On the Threshold Songs of Chokhamela

As one ponders, in all the terms that sociology and anthropology can provide, a social system that arranges human beings into pure and impure, and bemoans in moral terms the impregnable fort of the highborn, there comes along in the fourteenth century one such as Chokhamela. Can there be such love in the world is the wondering question that surfaces after a reading of these amazing poems written so long ago. Nothing so clearly brings into focus the tension between the external world of arrangements and the inner world of feeling as the bhakti movement that rose in protest against caste ritualism in medieval India. That opposition of outer and inner may be underpinned in different ways; the underlying point is the powerful presence of love in some, and the denial of it by powerful others; one kind of power set over against another; the power of ritual orthodoxy exercising its prescriptions against the power of loving devotion that recognizes no obstacles.