Sant

Literally, someone who has found the
truth, or who is searching for it. The
word is derived from the Sanskrit word
sat (“truth”). More generally it refers to
two major groups of devotional (bhakti)
poet-saints. One group was centered
around the temple of Vithoba at
Pandharpur in the state of Maharashtra,
and includes saints from the Varkari
Panth community such as Namdev,
Tukaram, Chokamela, and Eknath.
The other group included later poetsaints from various places in northern
India, among them Kabir, Ravidas,
Dadu, and Guru Nanak, the founder of
the Sikh community.
As a group the sants shared certain
general tendencies rather than an
explicit body of doctrine. Sant religion
was inclined to stress an individualized, interior religion leading to a personal experience of the divine, rather
than participation in established cults.
One of the most common sant themes
was their disdain for external ritual,
and the general rejection of any worship using images. The northern
Indian sants are the most uncompromising advocates of nirguna devotion,
in which the divine is seen as beyond
conception; but even among the
Pandharpur devotees (bhakta) the
stress was on devotion to the god
Vithoba, rather than actual worship.
The sants stressed the power of the
divine Name and its ability to remove
all obstacles. They disregarded caste
distinctions, viewing them as an arbitrary barrier dividing the human community. They stressed instead the value
of satsang, and the transforming
effects that such “good company”
could bring. Satsang thus formed an
egalitarian community through the
common bonds of faith and devotion,
as an alternative to the hierarchical
society established by birth.
It is sometimes suggested that all of
these themes can be traced to the sants’
social background, since many of them
596
Sant
An illustrated page of Sanskrit from the first chapter of the Devimahatmya.
The illustration depicts the opening episode, in which a king and a merchant visit a hermit.
came from very low caste communities. It
is certainly true that devotees of low social
status would have been forbidden even to
enter temples, much less worship the
images in those temples, and thus a religious path emphasizing the Name and
interior religious experience, which are
accessible to everyone, might have
seemed a more viable option. In the same
way, the socially oppressed might find the
notion of an alternative, egalitarian community immensely attractive. Yet to
reduce the sant tradition to a simple reaction by marginal social groups cannot
explain why one of its major figures is
Eknath, a brahmin. Such reductionist
analyses ignore the sant movement’s real
thrust, namely the passionate search for
the divine that permitted no compromises and no excuses. For further information see Karine Schomer and W. H.
McLeod, The Sants, 1985.