Devotion, Freedom, and Identity: An Early Female Saint

The Tamil Śiva-bhakti poet-saint Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār is understood by that tradition to be the first devotional saint, and scholars date her to the sixth century. My argument is that she inhabited devotion as an exploration of the freedom to question inherited identity in order to create a resonant spiritual identity. She created a devotional subjectivity that dislodged key social identification markers such as gender, caste and class by only identifying herself in two self-determined ways in her poetry: As a servant and as a pēy (ghoul). At the heart of both is a transformative affective relationship to the god Śiva instead of social identity. The concept of a devotional subjectivity allows us to explore the play among self, persona, and transformation as an expressive freedom of self-fashioning. This puts the focus on the logics of female exemplars’ devotional writings instead of on the domesticating impact of biographical writings about them.