The Making of a Blind Bhakti Poet

Hagiographies are sacred writings that depict ideals of devotion by documenting saints’ lives through constructivist narrative strategies. Especially, bhakti hagiographies in India influence present-day devotional cultures. Focusing on the discursive production of blindness in relation to blind saints, this article examines the case of Sūrdās, the sixteenth-century blind Vallabhite poet saint who composed in Brajbhāṣā. Reading the Vallabhite hagiography Caurāsī Vaiṣṇavan kī Vārtā , this article demonstrates how Sūrdās’s blindness is narrativized between oscillating discourses of prajñācakṣu (intuitive vision) and avidyā (ignorance), enabling sectarian theology to render blindness alternatively as an epistemic deficiency or a transcendent vision. Positioning the hagiography against the earliest compositions of Sūrsāgar attributed to Sūrdās, the article shifts the analytic frame from hagiographic constructs to poetic self-articulation. A close reading of his early compositions reveals that blindness is not affirmed as an enabler of bhakti but is articulated as an impediment or in ambiguous terms. Recovering Sūrdās’s agency through his compositions unsettles the hagiographic and theological constructs and reframes blindness as a contested site. With such a comparative frame, this article repositions Sūrdās as both a product of sectarian narrativization and a poet whose compositions resist its totalizing claims, exercising various forms of agency.