Substantial and Substantive Corporeality in the Body Discourses of Bhakti Poets

This paper studies the representation of human corporeal reality in the discourses of selected Bhakti poets of the late medieval period in India. Considering the historical background of the Bhakti movement and contemporary cultural milieu in which these mystic poets lived, their unique appropriation of the ancient concept of body is reviewed as revolutionary. The focus of the study is the Kabir Bijak, Surdas’s Vinay-Patrika, and Tulsidas’s Vinay-Patrika, wherein they look at and beyond the organic corporeality and encounter human body not as a socially, religiously, economically stamped noble body or lowly body; male body or female body, but a human body. This paper explores how, like existential phenomenologists, these poet/singers decode the material reality of human beings and link it to the highest goal of achieving Moksha (liberation from the cycle of birth-death) by making body a vulnerable but essential instrument towards spiritual awakening. The paper also reflects upon how these poets have suggested a middle path of absolute devotion to God while performing all earthly duties, seek spiritual enlightenment and avoid the extremities of asceticism and hedonism.