What are they talking about? Bhakt, bhakti, and brickbats

If you think you know what bhakti means, you obviously have no idea that someone on urban dictionary defines it as ‘the act of falling asleep or randomly leaving instant messenger without an away message and not returning for a few hours. The act of asking too my hypothetical questions’ and if you did that you have probably pulled a bhakti! As I read this I said – What? I don’t believe this. But then I read on and came across another absolute stunner on this word that thought bhakti was ‘an extraordinary, unique feature due to the over-growth of hair above the eye, that is, the eyebrow. Bhakti is pronounced: Back-t’ and used the word in a couple of sentences:
‘Yo bitch is tha’ a bhakti on yo face?!’
‘Dang bitch u need to shave that bhakti off yo face!’

The world obviously needs to know more on bhakts and bhakti… or they would enter the future believing that Bhakti is ‘one who wears real underwears time to time’ and this happens to be the third absurd definition of the word that lovingly embraces devotion. A misinterpreted slang meaning for any word is possibly the most devastating brickbat hurled towards it. Bhakti is definitely a victim of brickbats today in India… and many believe this is because of the word so closely related to bhakt.

A bhakt is a religious devotee or a worshipper and the word a charmingly sublime one that is indicative of a person being a religious disciple. It is sometime in 2010 that the term Modi-bhakt was shortened to leave bhakt with all its currently popular innuendoes. Some believe that it was Digvijay Singh (then Gen Secretary of Indian National Congress) who used it first to point towards those who support Narendra Modi. This beautiful word, along with bhakti, has now crossed over from the shores of poetic expressions of the bhakti age in India to a region where the liberal elite fling it mercilessly as an insult. There is a section on the social media who firmly believe that when one continues to support a person or an ideology even after having run short of any logical arguments, one qualifies to be a bhakt who is capable of just one form of bhakti, that is, sycophancy. Someone on Quora wrote that a ‘bhakt is a blind follower who firmly believes that his/her leader/party is always right. They are people who are more loyal to the King than the King himself.’ They probably forget that political leaders, both good, bad, and ugly, have had their own coterie of bhakts… and this includes Indira Gandhi.

Talking of politics, the word bhakt has now been a part of a barrage of puns and jokes going viral on the social media… one of the popular one being the re-definition of BJP as Bhakt Jumla Party. Tahira Nasrin on twitter defines the word in her own way: ‘Logic kills itself automatically when a Bhakt calls himself an intellectual.’ I have come across a quote by Chetan Bhagat calling Hindutva bhakts ‘frustrated men who need to get girlfriends’ and then adding that right-wing trolls must ‘get English lessons, get globalised and get a date’. There are, of course, thousands of absolutely tactless definitions of both bhakt and bhakti all over the territory of the netizens and most are linked to the current political skirmishes going on in the country.

These are times when terms like bhakti movement or bhakti poetry will possibly attract snide remarks linked to politics and political movements and not references to poetry bhakts of the bhakti movement like Kabir Saheb Namdev, Pipa, Ravidas, Beni, Bhikhan, Dhanna, Jayadeva, Parmanand, Sadhana, Sain, Surdas, Trilochan, and the fascinating one Muslim bhagat the Sufi saint Farid. Bhakti isn’t just about devotion and self-surrender but also revolutionary ideas that promoted thoughts of no distinction of different castes, higher or low, talked about fundamental unity of all religions, and condemned rituals, idol worship and any other activity that bordered on blind faith.

People have forgotten that doing something with total awareness is bhakti. There is an interesting short tale that I read on some website on the bhakti movement and it mentioned the Krishna bhakt poetess Meerabai so deeply in love with her deity that on coming across a beggar she would prefer to give him food than hurl angry words at the social system of that time. She believed that even the appearance of a beggar was a dramatic ploy used by God to invoke within her a feeling of compassion and to awaken within her the spirit to give.

Even if we want to step beyond the devotion and worship perimeter for both bhakt and bhakti, there are far better options than strangling these words by brickbats aimed at politics-language tie-ups. Look at the number of people in love with reading, writing, art, or even fitness or the way men have begun taking an interest in housework and the kitchen… they are all the new-age bhakts of the dawn of a mindset that is way different from the one that has gone on for the past decades (maybe a few centuries) that have shamelessly promoted every evil from male domination to women damnation!

A bhakt is not a troll and bhakti isn’t fake nor something to be ashamed of… and so it is time to coin an absolutely new word dedicated to the political relationship that is both uncritical and incapable to suggesting creative and socially acceptable solutions. Some may point towards words like ‘leftist’ and ‘liberal’ and demand that they deserve to be given a respite or a break from all the garbage flung on them… well, the way I see words, each of them deserves respect and instead of having a new dictionary of abusive expressions we had better change our own expression fads. This also means that India must remain as secular as it has been and there is no need to try and become a ‘Hindu’ Pakistan, as someone had tweeted some time back.

References:

https://scroll.in/article/740276/chetan-bhagat-says-hindutva-bhakts-are-frustrated-men-who-need-to-get-girlfriends

https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/comment/bhakts-and-their-reality-840909.html

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Note: This post is a part of a series of articles written on news and views that have made it to the mainstream media. The post is a part of the #BlogchatterA2Z edition 2021.

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Arvind Passey
02 April 2021