"...speaking of Bhakti, not as religious concept, but as a movement, a phenomenon of a set of religious ideas and structures first seen in the South in 7th century and slowly sweeping upto the North by the 15th century....Bhakti has been credited with securing the final triumph of Hinduism over Jainism and Buddhism, with bringing the vernaculars into being as literary languages with spreading the concepts of the Great Tradition of Brahmanical Hinduism to the common man, with reconciling Hinduism and Islam, with reviving Hinduism in the face of the Muslim threat, with providing the ethos for the last great Hindu Kingdom in India, the Marathas...The bhakti movement has been seen as the Indian counterpart of the Protestant Reformation, with one or another of its poet saints, usually Kabir, sometimes Chaitanya, filling the role of Luther."