Devotion as a social disruptor

Each year, during Panguni Uthiram in the Tamil months of March and April, the streets around Kapaleeswarar Temple in Mylapore come alive for the Arubathu Moovar festival in Chennai.

- SUDHA G TILAK

Rebellion in Verse: Resistance and Devotion in the Tamil Bhakti Movement by Raghavan Srinivasan Published by Penguin 300 pages, ₹799

Sixty-three bronze idols representing the Saiva Nayanmars are taken out in procession, gleaming with silk, flowers and jewels. As a child perched on my father’s shoulders, I remember less the meaning of the festival and more the heat, the noise, the press of bodies, and the towering wooden chariot carrying a resplendent Siva. The saints were distant, magnificent figures, part of a grand religious spectacle.

Raghavan Srinivasan’s Rebellion in Verse: Resistance and Devotion in the Tamil Bhakti Movement offers something very different from that sensory overload. It is a quiet, thoughtful companion that brings the Nayanmars and their Vaishnava counterparts, the Alwars closer, not as statues or processional icons but as living poets who reshaped faith, language and society through their songs.

The book’s central argument is clear and compelling: The Tamil Bhakti movement was not just about personal devotion. It was also an act of resistance. Through poetry and music, Bhakti saints challenged rigid caste hierarchies, questioned religious authority, and made devotion available to everyone, regardless of birth or status. Srinivasan shows us that these poets were not passive mystics but active social voices, using verse as a way to speak back to power.