Bhakti — devotion — is Vaishnavism's central claim and its most socially consequential one: because devotion requires no Sanskrit, no ritual apparatus, and no priestly mediation, the bhakti movements that swept India from roughly the seventh century onward were routinely led by poets from low castes and by women, and they said so explicitly in their poetry. The tradition's scriptural warrant is the Gita's promise that even a leaf offered with devotion is accepted.