Sant Bhasha

Sant Bhasha is not a language with a territory. It is the composite devotional idiom used by the North Indian sant poets, drawing on Braj, Khari Boli, Punjabi, Persian, Arabic and Sanskrit without settling into any one of them, and it exists because the poets who used it were addressing people across a wide region and several communities at once. Scholars sometimes call it the old western Hindi of the sants, and no two compositions in it draw on quite the same mixture.

Its most important body of text is the Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh scripture, whose compositions are largely in this idiom rather than in Punjabi as it is ordinarily spoken, although it is written in the Gurmukhi script. Pashaura Singh's study of the canon traces how Guru Arjan compiled it in 1604 and how the final recension came to be fixed, and the volume includes not only the Sikh Gurus but Kabir, Namdev, Ravidas, Farid and others, so that a Sikh scripture carries the words of Muslim and Hindu figures inside it as scripture rather than as quotation.

That inclusiveness is a doctrinal position and not an editorial convenience. The idiom itself is part of the argument. A poetry composed in a language belonging to no single community suits a teaching that rejects the authority of birth, of caste and of a priestly tongue, and the sants used it in that way deliberately.

The sant movement ran across northern India from roughly the fourteenth century, and its poets were mostly artisans and labourers rather than brahmins. Kabir was a weaver of Varanasi, claimed after his death by Hindus and Muslims alike. Ravidas was a leatherworker whose followers now form a distinct religious community with its own places of worship. Namdev was a Marathi speaker whose compositions entered the Sikh scripture in this idiom rather than in Marathi.

Their common ground was a formless divine reachable without ritual, image or intermediary, an attack on caste and on the professional religiosity of both Hindu and Muslim establishments, and a poetry made to be sung rather than read. W. H. McLeod's work on Sikhism and J. S. Grewal's history of the Sikhs of the Punjab set the Gurus within that wider movement while marking where Sikh teaching departs from it.

Because the poetry circulated orally before it was written down, the same composition survives in several recensions, and attribution is genuinely uncertain for a great deal of what is ascribed to Kabir in particular. The atlas records the corpus as shared and contested rather than assigning every verse to a named author, since the traditions holding it do not agree among themselves about which verses are whose.