TEBACC session on Bhakti Women Poet- Saints

 TEBACC session on Bhakti Movement’s Five Women Saint Poets                                               

The Eclectic Books, Art and Culture Club (TEBACC) that I founded held an engrossing Lec-dem of poetry and devotional songs of five women saints of the Bhakti movement of medieval India- Andal, Akka Mahadevi, Mirabai, Soyrabai and Lalleshwari Devi by Rama Sundar Ranganathan. 

She is an accomplished exponent of the Indore gharana gayiki of Hindustani Shastriya Sangeet. A ganda-bandh shagird of Pandit Tejpal Singhji, the oldest living disciple of the legendary Ustad Amir Khan Sahab, she is also pursuing her PhD on the subject under the renowned musician Shri L Subramaniam. A former MBA from London, she has long since turned to music as her career specialization and professional pursuit.

Her engrossing rendition was more like a taster session for the packed audience who partook of the uplifting spirituality embedded in the outpourings of those truly gifted Bhakti women saints who walked this earth on their own terms, defying the prevalent patriarchal oppression of their times.

The session began with my contextualizing the concept and practice of Bhakti in historical and social terms. According to scholars there are many kinds of Bhakti even though we speak of it in the singular.  Its fluid definition can be seen in that there is Bhakti focused on Shiva, Vishnu or the Devi, bhakti by men and by women, Bhakti from the South or Bhakti from the North, early Bhakti or late Bhakti, Bhakti for the pantheon of Gods and Bhakti for the Supreme Power or a very personal God. Each form is different from one another but comes under the same overarching umbrella of the Bhakti movement. As H.S. Shivaprakash says, it is the first and greatest pan Indian literary and cultural movement which travelled across languages and regional barriers after originating in what we now know as Tamil Nadu.

With the backdrop of the legends of the three Sangam literature festivals, the Bhakti movement originated through a group of saint-poets, known as the Nayanmars and the Alwars. It saw the emergence of saints who were also poets. These saint-poets created a new idiom for devotional poetry of great literary achievement. It was an unorthodox, radical movement that tried to reform religious beliefs, transform social attitudes and shape literary expressions. It grew between the seventh and the seventeenth centuries in different parts of India.

Bhakti literature is a mix of the religious and the aesthetic. A Bhakti poem is both a visionary offering in a religious framework and an artistic creation in its own right. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Bhakti spread like wild fire, uniting the country as various voices were heard and revered. At the core of all Bhakti is the intensely personal, mystic consciousness mediated by the Bhakt with the chosen Power. 

The movement symbolised a powerful grassroot challenge to the Brahminical Hindu order with its prescriptive caste system. It was energised by ordinary people like weavers, housewives, young girls, potters, artisans, dhobis, traders and servants who led it or followed it.  Another significant  feature of the Bhakti movement was the creation of a rich and extensive literature in the vernacular languages. The Bhakti hymns in local languages had begun to be sung in the temples in place of Sanskrit ones. It was a non-Sanskritic and a non-Brahminical religious literature with reformative zeal and zest that countered  Brahmin orthodoxy. As A.K.Ramanujan says of Bhakti, "a great, many-sided shift occurred in Hindu culture and sensibility---------.”

It is in this context that Rama Sundar Ranganathan’s recital situated five women saints who excelled in their professing of Bhakti for their individual gods while becoming social reformers  championing equality amongst human beings. These exceptional iconoclastic five women saints were:

• Andal nee Kothai Naachiyaar of Tamil Nadu is the only female Alwar saint and an avatar of Bhoomi Devi 

• Akka Mahadevi of Karnataka of the Lingayat Shaiva community

• Mirabaiof Rajasthan  is the mystic poet devoted to Krishna 

• Soyrabai of Maharashtra in her Abhangs complains to god about untouchability and the restrictive caste system

• Lalleshwari Devi or Lal Ded of Kashmir wrote her poetry in Vakhs 

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