10 Hawley John - 1984 - Bhakti and Music

The Music in Faith and Morality
Author(s): John Stratton Hawley

Source: Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 52, No. 2 (Jun., 1984), pp. 243-
262
Published by: Oxford University Press
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Journal of the American Academy of Religion, LII/2
THE MUSIC IN FAITH AND MORALITY
JOHN STRATTON HAWLEY
Many of the greatest achievements of Western music are also monu-

ments of the Christian faith: Bach's cantatas and passions, Brahms' and
Mozart's requiems, masses from Machaud to Stravinsky, and much else.
But in the daily lives of most Westerners, music seems to belong in quite
a different category from the life of faith, and is even more distant from
the realm of ethics. These divisions in the cultural universe depend upon
assumptions we imbibe at an early age. In my own childhood, for exam-
ple, it did not take many years of churchgoing to sense that music was
tolerated as a sort of amusing stepchild in the family of religion. The
bond between faith and morality was clear enough, for the pulpits of the
Presbyterian and Congregationalist churches in which I was tutored
often thundered with moral exhortation; but those same pulpits seemed
to stand at a safe distance from the organ and choir. Often, in fact, a
great aisle ran down the center of the sanctuary as if to symbolize the
bifurcation, with the preacher on one side and the choir on the other.
The two rarely called to one another in happy antiphon; sometimes, in
fact, they clashed.
In this essay I would like to investigate a tradition in which such a
bifurcation between music on the one hand and faith and morality on
the other does not exist. This is a tradition in which people are accus-
tomed to hearing preachers sing, so they might well be shocked to find
that in Protestant churches preachers and choirmasters frequently quar-
rel, or to learn that when such disputes erupt, it is inevitably the
preacher who has the power to fire the musician, never the other way
around. And they would be puzzled to find that all our Wesleyan Uni-
versities are dedicated to the memory of John Wesley rather than his
musical brother Charles, or that so many religious buildings bear
Luther's name, and none Bach's. For theirs is a heritage in which many
of the great saints are singers, and the values for which they stand are
not merely moral and doctrinal ones but musical ones as well.
John Stratton Hawley is Professor of Asian Languages and Literature at the University of
Washington, where he teaches Hindi and Comparative Religion. His books include At
Play with Krishna (Princeton, 1981), Krishna, the Butter Thief (Princeton, 1983), and
Sfr Diis: Poet, Singer, Saint (Washington, 1984).
244 Journal of the American Academy of Religion
The tradition of which I am speaking is called bhakti. It is the devo-

tional strand in Hinduism and has been one of its most important facets
for at least a millennium. Our purpose here will be to see how it is that
adherents of bhakti find music so integrally related to faith and morality.
We will do so by considering aspects of the life and words of some of the
most important musically inclined bhakti saints of North India: S&r Dds,
Mira Bdi, Narasi Mehtd, and Pipd Dds. Each of these singer-saints lived
sometime in the sixteenth or seventeenth century; each of their life sto-
ries early on became the matter of some celebration; and each of them
continues to be remembered and praised in the present day. By examin-
ing poems of Stir Ds in the first section of the paper, we will lay bare
one man's view of the intimate tie between music and faith. And by
highlighting motifs in the earliest hagiographical accounts of the lives of
Mira, Narasi, and Pipd in the second section, we will show how even the
strictly ethical aspect of the religious life is understood as having funda-
mentally aesthetic, and even specifically musical, connotations.
SUR DAS: MUSIC IN THE LIFE OF FAITH
The word bhakti is usually translated "devotion" or "lovi

tion," and indicates a style of religion in which an intense relati
God and, by extension, to others who share such a relation is pa
"Relation" is the proper term, for bhakti means devotion not in
of cool, measured veneration, but as active participation:
bhakti derives from a Sanskrit root meaning "to share."1
Several etymologically related terms cluster around this cent
cept. One is bhagavan, the person who "shares out" whatever b
are to be conferred upon those with whom a relationship has be
lished. In modern Indian vernacular languages such as Hindi, th
the term bhagavan has come to mean simply "God." The rec
this sharing action, at the other pole of the relational magnetism
bhakta: the devotee, the religious person. These three term
bhagavan, bhakta-are nowadays often mentioned in works intr
Hinduism to Western readers. What has been less brought to t
however, is a final permutation on the Sanskrit root bhaj that i
as important to the religious vocabulary of modern Hindus as th
This is the term bhajan (Sanskrit bhajana), which is in form th
noun that implies the doing of bhakti and which therefore com
circle between the divine bhagavan and the bhaktas of this wor
1 An extended consideration of the term bhakti, with its various meanings an

