The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology c14.s8.t1.7

c14.s8.t1.7

There are other items in the Maratha *milieu* which point likewise to the strength of the Hindu tradition. It is out of tailors, carpenters, potters, gardeners, shopkeepers, barbers and even untouchable *mahars* that the Maratha saints and prophets of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries arose.³ The rise of the lower tribes into the higher orders of the Hindu society, "social mobility" of the "vertical type," has been an eternal fact of Indian culture history since the earliest epochs of the Vedic period. In the Marathi-speaking regions during the epoch of the Hindu re-assertion expressions of the same democratic social "metabolism" were witnessed as elsewhere in India as but regular phases of the dynamic "culture-contacts." To a certain extent this ascendancy of the under-world was partly an expression of the great *bhakti* or Vaiṣṇava movement which was almost universal during the fourteenth to the seventeenth century. Democracy and *bhakti* (love or faith) went hand in hand as much in Northern India and Bengal as in South-western India and the Deccan.