Dating of Prayers as old as time

Understanding Indian culture through the popular prayers recited in the 21st Century

The number of people celebrating Deepavali grows every year. This is due not only to an expansion in Hindu population (which is growing at ~0.7% annually), but also to the festival’s ability, year after year, to invite and embrace people who lie outside the traditional Diwali-celebrating-Hindu type.

Deepavali, after all, is a festive expression of Indian culture. And Indian (Hindu*) cultural logic has shown immense capacity over three thousand years to absorb and assimilate all sorts of philosophies, languages, and practices. Each assimilation has usually added new elements to the locally dominant culture, and has also preserved the ways, languages, gods and philosophies of absorbed peoples as unique subcultures within the “Hindu” framework. This cultural logic ensured India didn’t turn into a melting pot (where prior identities of the subsumed people are erased and replaced by a new, uniform identity) but into a salad bowl, or as the Pew Research piece recently claimed, an Indian thali.

One core element of Indian culture, that has been repeatedly shaped and formed by numerous thinkers from various regions, backgrounds and philosophical/theological traditions (sampradayas), is the prayer. Prayers have been integral to the Indian way of life; they are practiced during worship (puja) and are an expression of devotion (bhakti).

The Importance and Plurality of Prayers in Indian Culture

Prayers are important for the adherents of Āstika faiths (most Hindu traditions that accept the epistemic authority of the Vedas), other Indian religions and philosophies (Buddhists, Jains, Sikhs, etc) as well as the Abrahamic universal religions in India - Christianity and Islam.

M.K. Gandhi echoed millions of Indians when he thought of prayer as the essence of religion and said that “prayer is the very soul of religion, and therefore must be the very core of the life of man.”

As Indian culture continues to digest various languages, deities, and philosophical currents, the common prayers of an age form a sort of signature of the cultural zeitgeist. The preponderance of a prayer or bhajan signifies the popularity of its god (like Vishnu, Shiva or Hanuman), or its philosophical strand (like non-dualism or dualism), or its sentiment (like courage, heroism, submission, or love).

In any community, multiple prayers are known to overlap and coexist. Some shlokas are grouped together and recited in sequence, while others are practiced during specific occasions (time of the day, day of the month, festive occasions, etc.) or while visiting specific tīrthas or pilgrimage spots. Persons adhering to different sampradayas may have multiple prayers in common, and people within a particular philosophical/theological school may show variations in their prayer-choices.

As a creative product of the people of a certain region speaking a certain tongue, prayers exist in nearly every known language- Sanskrit, Tamil, Hindustani/Hindi (incl. its dialects and predecessors), Marathi, Kannada, Telugu, Bengali, and more.

The “movement of prayers” across geographies and social strata can mostly be attributed to (1) the preaching of wandering gurus and rishis, (2) the movement of pilgrims from one part of the country to another, (3) the marriage of women into families in other towns/kingdoms, (4) popular movements that cut across families and social classes (like bhakti), (5) assimilation of folk religious practices (like the assimilation of Chandi-devi or various gramadevatas into the Hindu pantheon), (6) debates between students of different philosophical schools, or (7) war/conquest of one people by another.

Prayers remain only as strong as the will of the people who recite them. In this Darwinian struggle of prayers, only the strongest survive and propagate to the next generation. So by understanding the state of prayers in India today, we can begin to develop a picture of the subcontinent’s rich and diverse history.

Dating of Prayers in 21st Century India

Some cultures - like Islam and Christianity - appear to have rejected assimilation within the Hindu framework, and maintain a distinct set of prayers and practices outside the deeply intertwined Hindu-web. There are powerful examples of “syncretism” (some more successful than others) during the Sufi-age that showcase the gap between Indianized-Islam and Hinduism as narrowing, but this trend was emphatically bucked in the 1800s.

While the cult of Sai Baba (who is considered an avatar of the Hindu god Dattātreya, and has a favourite saying “Allah tera bhala karega”) is the most impressive example of assimilated culture, the Muslim, Christian, and Hindu worlds of prayer are today separated by sturdy walls. In this article, I have focused on the deeply intertwined Hindu-web of prayers, and have not studied the prayer-worlds of Indian Islam or Indian Christianity.

The Hindu world of prayers comprises of lakhs of shlokas, mantras, bhajans, kirtans, and other devotional chants and music, each dating back to various points of historical time and space.

Like supermassive banyan trees that develop accessory trunks by dropping thousands of aerial roots and spread infinitely outwards to become a tremendous forest, prayers which took root in an ancient past now flourish - as old words and new - in the minds of a billion people.

