often sensual and erotic, as for instance this “devotional” verse to Vishnu by Andal, the only female among the twelve Alvar poet-saints (translator unknown):

My life will be spared
Only if he comes to stay with me for one night.
If he enters me,
Leaving the imprint of his saffron paste upon my breasts.
Mixing, churning, maddening me inside,
Gathering my swollen ripeness,
Spilling nectar,
As my body and blood burst into flower.

From Tamil Nadu, the Bhakti movement spread north and inspired a great devotional awakening across India, with regional variants. In the early second millennium, it produced notable Brahmin theologians of Bhakti, such as Ramanuja and Madhvacharya. In the 12th century, Bhakti’s surge in Karnataka was led by Basavanna, a Brahmin who rejected caste and gender hierarchies, became a Shaivaite mystic, and founded the Lingayat sect. Other key Bhakti figures from Karnataka include Akka Mahadevi, Kanaka Dasa, and Purandara Dasa, considered the father of Carnatic music. In Odisha, a Bhakti movement grew around Lord Jagannath in the 12th century. A local mendicant, Jayadeva, wrote Gita Govinda, an epic poem on the love of Krishna and Radha, further fueling Krishna Bhakti in the region. In the ensuing centuries, mysticism spread and thrived elsewhere though figures like Chaitanya Mahaprabhu in Bengal; Janabai, Namdeo, Tukaram and Eknath in Maharashtra; Surdas in Braj; Sankardev in Assam; Ramananda, Tulsidas, Ravidas and Kabir in Banaras; Mirabai in Rajasthan; Guru Nanak in Punjab; and others.

This rising tide of Sufism and Bhakti had decidedly mixed effects. On the one hand, mystical faiths promoted social equality and religious tolerance, making the religious sphere more syncretic, inclusive and humane. They inclined people to pursue their own ways with a “live and let live” attitude that fostered pluralism and peace. They furthered beautiful art, literature, and devotional music. On the other hand, mystical worldviews lacked interest in intellectual inquiry and scientific and rational approaches to understanding the world. Both Sufi and Bhakti movements became prone to harmful superstitions, miracle-mongering, and deifying saints and tombs. Mystical devotion sometimes reinforced loyalty to monarchs who claimed divine lineage and, conveniently, supported these movements. Detractors therefore claim that in popular forms, Sufism and Bhakti also had a “narcotic effect” on the masses.

During the centuries of Indo-Muslim rule, religious fusion thrived among the common people. Sufi Islam significantly influenced many Bhakti saints in North India, particularly those of the nirguna tradition, which emphasises a formless, universal concept of God. Mystic thinkers like Kabir, Ravidas, and Guru Nanak blended Bhakti and Sufi ideas, promoting the idea of a universal God and rejecting rigid religious boundaries. Such ideas – along with actual compositions of many poet-saints – would later become the foundation of Sikhism’s central scripture, the Guru Granth Sahib.

Many ordinary Hindus and Muslims began flocking to the same saints, fakirs and pilgrimage sites, embracing a syncretic religiosity that featured captivating song, dance, music and religious theatre. Historian Romila Thapar notes that wandering “gurus, pirs and sants” of all backgrounds preached “a religious mélange that defied identification with a particular religion”. The exchange of ideas went both ways, with Hindu aesthetics of rasa (emotional flavour) and erotic expression enriching Sufi depictions of divine love. Shared customs, rituals, festivals, and folk traditions across religious communities forged a cultural ethos that has been called the Ganga-Jamuni Tehzeeb.

These fluid and fruitful exchanges may seem like distant echoes in today’s India, where competition and materialistic greed have risen sharply, and religious identities have grown more rigid and narrow, leading to polarized communities and alienated minorities. Yet, this makes mystic religiosity and its poetry all the more relevant and promising—as a counterbalancing source of spiritual inspiration, inner strength, and shared humanity. Its core principles of love, unity, and pluralism can increase social harmony and cooperation. Mystical faith may be a stronger ally than orthodox religion in building a secular democracy. Its emphasis on simplicity and contentment also resonates with contemporary movements for minimalism and sustainability. In our increasingly intolerant and conflict-ridden world, mystical poetry’s focus on self-reflection and love, especially love for fellow humans, is more relevant than ever.

In this volume, Pavitra Mohan presents his meticulous translations of selected verses from four renowned mystic poet-saints of India: Baba Farid, Namdeo, Kabir and Rahim. Between them they represent the broad spectrum of mystical traditions of India: Sufism in Baba Farid, Bhakti in Namdeo, and the fusion of the two traditions in Kabir and Rahim. Along with Pavitra’s brief insights into their lives and times, and complemented by Ankita Parashar’s charming illustrations, the reader is invited to enjoy some of the most exquisite examples of poetic wisdom from India’s rich mystical tradition.

This essay serves as the foreword to When I See, I Sing, a new collection of poetry by four mystical poets and thinkers of medieval India: Baba Farid, Namdeo, Kabir, and Rahim, translated by Pavitra Mohan and illustrated by Ankita Parashar, Maple Press.