is provided in Dhavamony: 11-44. A fine bibliographical introduction to the bh
ment, especially in North and West India, is presented by Zelliot; Hardy's stud
ments it with extensive materials from the South. The work to which first recourse has
often been taken to get a sense of the whole is that of Raghavan.
Hawley: Music in Faith and Morality 245
most significant that this fourth term in the family of words characteri
ing bhakti has a distinctly musical connotation, for bhajan means devo
tional song, the act of singing to God.
It is in a specifically musical context, then, that the circle of believer
comes to be completed, or rather, charged with life. Indeed, the associatio
between bhakti and bhajan is sometimes so close that it is virtually impossi-
ble to distinguish the two. If the religions of Mediterranean origin hav
tended to assume a close connection between the Word of God and the
realm of speech-words-then Hindus have assumed with equal force that
the act of making contact with God and participating in a divine interac-
tion has something intrinsically to do with the realm of song.
This can be nicely illustrated in some of the compositions of S&r Dds,
one of the foremost voices of the bhakti movement in North India. Sir,
who probably lived during the sixteenth century, is the blind poet of the
Hindi language family, and one of its greatest figures. The Sfsr Sdgar
("Sir's Ocean") attributed to him contains in the printed version cur-
rently standard some five thousand poems addressed to Krishna and
includes some of the best known poems in the language. Older collec-
tions of Sir's poems are much smaller, but the size of the modern Sfsr
Sigar indicates the dimensions of the poet's reputation: over the cen-
turies poets attributed some of their finest compositions to him and
thereby added steadily to the size of "his" corpus.2
We familiarly speak of Sir and the other later "Sfrs" as poets, but
they were no more poets than singers. Undoubtedly most of the poems
or songs in the Sofr Sigar were first sung, and only subsequently commit-
ted to writing. Manuscripts of the Siir Sdigar testify to this fact by assign-
ing to the great majority of poems a ranga, a musical mode in which it is
to be sung. These may differ from manuscript to manuscript for a given
poem, but the important thing is that some minimal musical notation is
provided for each. A reading of both the more recent and the older
poems of the S~ir Sdgar makes it plain that this musical environment was
understood to be no incidental matter. For Sir-if we may take the
poems recorded before about A.D. 1700 as being worthy of the poet's
own name-the life of faith (bhakti) was a life of song (bhajan).3 And
2 For a general introduction to the hagiography and poetry of Stir Dis, see Hawley
(1984). On development of the Sifr Sdgar, see Bryant (1980, 1983, and forthcoming) and
Hawley (1979:64-72; 1983:99-177).
3 The distinction between poems included in extant manuscripts of the Sor Sfagar whose
colophons date them to vikram 1763 (A.D. 1707) or before and those that come afterward
as constituting the "earlier" and the "later" Sifr Sagar is, of course, an arbitrary one. But it
is useful in pointing to characteristic shifts of perspective between earlier and later ver-
sions of the Sofr Sagar. Individual poems occurring in manuscripts of the Sofr Sagar will
here be cited according to the number to which they are assigned in the standard Ndgari-
pracdrini SabhM edition, by means of the prefix "S." This should not be taken to imply that
not just for professional singers, but for all to whom he addressed
himself-all who care to establish a relation with Krishna, all who care
about salvation.
Normally Str was so busy singing to and about Krishna from the point
of view of one of the characters in the god's dramatic world that one can
only infer his convictions about what was religiously incumbent upon peo-
ple living in this world. But there is one group of songs in the Sfir Sagar in
which the poet speaks in what seems to be his own voice. In these songs,
usually grouped under the heading of vinaya ("petitions"), much comes
clear about Str's understanding of the life of faith. Here he proclaims that
bhagavant bhajan, "singing to the Lord," has the power to cut through the
cycle of death and rebirth. Without it life is in disarray.
This is a matter of considerable emphasis. Sor seems skeptical about
some of the other arts, which he regards as likely to distract from the
religious search rather than contribute to it: dance and various forms of
theater are sometimes criticized in this way. But in music he has
supreme confidence. In the current Nagaripracdrini SabhM edition of the
Sfr Sagar no fewer than sixteen of the two-hundred-odd poems in the
vinaya section conclude their messages of admonition with the expres-
sion sfir das bhagavant bhajan binu, "Sir Dds says, unless one sings to
the Lord,"4 and this phrase invariably introduces mention of some form
of perdition that will ensue in the absence of divine song. Though for-
mulaic phrases are rarer in the older layers of the Sfir Sligar than in the
more recent, there too this expression is used on multiple occasions, and
similar phrases expressing the same thought are frequent.5 Here is an
example of an early poem that ends in this manner (S 357):
Unless we love the Lord we're like dogs and pigs,

Like meat-eating owls and vultures and cranes:
such are the animal bodies we bear.
Like lynxes we are, like a mongoose or fox-
they all live in homes just like ours;
All have their houses, their wives and sons-
what makes us better than they?
the manuscript readings are necessarily replicated in the printed text; it is merely the
handiest form of reference. Information about disparities between the Sabha text and the
relevant manuscripts can be found in "Notes on the Translations," Hawley, 1984. The
abbreviations employed for manuscripts are explained in Hawley, 1983:102-3 and 1984
"Manuscripts and Editions."
4 S 34.10, 35.12, 37.10, 58.6, 65.8, 79.8, 80.4, 86.12, 303.8, 317.6, 323.6, 324.8, 326.8,
329.8, 331.8, and 357.6. Variants include sir das prabhu tumhare bhajan binu (S 41.6),
sir sri gobind bhajan binu (309.8), kahat sfir bhagavant bhajan binu (335.6), etc. Similar
sentiments are echoed in other texts, as for example in the Bhaktamnal's description of the
mission of Kabir, jog jagya brat dan bhajan binu tucch dikhayo ("He showed that yoga,
sacrifices, religious vows, and acts of charity are useless without bhajan," Nabhdji: 479).
5 S 41.6 in U1, 326.8, 335.6, and 357.6. Cf. S 309.8, 323.6, and 324.8, all of which come
into manuscripts of the SfIr Silgar in the eighteenth century.
To fill their bellies they kill living beings

and feed on pleasures for which no one should yearn.
Sir says, unless we sing to the Lord,
we're camels and asses-that's what we are.
This poem is especially interesting because in its manuscript versions

