Devotional poetry composed in regional Indian languages over several centuries altered the vocabulary of religious expression. The changes were linguistic and social at once.
Composition moved into spoken languages
Much earlier religious literature was in Sanskrit, which required formal education and was accessible to a restricted group.
Poets composing in Tamil, Marathi, Hindi dialects, Bengali, Kannada and other languages produced material that could be understood on first hearing by anyone who spoke them.
Because the compositions were sung, transmission did not require literacy either, and they spread through performance rather than through manuscripts.
The register shifted towards ordinary relationship
These poems commonly address the divine through familiar relationships: parent and child, lover and beloved, servant and master, friend and friend.
That vocabulary made intense religious feeling expressible in terms drawn from daily life rather than from ritual or philosophical technical language.
It also permitted registers rarely found in formal literature, including complaint, longing, reproach and humour directed at the object of devotion.
Concrete imagery followed from the same choice. Household objects, fields, weaving, cooking and the roads between villages supply the comparisons, in place of the abstractions favoured by scholastic writing.
Participation widened considerably
The poets whose work survives include people from a wide range of occupations and social positions, and several were women.
Their compositions frequently address exclusion directly, arguing that devotion rather than birth or learning determines a person's standing before the divine.
How far these movements changed social arrangements in practice is debated among historians, and the poetry itself is stronger evidence of what was claimed than of what resulted.
Song was the transmission medium
These works were composed to be sung, often in metres and forms suited to group performance with simple accompaniment.
Melody aids memory, and communal singing meant a composition could be carried across a region by people who never saw it written.
Many of the surviving texts were collected long after composition, which means attribution is often uncertain and versions vary between regions.
The influence extended into literature and music
Several regional literary traditions treat these poets as founding figures, and their vocabulary shaped later writing well outside devotional contexts.
Classical and folk music repertoires still draw heavily on these compositions, performed in concert settings as well as in worship.
The dual life of the material, sacred in one context and artistic in another, has continued without either use displacing the other.