A common Hindu prayer ritual today often juxtaposes ancient words three-thousand years old with “recent” language merely five hundred years old. It is not uncommon to hear radios in India play “Om Jai Jagadish Hare”, a 1870s composition, immediately after the Rg Veda’s Gayatri Mantra (composed prior to 1000 BCE). A gap of three thousand years turns into a pause of a few seconds.

The table below shows various popular prayers, chants and verses, along with their source/composer and approximate time-period of composition:

A few caveats, before we jump to any conclusions:

1. This list is certainly not exhaustive, and may carry some unavoidable bias owing to the limitation of my own knowledge and exposure (and I beg the reader’s pardon in advance for this). The objective of this analysis is to develop a directional, but not exact, understanding of the trajectory and broad timelines of Indian (Hindu*) devotional literature. For example, it was only while working on this post that I realized the Skanda Sashti Kavasam (கந்த சஷ்டி கவசம்), a devotional Tamil song on Lord Muruga (a.k.a. Skanda/Kartikeya) and a relatively recent composition, was composed over one thousand years after Ādi Śaṅkarācāryaḥ’s Śrī Subramaṇya Bhujangaṃ (श्रीसुब्रह्मण्यभुजङ्गम्) dedicated to the same Lord Kartikeya.

2. There are also difficulties in discerning religious- / prayer- texts from a “secular” or philosophical texts that are commonly read, recited, or listened to today. For example, I have left out Śrīmadbhagavadgītā, one of the most revered of Hindu texts, because its scope is much more than just prayer; it is a synthesis of dharma, bhakti, jñāna-, karma-, and rāja- yoga ideals, Samkhya-Yoga philosophy, etc. In the analysis, I have included only those shlokas, mantras, bhajans, kirtans, and other devotional chants and music that are considered devotional, or offer praise or thanks to god(s), deities, or any spiritual-/divine-forces. For the same reason, I have excluded the late-Sangam work Tirukkuṟaḷ (dated ~500 CE).

3. This is not an exhaustive analysis of all devotional compositions over time, but only of those compositions that are most alive in the twenty-first century. There are, no doubt, magnificent lost works or works that are in limited circulation or use. The awareness that I wished to develop from this analysis is a directional understanding of Indian history through some of the most popular prayers in use today.

4. The number of unique prayers in the name of a particular god (or in a particular spirit) today may not be representative of the spirit of another time. For example, the Lokakṣemā prayer (लोकाः समस्ताः सुखिनोभवंतु) may find its source in the Kaṭhopaniṣad (~450 CE) but may find some of its popularity attributable to the spirit of globalism in the modern age. So the mantra’s popularity may have waxed and waned over the ages; we can only know for sure that it is well known and widely used today, but we cannot know whether its usage was widespread in, say, 1000 CE. Similarly, “Oṃ maṇi padme hūṃ” (ॐ मणि पद्मे हूँ) may have its roots in a 4th century text, but its usage would have been limited to Tibetan monasteries throughout the middle ages until the travel to these remote parts became cheaper, and until the West rediscovered Buddhism.

5. The number of unique prayers in the name of a deity doesn’t conclusively establish the popularity of the god. There is a chance I have included a larger portion of prayers/chants in the name of one god compared to another. It is also possible that the number of unique prayers in the name of a deity is quite low, but its usage is disproportionately high. For example, Tulsidas’ Hanuman Chalisa (1500 CE) is the only prayer to Hanuman in my list, but this particular Hariharan / Gulshan Kumar rendition of the song had over 2.7 Billion views on YouTube as of October 2022, making it one of the most popular devotional hymns online (and proving that Lord Rāma’s divine vānara companion is extremely popular with the people).

Insights about Indian History & Culture From Prayers

• There are four (slightly overlapping) distinct periods in Indian history as seen through prayers:

  1. Age of Rishis (start - beginning of CE): The roots of Hindu history lie in the ancient world of rishis (ṛṣi). In this Vedic / post-Vedic period are rooted some of the most important mantras and shlokas in use today (in rituals and meditation practices): the Gāyatrī Mantra, the Mahā Mrityunjaya Mantra, the Śrī Rāma rakshā stotram, and the Buddhist Triśaraṇa. With the exception of the Buddhist prayer that is in Pali, all prayers of the age of rishis “were revealed” in Sanskrit.

