OF VERSE AS WORSHIP
To escape dogma, the women poet saints in this book prescribe ecstasy
Somewhere between the sixth and eighth centuries, the Indian subcontinent witnessed a shift in spiritual weather. This was the birth of bhakti: an appetite for the divine that cuts across caste, class, region, language and gender. In an ethos of growing religious illiberalism, there is an urgent need to reclaim this legacy—one that saw god not as frozen doctrine, but as living friend. That offers a path not of dogmatism, but delirium.
Sandhya Mulchandani’s book introduces lay readers to an even lessacknowledged legacy: that of Indian women bhakts, from the iconic Meera, Andal, Lal Ded and Muktabai to those less familiar in a pan-Indian context.
To tease out authentic life stories from popular hagiographies, doused in miracle and mythic generality, is not an easy proposition. Wisely, Mulchandani offers us a mix of fact and legend and does not pigeonhole these women as secular feminist icons, estranged from their historical context, or the sacred longing that shaped them.
Unsurprisingly, vicious mothersin-law, hostile husbands and litanies of siddhis abound in these legends. But figures of startling individuality emerge too. The accounts I was particularly struck by were those I was unfamiliar with, like Gujarati poet Gangasati, who offers
her daughter-in-law some sage advice on existential questions, not a safe recipe for domestic status quo-ism, or Toral who switches partners and weathers storms (literally and figuratively) without ever losing her equipoise.
A distinctive characteristic of this verse is its often unbridled eroticism. Poets like Andal and Akka Mahadevi, for instance, are audacious in their articulation of sexual desire. Indeed, the trope of the woman in love—yearning, but confident of her desirability—imbued the verses of male Bhakti poets as well with deeper faith in the mutuality of their relationship with the divine.
The diversity of tone and approach in this verse is remarkable. Janabai’s love of god as mother (Vitthai) is striking, as is the idiosyncratic devotion of Avvaiyar and Karaikal Ammaiyar, who ostensibly opted for old age and ‘ghost’ status, respectively—surely a symbolic indictment of a patriarchal society’s valorisation of female youth and beauty.
Mulchandani’s book whets one’s curiosity about some of these women. The gaps that she leaves are perhaps best filled in by the poetry itself—that great, soaring, deep-throated heritage of self-discovery—that thankfully remains available to us even today. ■ —Arundhathi Subramaniam