it includes both the words bhakti (or rather its Western Hindi form bha-
gati) and bhajan. It is the opening line that contains the mention of
bhakti per se. "Without bhakti," it begins-"unless we love the Lord"-
and one quickly sees what follows. But it ends by emphasizing song
(bhajan) in similar terms--"unless we sing to the Lord"-and couples to
a lapse of song the same dire consequences that follow from losing faith.
One must conclude that the poet felt very strongly about the connection
between devotion and song. To him it seemed that some combination of
praise and song was precisely what made us human and distinguished us
from the lower species. Surely we have not earned our exalted position
by means of our social interests, as the poem makes clear, for these the
animals share. If there is a society that sets us apart from the beasts, it is
the divine society that has music as its medium.
Why is music so crucial to Stir's vision of the life of faith? The key
lies, I believe, in the well known mnemonic powers of singing. Even in
our time, when so much of popular musical culture has relied on rhyth-
mic pulse and left melody and lyrics to fend for themselves, the adver-
tising industry keeps us aware of music's power to aid memory. The
jingle lives on in our television commercials because there is little
defense against its power to imprint a message on the mind.
In traditional societies, of course, the connection between song and
memory was much more widely acknowledged. Hence in the vocabulary
of Str and other poets of his period one sometimes finds that the distinc-
tion between song and memory is all but collapsed.6 When Str and his
compeers encourage their audiences to "remember the name" of God
(nlim sumiran, S 17.8) or "remember Hari" (i.e., Krishna: hari sumiran,
S 52.1, 59.6), these admonitions have approximately the same force as
the command to sing to the Lord. The reason is that it was in the context
of singing that God's name was, in fact, remembered.
One common medium through which song was enlisted to stimulate
and focus the memory was chant, and several of the major religious
voices of Sur's era recommended it in unhesitating terms. The Bengali
ecstatic Caitanya
"chanting dedicated
the name" his life
of God (Hein, to the practice
1976:15-32), and the of nim
great sam.kirtan,
Hindi
6 It is worth noting that the structure classically given to the most basic components of
scripture by Hindus is generated out of a distinction between that which has been heard
(sruti) and that which is remembered (smrti), which places the present discussion in a
somewhat different perspective. On this distinction as it relates to the sacredness of music
within Hinduism, see Wulff: 161-62.
poet Tulsi Das, though not so exclusive in his attention, was scarcely less
convinced of the benefits accruing to those who remembered God's
name in this way (Allchin: 128-29, 137-38). Sir, however, went a step
further. While he did not actually criticize the use of pitch to strengthen
incantational formulae such as those repeated by Caitanya and Tulsi
Das, one finds them totally absent in his poetry. Later strata of the Sfir
Silgar incorporate them; various versions of the injunction hari hari hari
hari sumiran karau ("remember Hari, Hari, Hari, Hari") occur on
numerous occasions in the more recent levels of the Sfir Silgar. But they
are nowhere to be found in the more venerable poems. Evidently Str
did acknowledge the salvific power that attaches to the name of God,
particularly as ram n~am, "the name of Ram," but he avoided ever using
it in mantra-like fashion. Perhaps he was anxious to avoid the potentially
dulling effect that chant can have on an active memory.7
Sar prefers to use his songs to more discursive and thence performa-
tive ends. He is much fonder of drawing attention to divine titles that
have substantive content than he is of repeating the sheer names of God
as such. When, for example, he refers to the title patit pavan, which
means "savior of the fallen," it is with the intent of calling into being the
aspect of Krishna's character that earned him the title in the first place.
Sur's song serves not only to awaken his own and his hearers' memory
about this divine property, but to call Krishna to the bar to defend his
reputation. It is genuinely performative utterance. A line may do the
trick, as in the following (S 131.2):
Notorious me, a sinner (patit) among sinners (patitani);

and you, you're supposed to be the savior (pavan)!
Or Sfr may use an entire song to elaborate the point (S 134):
Today's the showdown, and I'm not going to flinch

From the fight to the end between you and me.
You urbane one, clever one, I've faith in myself,
For I am heir to a sevenfold lineage of failure
and to conquer this fallen one you'll have to go as low.
Now I bare my all: I want you to know
that unless you rescue me you wreck your reputation.
You lack the nerve to try! I have you now-
oh Hari, hard diamond, I have you.
Sir Dds says, I will only rise and go
when you offer me the betel prize and laugh at the show.
Other poems are less pugilistic in tone. They celebrate past evidence
of the efficacy of the title patit pilvan in song and thereby make an
implicit case for the value of singing to the Lord in the present. The
7 A slightly different viewpoint on this subject might appear to be implied in

McGregor: 109. See also, however, McGregor: 111.
following is an example (S 19):
Syam is purely the patron of the poor.

Our Lord is the one who fends for the wretched,
who answers the needs of those whose love is true.
Take Vidur: what high-caste status was his?
Or the hunchback: yet Hari was drawn to her charms.
What sort of splendor graced the Pindava house
that he should volunteer as Arjun's charioteer?
And what storehouse of wealth did Suddmd possess?
No, Hari seeks genuine affection instead.
Sing, then, says Sir, a song to him, the Lord
who burns away the trials of the low.
Finally, there are occasions when Sir gives explicit credit to the
power of song, as in the following poem (S 235):
Songs to Hari work great wonders.

