Female Saints, Self-Fashioning, and Freedom: New Directions in the Comparative Study of Historical Exemplars

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. 

Akka Mahadevi, a women saint and a major figure among the cadre of vachana-composers of the twelfth-century, has received much attention for her bold lyrical poems, which express intense devotion to and personal love for Shiva. This paper seeks to complicate the popularly-held representation of Mahadevi as a woman in love with the god by paying attention to poems that remain outside the general public’s focus and scholarly considerations. These “neglected” poems feature textual and literary elements that are not usually associated with Mahadevi. They include quotations of Sanskrit scripture and exhibit a catechistic worldview; their authorial voice is concerned with prescribed religious life. In the presentation, I shall contrast between the multiple subjectivities in Mahadevi’s poetry, suggest ways of understanding these contrasts by considering the historical contexts in which they were generated, and ask how we could accommodate multiple subjectivities of a “branded” woman saint.

Poetry attributed to Lal Ded first appears in the historical record in the late seventeenth century, over 300 years after she died, and thus was unlikely written by her but by later Kashmiri Hindu men. Even the earliest writings to mention Lal Ded, which are hagiographical, were written by Sufi men in the late 1500s. Through a close analysis of these early sources, this paper argues the Kashmiri woman saint Lal Ded was utilized in these earliest sources to shape and define a new ascetic masculinity—free from, but not unrelated to, other competing paradigms of masculinity in early modern Kashmir. New frameworks for understanding women saints may be produced through examining such historical reconfigurations of gendered protocols and expected behaviors, providing insights into the self-fashioning of past religious communities for both men and women.

The power of exemplary women from the past in the devotional (bhakti) traditions of Hinduism operates in participatory communal practices of story and song that attend them, their identities and voices relational and labile even as those of practitioners are, particularly in the case of the immensely popular sixteenth-century Krishna devotee Mirabai. This paper will argue that people’s continuing engagement with her story and songs reveal significant ways that such women open up alternative possibilities beyond normative gendering and facilitate the development of more expansive selves for both men and women devotees (bhaktas).  Through practices of singing and importantly also composing songs in her name as well as stories about her, people find their own voices, forge community, and craft alternate selves beyond socially prescribed identities and valuations. Such an approach offers an important avenue for comparative study when the lives and words of such women themselves are irretrievable.

It is clear reading the poetry of 18th c. devotional poet Vengamamba that she imagined herself as a kind of ascetic. Not only do her compositions reflect a depth of philosophical and yogic training, but she identifies herself as a poet and scholar, a friend of Vishnu. Most Telugu audiences, however, do not know Vengamamba through her textual compositions. They know her through oral life histories and hagiographical texts and films, which present her as a woman who refused marriage and traditional gender roles on the grounds that she was already married to Vishnu. This paper will examine this gap in the nature of the (male hagiographers’) fashioning and self-fashioning of Vengamamba. By contextualizing hagiographical narratives within the historical and cultural moment of the 19th c. this paper argues that the hagiographers and Vengamamba operate on very differing definitions of female asceticism and imagine very contrasting visions of Telugu womanhood.