[Answered] Discuss what was the most significant contribution of Kabir and Guru Nanakdev to Bhakti movement?

The Bhakti movement started during the period of Delhi Sultanate. There were numerous saints in the Bhakti movement such as Nimbarka, Chaitanya, Kabir and Guru Nanakdev. The advocates of the Bhakti movement succeeded to a considerable extent in uplifting the moral tone of the community and bridging the gap between Hindus and Muslims. However, the conservatism and orthodoxy of the people created barriers which could not be demolished with complete success. Guru Nanak and kabir is considered to be a part of the Bhakti movement.

Contribution of Guru Nanakdev to Bhakti Movement:

1. Guru Nanak Dev played a crucial role in the Bhakti movement. Sufism and bhakti contributed to Nanak’s religious philosophy. He discarded retrograde elements selfishness, hypocrisy, falsehood and violence of Hinduism and Islam.
2. His teachings incorporated the noblest principles of both religions. According to him, God is omnipresent and through love, devotion, purity of soul, everyone can attain god’s grace.
3. In his opinion, in order to link oneself to eternity, one must do good and virtuous to get the eternal liberation from the bondage of the world. Moral conduct and action on moral values were his core teachings.
4. Through Guru Nanak, the Bhakti movement in Punjab became a vehicle of social change and it was the intensity and depth of his message, fortified and consolidated by successor Gurus that served as an edifice on which the super-structure of Sikhism was built.
5. Guru Nanak played important role in integrating the contemporary Bhakti-Sufi tradition of spiritual quest with the socio milieu in the totality of the medieval Indian life. The essence of Nanak’s religion consists in it’s being a force and emancipating his followers from all religious and social shackles.
6. Guru Nanak consciously projected new goals, envisaging a socio-religious order based on the concept of universal brotherhood, social justice, and humanitarian cultural vision that would engender peaceful co-existence and mutual understanding through explicit acceptance of cultural pluralism.
7. Guru Nanak differed from other saints of the Bhakti movement on the concept of God and World. The policy of renunciation of the world or detachment with worldly responsibilities did not find place in his teachings.
8. He denounced the leading of life as an ascetic and put great emphasis on hard work and earning livelihood. For him taking care of one’s family and providing food and shelter for them was one of the prime duties of man before God.

Contribution of Kabir to Bhakti Movement:

1. Kabir Das got fame all over the world because of his influential traditions and culture. Sant Kabir was prejudiced by the existing religious mood of that time like Hinduism, Tantrism as well as the personal devotionalism mixed with the imageless God of Islam.
2. Kabir Das is the first Indian saint who has coordinated the Hinduism and Islam by giving a universal path which could be followed by both Hindus and Muslims.
3. According to him every life has relationship with two spiritual principles (Jivatma and Paramatma). His view about the moksha that, it is the process of uniting these two divine principles.
4. His great writing, Bijak, has a huge a collection of poems. He simply followed the oneness in the God. He always rejected murti pujan of Hinduism and shown the clear confidence in bhakti and Sufi ideas.
5. He composed poems in a concise and simple style resonating the admire for factual guru. After being an illiterate he had written his poems in Hindi mixing with Avadhi, Braj, and Bhojpuri. The poems are called variously as dohe, saloka and sakhi.
6.  Kabir has given the people an authentic fact about what is the religion of human beings that one should have. This has helped the common people to understand his message very easily.

Thus both Kabir and Guru Nanak was a significant figure and played an important role in Bhakti movement through their teachings and creations. Both helped Bhakti tradition to reach masses in their language and allowed spread of Bhakti Movement in various part of the nation.