They elevate the lowly of the world,
who celebrate their lofty climb with drums.
To come to the feet of the Lord in song
is enough to make stones float on the sea.
No wonder that even the meanest of the mean-
hunters and harlots-can mount the skies,
Where wander the infinite company of stars,
where the moon and the sun circle around,
And only Dhruv, the polestar, is fixed,
for he as a lad had sung his way to Rdm.
The Vedas are verses, testaments to God-
hearing them makes the saints saintly and wise-
And what about Sir? I sing too.
O Hari, my shelter, I've come for your care.
Here again the poet makes reference to a great backlog of examples that
support his point, using his song to stimulate the memory in the most
direct way, but this time all the examples have to do with the act of
singing itself. Here too the effect is to give force to the call for help that
is being sung out in the present; but this time it is not just a matter of
citing precedent, as one might do in a court of law, but of actually reca-
pitulating that set of precedents in one's own action. For by the time S&r
and his fellow singers have come to the last line of the poem, they have,
in briefest summary, resung the moments of song that succeeded in
establishing a bond with Krishna in the past. In the verses that they have
intoned, S&r and his company have made those songs their songs in an
act of memory facilitated by the act of singing itself.
There are times when Sir seems to go even a step further. Certain of
his songs apparently achieve this communication with God when they
focus not on acts of remembrance but on a history of forgetfulness. In
the example that follows (S 326), the poet details the extent of his own
failure to acknowledge and appeal to the presence of God, and those
who join him in the song, whether by hearing or repeating it, implicitly
do the same.
Time after time I've deceived myself,

Instinctively clawed after sensual carrion
and squandered the jewel of Hari within,
Like a deer in a desert chasing a mirage,
who aggravates his thirst with every assault.
Birth after birth I have acted and acted
and acting, entangled, imprisoned myself
Like the parrot who nurtures the silk-cotton bud,
stalking it constantly, obstinate, vigilant,
Till one fine day he pecks the ripe fruit
and it's empty: like cotton it flies in his face;
Like the monkey the minstrel-magician has leashed
so he'll dance for crumbs at each neighborhood market-
Sfir D~s says, sing to the Lord, sing or else
you're feeding your tail to the viper of time.
Like the very first poem we quoted, this composition is one whose
final line begins with the formula sfr diis bhagavant bhajan binu: "S&r
Dds says, unless you sing to [or of] the Lord"-and, as in our earlier
example, the consequences follow. But here this admonition is preceded
by a great list of instances in which the one who voices it did not give
heed to such warnings, did not sing God's song. What happens is that
the sheer weight of all these offenses eventually forces the poet to sum-
marize, and it is at this point that the familiar formula enters: "Sir Dds
says, sing to the Lord, sing or else ... " This functions as a true sum-
mary in the original because bhagavant bhajan binu means literally
"without singing to the Lord," and that is just what the poet has been
doing all his life, to hear him tell it-not singing to God. Yet by virtue of
the fact that he has just been remembering this massive lapse of memory
and putting it in the context of a song of the Lord, he does succeed in
remembering. Indeed, the very words are there-bhagavant bhajan,
"singing of the Lord." However backhandedly, the poet does "sing to the
Lord," and at just that point, as convention requires, he affixes his oral
signature, as if to underscore the fact. Thus the act of giving expression
in song to one's own sinfulness serves implicitly to transmute this heed-
lessness into true memory of God: the song itself has brought it on.
This is the extreme case. Here it seems that musical reflection has
the power to achieve a realignment of faith even when the moral dimen-
sion of the religious life has gone astray. It is as if, to put it provoca-
tively, bhajan outpaces bhakti. Even if one has not loved the Lord, even
if one has turned one's back on a life of devotion, to lament that fact in
song is in some mysterious way to return to the fold. The poem's own
need to have closure seems miraculously to save the poet. And if to sing
one's sins has such salvific power, by linking the Lord with one's absence
from him, then how much more is this performative power experience
when the song does remember and celebrate what Krishna has done?
THE BHAKTAMAL: MUSIC AND MORALITY
S&r may have felt, particularly when singing in the vinaya genre
that his life had its share of profligacy and indirection. Others, howev
remembered it differently. Traditional accounts of his life present him
a figure whose musical devotion was worthy of the heartiest praise, a
the same can be said for a number of other bhakti saints who are
recalled not only for their musicianship but also because they exemplify
a certain range of virtues. In these life stories it becomes clear that song
is to be understood not only as an antidote to a life of moral and devo-
tional laxity but as a partner, defender, and shaper of the ethical life.
The Bhaktam-l ("Garland of Devotees"), composed by one Nabhdji in
the early or middle seventeenth century, is in all probablity the oldest
surviving hagiographical collection in Hindi; and the most important
commentary on it, the Bhaktirasabodhini of Priya Dds, can be dated
firmly to A.D. 1712.8 In this enlarged Bhaktamal (I will use the term
hereafter to refer, as Hindus often do, to both the original work and its
commentary) certain virtues and features of character are repeatedly
drawn to the fore as Ndbhaji and Priyd Dds tell the stories of people
whose lives were committed to singing of the Lord. In what follows I
will present a few incidents in the lives of these singer-saints that
illustrate such distinctive bhakti virtues and then try to explain why I
believe that the connection between music and the morality they evince
is far from random.
The Bhaktamrl is not a text of musical devotion in the same sense

