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EARLY BHAKTI POETS 21 headquarters of the new movement. He was undoubt- edly one of the most important Hindu religious leaders in North India, for not only is the sect of Ramanandis, which acknowledges him as its direct founder, still very large, but a great many other sects owe their first impulse to the movement he initiated, or else were founded by those who were originally his dis- ciples or members of his sect. As a writer, however, Ramananda does not hold an important place. Hymns in Hindi purporting to have been written by him are still preserved, one of them in the Adi Grafith. In this hymn he seems to be declining an invitation to go and worship Vishnu in a temple, on the ground that God is all-pervading and that he has found God in his heart. It must not be inferred from this, however, that Ramananda forbade idolatry though he may have criticised it. He preached a vivid faith in the reality of the one personal God, spiritual and invisible, whom he called Rama, but no break was made with idolatry, the Hindu pantheon, or the old mythology. Nor did Ramananda throw over the system of caste. It is true that like other bhakti teachers before his day he was willing to acknowledge that even outcastes, by means of bhakti, could obtain release, and that amongst his personal disciples there are said to have been not a only a Siidra, a Jat, and an outcaste, but even a Muhammadan weaver and a woman. But there is no evidence that he modified the social rules of caste in the slightest. From the point of view of Hindi literature the significance of the movement initiated by Ramananda was in depending for its literature almost entirely on the vernacular. The followers and successors of Ramananda practically gave up the use of Sanskrit, and this of course gave a great impetus to the development of Hindi literature. Ramananda's Disciples.— The immediate personal disciples of Ramananda were, according to tradition, twelve in number, and Hindi compositions of some of these have been preserved. Pipa was the Raja of Gagaraungarh and is said to have been born in