The bhakti poets are among the most quoted figures in Indian religious history, and much of what they said was aimed squarely at the religious establishment of their own communities.
From roughly the sixth century in the Tamil south, spreading north over the following thousand years, poet-saints composed in regional languages rather than in Sanskrit, which put religious speech within reach of people who had been excluded from it by language alone. The most revered among them include a leather worker, a weaver, a tailor and a number of women, and their poems attack ritual formalism, temple wealth, priestly authority and caste distinction directly and by name.
Kabir, a fifteenth-century weaver from a Muslim family in Banaras, ridiculed Hindu and Muslim ritual with equal contempt and is claimed by Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs alike; his compositions are included in Sikh scripture. Mirabai, a sixteenth-century Rajput noblewoman, left her marriage for Krishna and is remembered as much for the refusal as for the poetry. Ravidas, a leather worker and therefore of the lowest ritual status, is revered by a community that takes its name from him and that has at times asserted a separate religious identity on that basis.
How far any of this constituted social reform is genuinely disputed among historians. One reading holds that bhakti opened a real alternative to caste hierarchy within the religious sphere. Another holds that it offered spiritual equality while leaving social arrangements entirely intact, and notes that several of the saints were subsequently absorbed into the very temple establishments they had attacked. Both readings have evidence behind them. What is not in doubt is that the poems remain in constant circulation, are sung daily across India, and are still quoted in public argument by people standing on opposite sides of it.