that Sir Sagar is. Though its verses are sometimes sung in a religious
environment (Hein, 1972:55-69), they are not of the poetic or musical
quality that Stir's are and are not revered as such. But the Bhaktamial's
debt to music is nonetheless real. It is a sort of literary stepchild, in fact,
of the musical anthologies of bhakti poetry that began to be composed in
the sixteenth century in North India.9 Its anthology of lives follows
closely upon those anthologies of song, for a great proportion of the
saints to whom the Bhaktamiil devotes its attention were singers of the
8 Critical work relevant to the Bhaktamiil is is assembled in the studies of Jhi, Gupta,
and Pollet.
9 The earliest among them to have come to light thus far is the Fatehpur collection
devoted primarily to the poetry of Str Dds (A.D. 1582); it contains compositions attributed
to thirty-four other poets as well. Next comes the well known Gurfi Granth Sdhib or Adi
Granth of the Sikh community, dating to A.D. 1604. It too features the hymnody of a
single poet, Ndnak, but includes a range of other poetry as well. Various sectarian anthol-
ogies followed these in the course of time, prominent among which are the Paiievianis of
the Dada Panth.
group whose compositions had earlier been collected. What the Bhak-
tamal did was to record not the compositions of these poet-singers but
their deeds.
A number of characteristic virtues emerge in the hagiographies of
the Bhaktamal, and we shall concentrate on three of the most important:
fearlessness, generosity, and community service. These virtues are
sharply exemplified in the lives of three of the saints the Bhaktamal
presents. Fearlessness is particularly associated with Mird Bdi, the leg-
endary poetess of Rajasthan; generosity shines forth in the life of Narasi
Mehtd, the greatest bhakti poet of Gujarat; and community service finds
its exemplar in Pip~ Dds, yet another poet whose compositions appear in
the early anthologies of bhakti writing in Hindi. Here I will present
highlights from these three ethical profiles; the interested reader is
referred to another essay for greater detail (Hawley: forthcoming).
Of the cardinal bhakti virtues depicted in the Bhaktamal, fearless-
ness is one of the most striking, since it causes its exponents to stand out
boldly from their mundane environments. Mird Bdi is certainly a case in
point. According to the Bhaktamal-and, indeed, all major biographies
of Mird-her all-encompassing devotion to Krishna led her to be com-
pletely unafraid when it came to fending off the expectations that were
thrust on her by the profane world. So engrossed in the divine presence
was she that she refused to acknowledge as her own the husband to
whom her marriage had been arranged.
Instead, she adopted another family, one whose membership was
determined not by birth or marriage but by ascription: the family of
those who joined her in singing Krishna's praises. Ultimately Mird's
worldly family took action against her rebellious behavior. In the most
famous moment of her life, a moment to which reference is often made
in poetry bearing her own name, the king (r~an) into whose family she
had been wed attempted to poison her rather than allow her to continue
consorting with her bhakti companions. Mird took the cup gladly and
without fear, as the Bhaktamal emphasizes on a number of occasions;
and its effect, miraculously, was nil. In fact, the Bhaktamal reports that
her countenance glowed all the more after she had downed the potion,
and she continued to sing to her otherworldly Lord as enthusiastically as
before (Ndbhdji: 712-13, 718-19).
Narasi Mehtd represents another virtue: generosity. This, however, is
generosity of a particular stripe. It can hardly be called philanthropy,
since Narasi possesses nothing that he could give away: he is the poorest
of Brahmins. Yet seemingly because of his indifference to worldly gain,
he always has plenty of wealth to give away. It is as if he operates in an
entirely different economy from that to which his compeers, even and
especially the Brahmins among them, subscribe. Despite the fact that
Narasi has nothing he can call his own, he acts as if God's abundance
were always available. Instead of following the normal practice of trying

to conserve and maximize resources that are understood to be scarce, h
inhabits a world of effortless plenty.
His life is full of moments when this unusual perspective on life works
miraculous effects, but one example must suffice. The Brahmins of Narasi
native city, Junagadh, are accustomed to making considerable profit from
the fact that Junagadh lies along the main pilgrim route to Dvaraka, where
there is a great temple to Krishna. For a fee they provide the pilgrims
insurance. Pilgrims can deposit the funds they carry with the Brahmins o
Junagadh and by means of a note retrieve an equivalent sum from these
Brahmins' relatives or associates in Dvaraka-minus, of course, a substan
tial commission. They lose a percentage of their capital, but they are not in
danger of losing the whole amount to thieves along the dangerous road
between the two cities.
Narasi has no interest in such dealings. Rather than making money
he spends his life singing songs in the "company of the saints" (satsaitg)
who gather about him in great numbers. The Brahmins of Junagad
know this; hence it is a practical joke they intend when they recommen
that a group of hapless pilgrims make their way to Narasi's door t
deposit their funds. Evidently they assume that Narasi, if he accepts the
sum, will soon squander it, leaving himself liable to criminal charges and
who knows what ire.
When the travellers arrive at Narasi's ramshackle house, he greets
them cordially and obliges them by accepting their deposit, interpreting
it as a gesture from on high. He even makes out the requisite I.O.U. for
them to take to Dvaraka, which reads as follows: "Sgh SArmval is very
generous. Take this to him, get the money from him, and go about your
business without a second thought."
The pilgrims proceed to Dvaraka, where they search assiduously for a
man of that name, but to no avail. The money merchants in town have
never heard of such a person. When the desperate travellers have just about
given up, however, that very merchant appears to them, saying that he has
been looking everywhere for them. Not only does he return them thei
money, he grants them 25% interest in addition to the principal, rather
than extracting the customary reduction. As his letter of confirmation t
Narasi, he writes that he has plenteous funds on hand and that Narasi
welcome on any occasion to write promissory notes in his name.
The mysterious financier, it turns out, is none other than Krishna
himself,
One." for
And it S.mval
is no is aonvariant
surprise, on that
reflection, Syam,the one of his
Brahmin titles: of
merchants "the Dark
Dvaraka, despite their physical proximity to Krishna's great temple and
apparent call to his service, are ignorant of his true identity. He trades in
a currency whose principles they do not understand. Its effortless abun-
dance makes the Brahmins' joke on Narasi come true. To worldly vision,
Narasi has nothing; yet, as events make clear, he has everything-