  2. Age of Poets and Teachers (4th - 10th century CE): This period in the first millennium of the Common Era can be considered an Upaniṣadic / post-Upaniṣadic period. From this period thrive the prayers and teachings from Upaniṣads, and compositions and interpretations of great teachers. Ādi Śaṅkarācāryaḥ (the great Advaita Vedanta scholar who is now thought to have been born in the kingdom of the Chalukyas of Badami around 700 CE) is by far the greatest exponent of this period.
     
     There was also massive philosophical development in all six orthodox Hindu schools (Samkhya, Yoga, Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Mimamsa and Vedanta) as well as in Buddhist (Madhyamaka and Yogachara) and Jaina traditions. It is towards the end of this age of poets and teachers when various schools of Vedānta began to emerge as a powerful creative, social and philosophical force.

  3. Bhakti (7th - 17th century CE): Originating in Tamilakam during the 6th century CE, the Bhakti movement sought to bring religious reforms by adopting devotion to achieve salvation. It gained momentum through the works of Āndāḷ and the Āḻvārs (of the Sri Vaishnava tradition), and Mānikkavacakar and the Nāyaṉmārs (of the Shaiva tradition), before spreading northwards.
     Several 11th and 12th century writers - including Ramanuja, Madhva, Vallabha and Nimbarka - developed different philosophies within the Vedanta school of Hinduism, which were influential to the Bhakti tradition in medieval India. Bhakti prayers and compositions came to include the works of Basavanna, Kabir, Guru Nanak, Tulsidas, Purandara Dasa, Kanakadasa, Tukaram, Mirabai, and Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, as the movement swept over the entire subcontinent.
     This period saw increased usage of people’s languages alongside Sanskrit in prayers: Kannada, Telugu, Marathi, Punjabi, Awadhi, and Rajasthani.

  4. Hindu Modernity (18th century onwards): Prayers from this period are usually bhajans and kirtans that have leveraged mass-media to gain ubiquity. Aarti songs like “Om Jai Jagdish Hare”, “Jai Ganesh Deva”, and “Jai Santoshi Mata” are from this latest period of prayer-history. These songs are in multiple languages, and most commonly, in Hindi.

• The gods in our prayers today speak of continuity as well as diversity. A web of philosophical strands take us back from today into the world of rishis, while the gods and languages have multiplied over the millennia.

  1. With some of the oldest words spoken today, the “Gayatri Mantra” may be seen as dedicated to the Vedic deity Savitr or to One Supreme Creator. Other prayers from our ancient history are dedicated mostly to Vishnu and Shiva.

  2. From the age of teachers and poets, we have prayers dedicated to Saraswati, Lakshmi, Durga, Ganesha, and Kartikeya, apart from Vishnu and Shiva. Adi Shankaracharya is regarded as the founder of the Panchayatana Puja: the worship of five deities - Ganesha, Shakti (Durga), Shiva, Vishnu, and Surya. His compositions are used as prayers to these deities even today.

  3. The Bhakti age gives us a wide range of prayer practices dedicated to Maha Vishnu, his various avataras (predominantly Krishna, but including others like Rama, Hayagriva, and Vithoba), his consort Lakshmi/Shri, and his companions (like Garuda, and Hanuman). The forms of these prayers also turn more musical; Purandara Dasa, Tukaram, and Mirabai have given us many popular devotional hymns still in use today.

  4. The last 300 years of prayer-history have seen prayers becoming a political/social tools in the country. The philosophy of the modern Bhajans/kirtans don’t distinguish sharply between deities, and seem to implicitly accept that all gods are one, while being dedicated to any one deity at the outset.
     We also have new gods in the Hindu pantheon. Bhārat Mātā, who may be considered an avatar of Shakti, is often seen in a red-coloured sari and holding a national flag. Another Hindu goddess who gained immense popularity in the twentieth century is Santoshi Mata, for whom millions of women hold a Friday vrata.

Those are some thoughts on this interesting subject for now. Please let me know if you would like me to explore some of these topics further in future posts/threads. Thank you for reading!

Sources:

• Wikipedia - pages on various gods, mantras, shlokas, kirtans and composers/poets

• hinduism.stackexchange.com

• Speaking Tree

P.S. I have used “Indian (Hindu*)” in a few places because the word “Hindu” is an exonym and originates as a Persian geographical term for the people who lived beyond the river Indus. So all people who live in India are, in this limited sense, Hindus.

P.P.S. Adherents of many traditional schools may not agree with my dating of the Vedic age, the time when the Upanishads were written, and the dates when stalwarts like Adi Shankara, the Alvars and the Nayanmars lived. I have relied on the commonly accepted dating provided by academics today, and not on dates provided by various mathas.