The Sultanate of Delhi, 711–1526 A.D. c26.s7.2

c26.s7.2

The earliest exponent of this school of religious thought was a great *Vaishnava* teacher, Ramanuja, who flourished in the early years of the twelfth century. He did his best to popularise the cult of devotion to a personal God and preached that salvation can be had by this means alone. The next reformer was Ramananda, a follower of the Ramanuja school, who was born in a Kanyakubja family of Allahabad. A worshipper of Rama, he preached the doctrine of *bhakti* to people of all castes and to both the sexes. He had twelve principal disciples, one of whom was a barber (Saindasa), another a cobbler (Raidasa) and the third a Muhammadan weaver (Kabir). The third teacher of the school was Vallabhacharya who was a worshipper of Krishna and, therefore, an exponent of the Krishna cult. He was born near Banaras in 1479 and his parents were Telugu Brahmans who had come to northern India for pilgrimage and settled here. He was a man of remarkable literary talent even in his early life. After completing his education at Kashi, he went to the court of Krishnadeva Raya of Vijayanagar where he won a victory over some scholarly followers of *Shaivism*. He preached monism of the pure type, known, technically, as *shuddhadwaita* or pure non-duality. He became very popular with the common people; but, later on, abuses appeared among his followers who were mostly well-to-do people and, eventually, it became ‘the Epicureanism of the East’.