providing he is giving it away. Because he lives his life trusting in God's
abundance, he is capable of matchless generosity (Nabhdji: 679-81).
A third saint serves as an exemplar of still another bhakti virtue:
community service.10 This is Pipd Dds, whose life is closely intertwined
with that of his wife Sitd. Pips and Sitd are royalty, but they devote their
lives to the service of whoever comes to them as part of the devotional
fellowship of song. And this dedication to the bhakti satsanig sometimes
prompts them to put themselves at the service of still others-people
entirely outside the community of faith-and with surprising results.
On one memorable occasion, for instance, Pipd is away from home
when Sitd is visited by a group of devotees and finds that she has nothing
in the house with which to feed them, since she and her husband have
already distributed everything they own to others. Sitd, however, is
undaunted; she is ready to go to whatever length is necessary to honor
the proper canons of hospitality. Without a moment's hesitation she
determines to bargain her own body for food for her guests. She knows
of a very distasteful but unquestionably wealthy merchant who is sure to
accept such a contract. The lascivious gentleman is indeed only too
eager, and Sitd agrees to go to his house after serving her guests with the
food that his advance payment can provide. When Pipd returns from his
trip, he is delighted to find that the saints have been provided for. Even
the means that Sitd has adopted pleases him, since it testifies that her
devotion to the welfare of the saints is greater than her attention to any
claims that their own marriage might make on her. He determines to
help her honor her bargain.
As it happens, his help is much needed, for it is the rainy season and by
the time the meal is done, the roads are deluged to the point of impassi-
bility. Pipd insists on carrying her across the sodden fields to the house of
the despicable merchant, and when they arrive he hides himself so that the
merchant can satisfy his desires undisturbed. Divine providence, however,
prevents Situ's sacrifice from being completed. When the merchant dis-
covers her at the door in spite of the miserable weather, he asks incredu-
lously how she got there. As she tells him, his disbelief is transformed to
shame, his eyes gush tears, and Pipd, seeing the man's change of heart,
initiates him into the fellowship of the saints. Not only are the satsanig and
the outsider served independently by Situ's selfless ministrations, then, but
the merchant is ultimately brought within the circle of the saved as well
(Ndbh~ji: 508-9). As in the case of Mird and Narasi, the virtue in which
Pipd and Sits excel proves to have remarkable effects, even when they
10 Since the term sant (cf. sat) is more or less synonymous with the term sadhu (or
sadhs) in the Bhaktamiil, community service is sometimes designated sadhusev&l, as in
Nabhdji: 503.
themselves cast no eye toward achieving such wonders.

In relating incidents from the stories of Mird, Narasi, and Pips and
Sitd, I have been emphasizing particular virtues for which they stand-
their ethical attributes-but it is well to recall that these saints were
included in the Bhaktamal in the first place because of their fame
singers of devotional poetry. The question that faces us now is whethe
these two excellences, the ethical and the aesthetic, have anythin
directly to do with one another. This query is not an easy one to answe
for usually the Bhaktamal simply assumes the musicality of its saints
rather than making a point of it.11 And since so many of the saints t
which it devotes lengthy attention are singers, there are few unmusic
souls in the group against whom the measure of these singer-saints ca
be taken. Let me begin to approach the question, therefore, not just b
discussing the bhakti context per se but by appealing to my own experi
ence in addition.
First, in regard to fearlessness: anyone who has ever tried to sing
before an audience knows that the performer's greatest enemy is fear o
shame. To sense a potential enemy, particularly an enemy within one-
self, is to constrict the flow of air upon which every aspect of the musi
line depends: its dynamics, its pitch and timbre, its steadiness and abili
to be sustained. Faced with a menacing presence, as in some terrifying
dream, one fails to find one's voice. It is as if the breath had congeale
in the throat. The sensation one wants when one sings is just the oppo
site: an absence of fear and a free access to voice and breath. In the
happiest of songs, indeed, one feels so trusting of one's supply of air that
it seems the breath breathes you rather than the other way around. The
sensation is one of unusual, even unreasonable invulnerability. Years of
training and discipline may be required to recognize and cultivate this
ease of breath, but the quality of the experience when it occurs is not
one of conscious control. The singer becomes but a vehicle of the song, a
musical instrument through which the song sings itself.
It seems to me that the fearlessness that is praised in the character of
Mira Bdi is a fearlessness of this sort. Hers is not in the first instance a story
of defiance. Doubtless it has sometimes been presented that way, and cer-
tain modern versions of her life apparently attempt to compensate for that
11 The Bhaktamal's references to music tend to be pervasive rather than sharply defined.
Even so, its importance is not to be missed. In the poem introducing the singer-saint
Dhana, for example, it is said that God rewards the singing behavior of his devotees
(bhakta bhaje ki riti, NMbhiji: 521); and the theologians Jiv Gosvimi and Vallabhdcdrya
are praised no more for their thought than for their cultivation of bhajan (Nibhaji: 338,
610). John Carman has noted, in a similar vein, that when the three most important theo-
logians of the Sri Vaisnava movement are placed together in an iconographical group,
they are apt to be overshadowed by the much larger figure of the singer-saint Nammdlvdr
(personal communication, February 10, 1983).
fact by clearly asserting, tradition to the contrary notwithstanding, that she

