The nature of bhakti among women in Medieval India

The word ‘bhakti’ is generally understood as meaning ‘selfless devotion’ to the Divine. When we talk of the bhakti movement per se, we mean the religious movement in which the main spiritual practice was devotion to God, or bhakti. The devotion was directed towards a particular form of God, such as Shiva, Vishnu, Murukan or Shakti. The bhakti movement started in southern India and slowly spread north during the later half of the medieval period (800-1700 CE). This movement is known to have played a crucial role in shaping the cultural and religious life of people of all religions in the subcontinent. The bhaktas asserted the equality of all souls before God and denounced caste and class. There is a vast amount of bhakti literature available to us for study today. It needs to be made clear that the bhakti movement did not start as a movement of the lowest and the poorest classes. A. K. Ramanujan reasonably suggests that to ‘give up something’ necessarily implies having that ‘something’ in the first place. The bhakti movement did start with people from the ‘upper castes’, but soon began to enlist people from all castes and occupations.

It is surprising, however, that women bhaktas inspite of having flouted societal norms and having defied convention ‘were not persecuted as heretics or dismissed as lunatics’, but were given much respect and their teachings later became a part the living and growing tradition. This is made clearer by the fact that it is nearly impossible to study poetry without coming across works by eminent women bhaktas such as Mira in the case of North India or Andal in the case of the South (Tamil literature).

Given their belief in the centrality of personal devotion, poet-saints were highly critical of ritual observances as maintained and fostered by the Brahmin priesthood. Another thing in common was their usage of the vernacular, or regional languages of the masses, as opposed to the sacred language of the elite priesthood, Sanskrit. This practice, too, stemmed from the movement’s focus on inner, mystical, and highly personal devotion to the Divine.

Though there are several things in common, in practice bhakti meant different things to men and women. The first basic difference between men and women bhaktas is that it was possible for a man to pursue his chosen path while still being a householder. Women bhaktas wrote of the obstacles of home, family tensions, the absent husband, meaningless household chores, and restrictions of married life, including their status as married women. In many cases, they rejected traditional women’s roles and societal norms by leaving husbands and homes altogether, choosing to become wandering bhaktas; in some instances they formed communities with other poet-saints. The sacrifices made by women bhaktas included not only the giving up of marriage, but also wealth and status. For example, Mira wore the tabooed ghunghroos and danced in public, Mahadevi Akka and Lal Ded discarded clothing altogether.

In the case of men, bhakti often meant undergoing a change or conversion in order to discover god and a realization of the self. This was often followed by resuming the worldly duties while maintaining the devotion alongside. For women, however, bhakti was a means to free oneself from the constricting social order. Bhakti, in this case, did not mean the incorporation of the ‘right path’ within the framework of daily living, but the selection of a different and radical religious path altogether. The women bhaktas are in love with their God from the outset. Their love towards God is, more often than not, like that towards a lover or a husband. This would thus necessitate the giving up of oppressive marriages and would justify their bhakti due to its religious overtones. The union with god is also envisaged differently. Men achieve the state at a metaphorical level: the union being a metaphysical one. Women envisage it much more explicitly.

This is also one of the many things women bhaktas have in common with the untouchable saints. The conflict of both(women bhaktas and the untouchables) is not with themselves(as in the case of male bhaktas), but with others who prevent them from gaining access to their Gods; the oppressive households in the case of women and the ‘upper castes’ in case of the untouchables.

Interestingly enough, the idea of men looking up to a goddess as a lover or wife, is unheard of. A tentative argument supporting the different nature of bhakti among men may be that goddesses like Lakshmi and Parvati were merely looked upon as consorts of the Gods in the classical framework. Also, the cult of ‘Shakti’ in West Bengal, which influences our present day tradition of worship of goddesses like Durga, had not come into existence then.

The use of vernaculars mentioned earlier means that the interaction of the bhaktas with the Divine becomes more personalized and develops beyond the conception of God as a lord or master. He is now attributed more day to day forms like those of a father, a husband, a lover or a child etc. Looking at the works of women bhaktas we see an increased flexibility in the vernaculars which are used to convey all kinds of ideas- from proverbial wisdom to complex philosophical thought. Most poetic compositions of women bhaktas have survived as oral traditions. There are written records, but then the men bhakti poets greatly outnumber the women. Mira is the only woman bhakta whose work has survived substantially.

The women saints, according to Ramanujan, all display a certain common pattern in their lives- be it Lal Ded of Kashmir, Mira of Rajasthan, Mahadevi Akka of Karnataka or Andal of Tamil Nadu. All of them are generally not bound to a man and may escape marriage or defy their parents in various ways- by transforming into an unmarriageable old woman like Avvai or by terrifying the husband with miracles as Karaikalammaiyar does.

Uma Chakravarty opines that the manner in which each of these women bhaktas deal with the issue of marriage is very different and it is linked to the deeper question of sexuality of these women and their explicit perception of the female body. For instance, Andal denies her sexuality or rather transcends it by going past the sexually active years into an ascetic kind of stage. Akka Mahadevi contrastingly, does not deny her sexuality but confronts it by stripping off all clothing. For her, modesty is a way of suppressing one’s sexuality and of giving way to others’ imagination or a way of inciting them. Stripping off clothing and walking naked is thus a refusal to acknowledge the notion of vulnerability of the female body and a refusal to make compromises because of it. Karaikalammaiyar, on the other hand, transforms her sexuality into an awesome power such that her husband and other men are terrified of her.

The lives and poetry of the woman bhaktas indicates that their relationship with the Divine was perceived as an idealized version of the conventional relationship of a woman to a man. The God took on different forms in different cases; he could be an equal at times or one to whom the bhaktin was subservient as in the case of Karaikalammaiyar. He was not a distant object of devotion, but someone perceived as being so real, that one could communicate with him at a personal level. In a way, women bhaktas tried to indicate an alternative model of gender relations.

It is interesting to note that women bhaktas in the process of being accepted in the living and growing traditions, also get contained. In case they were not accepted then, they would’ve threatened to become real alternatives- with women routinely walking out on oppressive husbands and breaking established norms. The acceptance of the women bhaktas into the social order, in a way ‘takes the sting’ out of the movement. Therefore, while initially the bhakti movements are very radical, they become routinised over time. The deeper social message is lost in the religious ferverence or importance given to the ‘religion’ part of the movement. The social acceptance of women bhaktas did not mean that the lives of the ordinary woman had changed or become any better. It did not lead to an ‘expansion of options’, as Madhu Kishwar puts it, for the ordinary woman or the easy acceptance of women in unusual roles. Despite all the respect accorded to these women saints, it is ironical how women as suppressed in our country today. People may worship goddesses of learning and wisdom, but they’re unwilling to educate their own daughters. The framework within which we think needs to be expanded and the nature of the bhakti movements needs to be understood in its entirety.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

  • Introduction to Manushi(January-June 1989)- Madhu Kishwar
  • Talking to God in the Mother Tongue- A. K. Ramanujan
  • The World of the Bhaktin in South Indian Traditions: The Body and Beyond- Uma Chakravarty