Bhakti, loving devotion to a personal god, offers itself in Hindu tradition as a complete path to liberation, moksha, standing beside and often displacing the older paths of ritual action, karma marga, and philosophical knowledge, jnana marga, which historically demanded resources, caste standing or leisure that most people did not have. Where Vedic ritual required a trained priesthood and Upanishadic knowledge required years of disciplined study under a qualified teacher, bhakti asked only sincere love and surrender, open in principle to anyone regardless of caste, gender, learning or renunciation, a claim the tradition's own bhakti poets made explicitly and repeatedly, often naming their own low social standing as proof that devotion alone, not birth or scholarship, was what actually reached God.
The Bhagavad Gita gives bhakti its most influential early philosophical statement, with Krishna telling Arjuna that devotion offered with a pure heart, even a single leaf or flower, is received, and that the devoted soul, whatever its failings, is dear to God and will not perish. From roughly the sixth century onward, regional bhakti movements, the Tamil Alvars and Nayanars devoted respectively to Vishnu and Shiva, the north Indian sant poets, the Bengali Vaishnava movement around Chaitanya, and many others, turned this philosophical claim into a sustained literary and musical culture of vernacular devotional song, replacing Sanskrit ritual language with the languages ordinary worshippers actually spoke.