International Women’s Day, which brings its own reflections. Within such a strong culture as Sanatana Dharma it requires great courage for a Hindu woman to claim an individual identity, although the law of the land supports women. Her identity is usually subsumed in her husband’s, and society is noticeably wary of widows, divorcees, single women and women who live alone. It is as uncharitable to wives who do not bear sons.
Only two other kinds of women are accorded dignity—old women and renunciates. Traditionally, therefore, the only escape route for Hindu women from patriarchal culture was through religion. They could leave home only to become saints. The common link between such women saints is they usually wished to escape oppression or heartbreak at home. All but the girl-saint, Andal, in the ninth century, who loved Lord Vishnu. She is believed to have disappeared into his image at Srirangam temple.
Her poems to Krishna, the Tiruppavai and Nachiar Tirumozhi, were major influences on Ramanuja, the tenth-century founder of the casteless Srivaishnava movement, which swept like wildfire over India. Sant Ramanand of North India followed Ramanuja’s precepts and Sant Kabir was Ramanand’s disciple. The tradition includes deeply influential poets like Jayadeva in the twelfth century and Tulsidas in the sixteenth. This means that little Andal was a person of great influence in Indian history. However, our textbooks do not tell us that a girl child inspired a great and lasting religious and social reform movement. Its most recent affirmation was the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya that follows the Ramanandi tradition. Its motto is, Jaat-paat poochhe na koi, Hari ko bhaje so Hari ke hoi (Do not ask about caste, whoever seeks God, becomes God’s). Kamleshwar Chaupal, a Dalit, laid the first brick for the Ram Mandir. The Akhil Bharatiya Manga Samaj, representing an ancient Dalit community, brought silver offerings to Ram Lalla and was received with honour at the temple.
Meanwhile, Karaikkaal Ammayar, ‘the old lady of Karaikkaal’, is the earliest-known Indian woman saint. Her name was Punitavati. She lived in the port city of Karaikkaal in the sixth century, in the old Chola country. She is one of the sixty-three ancient Tamil Shaiva saints, the Nayanmar, whose statues are found in every major Tamil Shaiva temple.
The legend goes that Punitavati was a young devotee of Shiva. Her husband, the merchant Paramadattan, refused to believe that she received a magic mango as a mark of Shiva’s favour. So, she begged Mahadev for another mango to convince Paramadattan that she spoke the truth. When the second mango appeared, Paramadattan could no longer think of Punitavati as his wife for she now seemed much above him. He moved to another town and married another woman. Punitavati was devastated. She begged Mahadev to turn her at once into an ugly old woman. She went all the way north and reportedly climbed Mount Kailash upside down on her head and hands, for she did not want to disrespectfully put her feet on it. Some interpret this sad story as very Shaiva, that she was liberated from a lifetime of worldly ties and went off to God sooner rather than later—but at what cost.
Besides Karaikal Ammayar, the best-known old woman saint is Avvai or Avvaiyar. The legend goes that when her parents fixed her marriage, young Avvai begged her beloved Ganesha to turn her into an old woman so that she could escape marriage and not waste her human birth as a slave of domesticity. After that, we have Akka Mahadevi of Karnataka in the twelfth century and Lal Ded or Lalleshwari of Kashmir in the mid-fourteenth century. They became ‘women saints’ after they were severely ill-treated by their in-laws. They left their families and actually wandered about naked in utter rejection of everything that their societies stood for.
Akka was ten when she was married and Lalla was twelve. Lalla had to eat last after everybody else. Her mother-in-law put a big stone on her plate and covered it with a layer of rice to make it look like a large helping. Her husband was of no support at all. Why was the mother-in-law so unkind to a little girl? Perhaps she was unkind because the cultural has sanctioned her the power to be so. But it is too easy to sneer that ‘women are women’s worst enemies’. If that is so, is it not because their softer natures have been perverted over the ages by the social pressure to produce sons and quietly put up with bad behaviour as their duty? In this discouraging scenario, both Akka and Lalla transferred all their love to Shiva. They wrote poems to Mahadev that people still remember and recite.
Marathi women saints like 13th century Jana Bai, who loved Krishna as Vitthala Pandurang at Pandharipur, did not have an easy time, either. Jana was left as a child at the temple by her starving parents. Sant Namdev rescued her and took her home. She spent her whole life as a servant. Such examples reinforce a pattern that women saints sublimated their suffering and individuality into God-love.
And then, in the 16th century, we have Meera Bai, who suffered extreme persecution from her royal in-laws because of her unswerving love for Krishna. Meera left home too, to take her chances alone although she was only thirty-eight years old. What made her and gently-bred girls like Akka and Lalla reject their prescribed life and wander alone into the aggressive, jeering world of the male gaze? We cannot begin to imagine what they must have endured, or the strength of mind they had to make and keep this terrifying choice. We can understand why Punitavati and Avvai wanted to be turned at once into old women. Keeping this in mind, although greatly improved from a century ago, it will take a collective effort across Hindu society to upgrade its attitude to women while retaining much of value from its vast tradition.
(Views are personal)