Anti-bureaucracy stolen by the intellectuals

In India, a parallel arose to Christianity and Islam, around year zero, in the form of so-called bhakti movements, which were directed at the status hierarchies of civil society as well as at the officials of the empire. They also targeted the Buddhist monasteries that had been protected by the empire and used this protection to accumulate capital.

The Bhakti movements did worse than Christianity and Islam. Probably because the intellectuals in the movements could dominate them by virtue of their organized hereditary Brahmin guild. They could thereby give the insurgency a more conservative form and give themselves a more stable supremacy in the post-imperial society, which was organized in a complex and pragmatic combination of clans and guilds that were systematized for the first time between about 500 and 1000. Of course, they rejected the egalitarianism of the bhakti movements, and emphasized exclusively the rights of the local community, organized with themselves as the ruling class.

Consequently, indebtedness continued to plague India, which also remained more unequal than both Europe / the Islamic countries and China. Against this inequality, new Bhakti movements continued to mobilize, most successfully the Sikhs in the 15th and 16th centuries.

Reading
J.F.T. Earth: Medieval Hindu devotionalism, and Hew McLeod: Sikhism, both in A.L. Basham (ed): A cultural history of India, Oxford University Press 1975.
Arun P. Bali: Organization of the Virasaiva movement, in M.S.A. Rao: Social movements in India, Manohar Publishers 1979