The work known as Bhaktamal does not exist as a single, fixed book, but as a living textual tradition with multiple layers and regional inflections. At its heart stands the concise Braj Bhāṣā composition attributed to Nabhādās, which offers brief, often allusive verses on a wide range of bhakti saints. Around this nucleus, extensive commentarial traditions arose, most notably the influential ṭīkā of Priyādās, which transformed terse verses into full hagiographical narratives. Other commentators, such as Dāsu Rāmdās and Anantadās, also expanded and interpreted the text in ways that reflected the concerns of particular sampradāyas and devotional lineages. These commentaries effectively function as redactions, since they do not merely explain but also reshape the received material, sometimes adding or omitting saints and altering doctrinal emphasis.

Within the broad Hindi–Braj–Rajasthani region, the Bhaktamal circulated in multiple manuscript lineages, each bearing the marks of its local setting. Differences appear in orthography and vocabulary, where the language is gently bent toward regional speech forms, as well as in the selection and elaboration of particular saints. Local centers of devotion and specific sectarian communities often receive greater narrative space, so that the “garland of devotees” subtly changes its pattern from place to place. Over time, scribes and editors introduced expansions, updated details, and occasionally interpolated additional figures, giving rise to recensions with varying numbers of verses and biographies. In this way, the text mirrors the diversity of the bhakti movement itself, accommodating a wide spectrum of voices while retaining a recognizable core.

Printed editions represent yet another stage of redaction, as later editors sought to standardize and systematize what had long been fluid. Many widely available versions are composite works, combining Nabhādās’s original verses with selected portions of commentaries, and sometimes extending the chain of saints into more recent times. Language is often regularized toward more standardized Hindi, and the overall presentation shaped to meet the devotional and pedagogical needs of particular communities. Alongside these direct recensions, the very idea of a “bhakta-mālā” inspired analogous compilations in other regions and languages, which, while not strict textual descendants of Nabhādās’s work, echo its impulse to weave together a many-colored tapestry of saintly lives. In all these forms, Bhaktamal stands as a testament to how a single devotional text can be continually re-embroidered by the hands of different regions, sects, and generations.