‘Wild Women’: Anthology of Bhakti poems shows how women shaped language subconscious in India

With Wild Women, a wide-ranging anthology of hand-picked Bhakti poems from all the major Indian languages, poet Arundhathi Subramaniam has joined the great league of scholars like Susie Tharu, K Lalita, Vanamala Viswanatha, Malashri Lal, Ruth Vanita, Mrinal Pandey, Mamta Kalia, and Kshama Sharma. Subramaniam will be remembered not only for her poems but also as one of those luminaries of post-colonial women’s studies, who fought against the unipolar dominance of the West by recharging native traditions, local knowledge systems and movements like the Bhakti tradition.

How did she recharge these indigenous traditions? Through the electric sockets of what is called “thick translation” – translations adorned with footnotes, brief biographies, insightful prefaces, and (in some cases) also with adaptations or intertextual transplantation of what the 9th Century poet and critic Anandavardhana had once referred to as dhwani inlaid in Anyayoni poems.

An anthology of fellowship

Subramaniam’s grand anthology of such translations is going to be a throbbing presence for at least three kinds of people: Radical thinkers, fellow poets, and students of intricate mass movements like Bhakti. First of all, it is quite a soul support for radical thinkers and fellow citizens of our troubled times, who keep wondering why a pursuit as poetic as religion should be allowed to be highjacked by the most non-poetic segment of society, the fundamentalist forces, and also why both religion and enlightenment which had once promised redemption on earth, now stand defeated as claims with fragmented value.

Subramaniam cogently establishes Bhakti as the binary of spineless sycophancy by highlighting the edgy brazenness of voice- and body-centricity of these outstanding poets who foreground our dream of breaking social hierarchies by pulling down the barrier between the cosmic and the commonplace, the macro and the micro, the body and the mind in their metaphors. Underlining the good old theory of correspondence, which visualises the world as an interconnected web, they enact a wild bear hug between the heterogeneous opposites with the tropes of comparison:

“I locked the doors of my body
trapped the thief of life and held my breath.
Chaining him in my heart’s dark cellar
I stripped him of his skin with the whip of Om”

— Lal Ded, translated by Ranjit Hoskote.

Subramaniam terms the anthology a “fellowship of vagabonds, lovers, moon gazers, of all those who have lost their citizenship cards “ – everything but their ragged longing for more. Doesn’t this “citizenship card” ring a bell? This is the job of a good poet – to play with the various dhwanis and make a mocktail of all rasas. Subramaniam has selected primarily – but not exclusively – women poets who surrendered not to external authority but to the dictates of the spirit, the ones like Meera. For instance:

Mere to Girdhar Gopal Doosaro na Koi

Girdhar is my master, none else

— Translated by Rahul Soni

It goes without saying that Meera’s denial of the patriarchal mode of control is a bold “no” even to royal patronage. Whatever she has to say, she announces loud and clear. Her playful aradhya (and also of those of other women Bhakt poets like Janabai) sees her prayers transformed into a blueprint of the kind of man every sensitive woman yearns for:

“Jana sweeps with a broom
The lord loads up the garbage
Among basil plants growing wild Jani loosens her hair,
The lord with butter in the palm massages her hair.”

— Translated by Dilip Chitre.

Flipping through the pages of the book, fellow poets of our times will also identify with a seeker’s angst in every poet, the angst that Subramaniam calls “lying on bathroom floor and smelling the 3 am desolation of the pillow.” They will derive solace from the fact that they are not alone in their “terrors, longings , meltdowns.”

How women shaped the linguistic subconscious

Even in her scholarly endeavour, the poet in Subramaniam is alive and she deconstructs the Bhakti poets, cracking the central aporia in key texts from a historical perspective. Floating the text intelligently against the current, she does something enormously useful for students of mass movements like Bhakti, especially in presenting the role women and the lowly-born played in shaping up its linguistic subconscious.

When Buddhism and Islam, the two new religions, started playing the Pied Piper to the masses, Dharmadhikaris were shaken out of their slumbers. With the dead being awakened, they released scriptures from the custody of Sanskrit and let the essence of Yoga, Tantra and Sankhya flow into local languages, the lingua franca of women and the lowly-born who were denied the privilege of formal education (and, thus, access to Sanskrit, this classical language of scriptures). When women and the lowly-born entered the folds of Bhakti, the texture of poetry underwent a sea change. It became more informal, chatty, body-centric and lucid.

Why body-centric? To my mind, this was because both women and the lowly-born had no other assets but their bodies to boast of, the body which was the sole source of labour, production, and, in the case of women, also of reproduction. Why chatty and even witty? Because these people had never held the seats of power, which teaches you to be tight-lipped:

“If menstrual blood makes me impure
Tell me who was not born of that blood..

The first sound is echhil, the first form is ecchil
The four Vedas of the Brahmins are echhil*

— ShenkottaiAavudai Akkal, translated by Kanchana Natarajan

*(“Ecchil” is the idea that one can be polluted by another’s saliva.)

Even today, when a woman is seen having “satsang” with men over a cup of coffee in Mandi House, a hurricane of wild speculation comes her way. Now imagine beautiful women like Andal, Akka, Meera, Bahinibai, Muktabai and Rani having “satsang” with men on chowrahas in medieval India. Subramaniam’s insightful preface helps us visualise such grand spectacles, highlighting situational ironies with tongue-in-cheek remarks. She begins her introduction with a reference to her chanting of the Sahasranama in a remote temple in South India, quietly hinting at how each name opened like a petal in the sahasrar and how the multiple names, highlighting the various aspects of the Mother Principle in each of us, finally bloomed into this book celebrating multiplicity in the best sense of the term.

Anamika is a poet, social worker and novelist.

Wild Women: Seekers, Protagonists and Goddesses in Sacred Indian Poetry, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Penguin India.