was a model Hindu wife (Chandrakant: 4, 11). The Bhaktamial, however, is
not at all defensive on this point. It simply reports Mird's fearlessness as a
reflex of her trust in Krishna, which was constantly expressed in her musi-
cal devotions. The Bhaktamiil seems entirely unconcerned that the reader
may interpret her boldness as a defiant, denunciatory response to conven-
tional dharma. Mira drinks the poison cup as easily and gladly as she sings.
Her fearlessness is not a virtue she has steeled in herself in order to with-
stand the unjust demands of society; it is something that springs naturally
from her sense of the abundance of the life of faith she already leads. She is
fearless because that abundance cannot really be threatened, even by
death.
This ushers us naturally into the realm represented by the second of
the bhakti virtues: generosity, the ability to sustain a sense of amplitude
as guiding one's approach to life. This is Narasi's cardinal virtue, and
again it is a musical one. As I have already hinted, one cannot sing from
scarcity. It may seem unlikely, but I believe any singers who read this
will testify that if one is faced with a long Brahmsian phrase and is con-
cerned about having the breath to get to the end of it, almost the worst
thing one can do is to try to limit the amount of air that one expels at
the beginning of the phrase. Rather than treat one's breath as if it were
in short supply, one must believe that somehow one has enough air to
sing the whole line. Even more than many other aspects of life, singing
depends on faith. Surprisingly, this faith often has the effect of giving
one access to just the amplitude of breath one needs, and the musical
phrase seemingly regulates itself by its own logic. By putting oneself at
the service of the line to be sung, one allows the phrase to find its own
way of apportioning breath in a continuous stream throughout its length.
Many of us fall short, both in faith and in training, but the opposite
approach-to constrict and quantify one's supply of breath, parcelling it
out from instant to instant-does little to help. One's store of breath
seems smaller, and the coherent musicality of the line is easily lost to
moment-by-moment anxieties.
Narasi, of course, was no ordinary singer but a real adept. In him, as
the story goes, a great faith in God's abundance led to great abundance
in fact, both in the musical realm and beyond. The lesson to be learned
is that all life should be understood as if it were a song. To approach it
as if one were singing it-to act as if song were the only true reality, as
Narasi does-is real virtue, and it has positive, remarkable effects.
Finally, we have Pips and Sitd, with their particular devotion to
community service, and this too has its musical correlations. As the story
of Site's determination to prostitute herself for the sake of the satsang
makes clear, a fearlessness such as Mirs's and a sense of abundance such
as Narasi's are assumed in this understanding of service. But in the tale
of Pips and Sitd special emphasis is laid upon the communal contex
within which these virtues are fostered and the communal strength to
which they lead.
Like virtue, singing too has strongly communal associations, particu-
larly in its Indian context; it is rarely an individual experience. And th
nature of Indian music suggests why this should be so. Though it make
little or no use of harmony, the communal "virtue" that Westerners woul
doubtless first associate with music, other communal values take it
musical place and provide ample compensation. Unison, responsorial, and
antiphonal singing are much more common in India than in the modern
West, and there is a great delight in heterophonic accompaniment. Even
in the soloistic, classical style it is a rare occasion when an Indian audienc
remains totally silent. Evidently community is understood as a natural
outgrowth of the presence of structured, pitched sounds; hence simply to
be present at a musical performance is to help in the providing of the
music's substance. In the case of satsanig and the singing of bhajan the
association between music and community is particularly close. There the
distinction between performer and audience is often diffused almost to
the point of nonexistence as everyone sings along. Other situations are
more formal, but there too communal values obtain. The person in
possession of the chief musical statement at any given time must know
when to yield to another singer or performer and thus to serve the caus
of total musical community. Even when there is only one performer, as i
the case of simple singing events in Indian villages, it is a familiar patter
for the singer to yield the vocal line to his or her audience at the proper
time, surrendering it to the wider community.
One of the latter-day expositors of the Bhaktamal, Sitdrdm^aran Bha-
gavdnprasad Rtpkald, seems to allude to this connection between singing
and community service when he speaks of "service through singing" or
"the service of song" (bhajan seva, Ndbhdji: 474). He does so in glossing
what the text says about the saint Ravi Dds, and refers to the service
provided for one's community and for God through the exercise of one's
particular craft, in this case singing.12 But the phrase has a deeper reso-
nance. One gets a hint of it in the persistent association that the Bhak-
tamal makes between music and food. Hari Dds, Gopdl Bhatt, and
Sfirdds Madanmohan, for example, are all praised for the liberality with
which they offer these two elements to others (Ndbhdji: 601-2, 614, 746)
When one realizes that commensality is the most important indicator of
community in India, one realizes how important the Bhaktamal consid-
ers music to be in the creation and maintenance of right society.
12 In this way the Vallabha Sampraday sets the service of singing alongside those services
rendered by those who prepare the food, garments, and flowers that are ritually offered t
images of Krishna.
The nature of such a society in the bhakti context points to what is

