Mathew Andrews’ talk: The Bhakti Movement was a force that transformed India. It allowed regular people, who had been told they needed a priest to mediate their relationship with God, to explore their own spirituality. Bhakti poets and singers cried out in joy and longing, sharing their hearts’ pain and aspiration for unity with the Divine Beloved. The voices of the Tamil Nayanars and Alvars, the bhakti poet-saints of Jagannath in Orissa, Tulsi Das, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, Mirabai, and others gave regular people an opening and an outlet for the voices of their own hearts. These voices were inspired by the Sufi saints like Kabir, Rumi, and Hafiz as Islam mingled with the vedic and indigenous traditions of the land. In this session we will trace the expansion of the Bhakti Movement, explore a few renowned compositions, and seek to cultivate and experience together the mood of reverence, devotion, and love for the One Creator that is bhakti.

Sehdev Kumar’s talk: The great Indian poet-sage Sri Aurobindo called Bhakti–‘Love and Ananda’–as “the Last Word of Being, the Secret of Secrets, the Mystery of Mysteries”.  “There is nothing”, he said, “which is beyond the reach of a God-Lover, a ‘Lover of God’. Or is denied to him, for he is the favourite of the Divine Lover and the Self of the Beloved.”

In this presentation, in an attempt to communicate what is said to be truly ‘incommunicable’, Professor Sehdev Kumar takes us to a pilgrimage of the psyche through words and metaphors of three of India’s great Bhakti poets over the past five hundred years–Mira, Kabir and Nanak– in their original songs and verses, and in his trans-creations in English.