The Sacred & The Secular: Devotional Literature & The Making of India’s Democratic Consciousness

Abstract

The Indian Constitution represents a secular, democratic framework, yet its moral imagination is deeply interwoven with the country’s religious and cultural traditions. This paper explores how devotional literature—especially the Bhakti tradition—functioned as a cultural precursor to India’s constitutional ideals of justice, equality, and fraternity. By engaging with vernacular poetic voices such as Kabir, Ravidas, and Mirabai, the paper examines how their critiques of caste, hierarchy, and religious orthodoxy anticipated the ethical commitments embedded in the Constitution. Drawing upon postcolonial theory, literary analysis, and constitutional scholarship, the study argues that Bhakti poetry contributed to the shaping of India’s democratic consciousness—not merely as spiritual expression but as political resistance. The sacred and the secular, often viewed as oppositional, are established here as historically co-constitutive in the evolution of Indian citizenship and moral modernity.