perhaps the most fundamental sense of "service through singing," what
one might call a musical sense of community. For in the bhakti tradition
community is constituted not by amalgamating people who serve differ-
ent yet complementary functions, as society is normally depicted in texts
describing Hindu dharma, but rather by putting together people who
respond to a single sense of what is true or real. In the literature of
bhakti such a community is typically called satsanig. Sometimes this
word can mean "the gathering of the true," since sang means "gather-
ing" and sat means "good," "true," or "real." But satsang can also mean
a gathering for the sake of the true, an assembly stimulated by the rec-
ognition of a common divine reality and the need to respond to it, and
this gives it still a further meaning: "true community."13
What is distinctive in each of these latter meanings is the sense that
true community is not a composite entity but one whose existence fol-
lows from a common core, a shared assent. In the Bhaktamal and the
Silr Sagar the form that this community takes is a specifically musical
one. Members of the satsanig gather to sing to the Lord, and it is natural
in this context that the considerations of boundary, location, and propri-
ety that govern the dharmik conception of society fall into the back-
ground. This happens because the object of their singing, God, relativizes
the positions of them all, but I believe it also happens for an intrinsically
musical reason. Music demands that one recognize a dimension of truth
that is often absent in ordinary speech. It reaches toward a level of real-
ity that is easily obscured by propositions, interrogations, and performa-
tives. Though songs have words, of course, they depend for their power
on a level of truth that is not just propositional. The "truth" of music
precedes the truth of speech, just as children often learn to sing before
they can manage sentences. Music requires assent at a more primordial
level than speech does. To find it true is to have been pulled naturally
into a community of others who make the same assent-who "appreci-
ate" the music, we say. If one finds it false, one is by that token outside
the whole discourse, and outside the community that it establishes.14
The crucial role of music in the bhakti tradition underscores the
13 On various meanings of satsang and analagous terms in the poetry of Sir Dis, se
Hawley: 1984, chapter 5. A similar range can be found in the Bhaktamral. In the section
on Kabir, for instance, the term sant (cf. sat) is used on the one hand to indicate tho
who are "good" in a more or less conventional sense (Ndbhdji: 486) and those whose mora
worth is entirely determined by their allegiance to God (Nabhaji: 489).
14 Classical Hindu texts on music have referred to the primordial nature of sound an
music through various means. These are summarized in Wulff: 153-57. The search for
primordial sound continues to be a prominent feature of the practice of certain group
that can be broadly located within the bhakti tradition, for instance the Radhasoami Sat
sang. See Babb: 302-3 and Juergensmeyer.
conviction that the life of faith requires a leap, since it embraces a kin
of truth that cannot always be rationalized to the world of dharma. At
the same time it challenges the notion that true morality can be founded
on any other basis than bhakti. Bhakti is to dharma as song is to speech
It enunciates a logic of social communication that is prior to any particu
lar realm of social discourse. Like melody in relation to individual words
bhakti draws attention to the overall momentum and phrasing that give
particular social interactions their deepest sense. Like music in relation
to text, bhakti may seem at first to jettison the laboriously erected rule
of social grammar, but if it is true bhakti, then like good music it wil
challenge only to illuminate, and the true nature of social interaction
will emerge from the dust. Just as speech acquires its power through th
elaborate differentiations of which it is capable, so dharma creates its
social logic through delicate distinctions between unequal members
Bhakti is aware of such distinctions, but regards them as provisional and
secondary, just as music transforms sentences into something differen
altogether.
The intriguing thing is that, if the Sifr Sagar and the Bhaktamal are to
be believed, this set of parallels between the world of music on the one
hand and the realm of faith and morals on the other is more than mere
analogy. Though it is true that faith and the sort of character and commu-
nity it implies are in some sense like music, this is not the last word on the
subject. In the poems of Si~r Das and the portraits of the Bhaktamil one is
never very far from the conviction that bhakti actually is in some measure
bhajan, that devotion is music, that service is song, and that the deepest
levels of morality have distinctly musical connotations.
There was a time in the history of Christian culture when such affir-
mations would have occasioned no surprise, a time when one could still
detect the music of the spheres, and each of the classical modes was felt
to have its particular affective and moral connotations (Hollander: 31-36,
266-72; Boyd: 240-48). For most of us, evidently, that time has passed.
As one writer has put it, the skies have been untuned (Hollander: 332-
422), and the world of faith and virtue along with them. Yet the vigor
with which Stir Das and the Bhaktamal present the claim that music
belongs intrinsically together with religion and morality should give
pause to even the staunchest monotones among us, and cause us to ask if
perhaps it is not true.
NOTE OF ACKNOWLEDGMENT
I am grateful to Laura Shapiro, Donna M. Wulff, and Mark Juer

their careful criticism of this essay in its present form; to Mark
for his help with the verse translations; to John B. Carman, Norm
William Brinner for their response to related presentations; to D
and Lorraine Sakata for their musicological expertise; to Kenneth E. Bryant for
his massive labors in the cause of creating a critical edition of the Sfsr S~igar; and
to the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Henry R. Luce Founda-
tion for their support of the Berkeley-Harvard Project in Comparative Ethics,
which provided the context in which some of the ideas contained here were first
put forth.
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The Music in Faith and Morality

Author(s): John Stratton Hawley

THE MUSIC IN FAITH AND MORALITY

JOHN STRATTON HAWLEY

Many of the greatest achievements of Western music are also monu-

The tradition of which I am speaking is called bhakti. It is the devo-

SUR DAS: MUSIC IN THE LIFE OF FAITH

The word bhakti is usually translated "devotion" or "lovi

1 An extended consideration of the term bhakti, with its various meanings an

Unless we love the Lord we're like dogs and pigs,

To fill their bellies they kill living beings

This poem is especially interesting because in its manuscript versions

Notorious me, a sinner (patit) among sinners (patitani);

Or Sfr may use an entire song to elaborate the point (S 134):

Today's the showdown, and I'm not going to flinch

7 A slightly different viewpoint on this subject might appear to be implied in

following is an example (S 19):

Syam is purely the patron of the poor.

Songs to Hari work great wonders.

Time after time I've deceived myself,

THE BHAKTAMAL: MUSIC AND MORALITY

The Bhaktamrl is not a text of musical devotion in the same sense

were always available. Instead of following the normal practice of trying

Narasi has nothing; yet, as events make clear, he has everything-

themselves cast no eye toward achieving such wonders.

fact by clearly asserting, tradition to the contrary notwithstanding, that she

The nature of such a society in the bhakti context points to what is

I am grateful to Laura Shapiro, Donna M. Wulff, and Mark Juer

forthcoming "Introduction." In Pad Sfirdas ka / The Padas of Siird

1984 Sirr Ds: Poet, Singer, Saint. Seattle: University of Wash-

1870 "Eight Orientalia

1980 "The Old Braj Hagiography of Nibhzdzs." In Early Hindi

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