Abstract: This paper attempts to strike a comparison
between the articulation of select women poets who are separated by space and
time but united by the desire for freedom. Both The Therigatha, a
collection of poems by the early Buddhist nuns called Theris and
Wild Words: Four Tamil Poets,
a collection of twentieth-century feminist poetry by Tamil women, offer an
insight into the dynamics of patriarchal oppression of the female body and its
rebellion, through different ways, albeit differentiated by vast stretches of
history and time. Female body and sexuality and its intersection with identity,
politics, religion and caste, as treated within the cultural context of their
times, is at the core of the discourse. These poems focus on the body's
resistance to the cultural norms of the times, be it the strictly religious
setting of the Buddhist Sangha of the 6th Century CE or the Tamil social
context of the 20th Century CE. These poems, when analysed through the lens of
intersectional feminism, throw light on the lived experiences of women against
the background of the perennial Nature-Culture debate informing the ethos of the
Indian subcontinent.
Keywords: female
body, sexuality, religion, caste, rebellion, articulation.
“When
freedom exists, why would anyone want
imprisonment and execution?”
Therigatha
The Indian subcontinent is known for its
strange mix of materiality and spirituality. It occupies a unique stature in
terms of coalescing variables of gender, caste, class, and religious divisions
into its societal matrix. At one end of the spectrum, we find consistent
articulations for social justice and change. In contrast, at the other end,
discourses show a blind conformity to age-old notions of tradition and culture
among distinct groups. Across centuries, we notice curt and evocative
expressions in the form of literature addressing the ambivalence shown by the
value-ridden Indian society. One such voice is that of Therigatha,
included in the Pali Canon of Theravada Buddhism, an early Buddhist text
ascribed to women converts to Buddhism, women from different strata of society,
placed around the 4th and 5th century BC. Another voice,
far removed from these ancient times and into the twenty-first century, is the
poetry of feminist poets of Tamilnadu, a southern state of India.
Separated by
time and geography, women in Therigatha and the women in Wild Words
engage with themes of embodiment, body sexuality, and individuation in
starkly diverse ways. These narratives exhibit similarity in their reclamation
of agency while they seemingly differ in their acceptance or neglect of their
bodies. What does a closer look entail? This paper offers a comparative study of
some poems from the Therigatha, written by bhikkhunis, the female
Buddhist renunciants and select poems of Kutti Revathi and Sukirtharani, the
feminist poets of Tamilnadu who vociferously struggled against the casteist
patriarchy with their unprecedented writing. Comparing these poets who belong to
two vastly disparate centuries offers a nuanced look at the evolution of the
patriarchal system over the centuries, the perspectival changes in women’s
outlook on their lives and how they foreground their lived experiences. The
status of women, from being a silent witness to all societal and cultural
invasions on their bodies and sexuality to being agents of change and
resistance, is analysed. What do these expressions say about the socio-cultural
contexts, and how does it change their lived realities for the better? What are
the commonalities and differences in the perception of these women, and how do
they negotiate their identity in their contexts through their practices and
expressions? Is there any notable change in the patriarchal worldview over the
millennia? This paper seeks to answer these questions.
The
nature-culture debate in Body and sexuality studies is a long-standing one.
Sparked by Sigmund Freud(1905), who was one of the first to examine human
sexuality as unconscious libidinal drives that affect the behaviour and
character of an individual, many theorists from Michel Foucault(1978), Levi-
Strauss (1969), Shulamith Firestone(1970) Judith Butler(1990), Gayle
Rubin(1975), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1990)Nancy Chodorow (1978) to Anne
Fausto-Sterling(1985)(2000) have unequivocally maintained how the body and
sexuality of an individual are moulded as much by social, cultural and
historical factors as by biological factors. The centrality of power, discourse,
cultural conditionings, and the reproduction of socially gendered roles have a
profound impact on how one perceives one’s body and sexuality. As Elizabeth
Grosz puts it succinctly throughout her work: The body
is never simply a biological entity but always a cultural, social, and political
phenomenon. (Grosz, 1994)
Intersectional
feminism offers a lens that helps one gauge the impact of the convergence of
multiple discriminations at work. Here, gendered experience is intertwined with
categories of religion, caste and social class. The theoretical framework
accounts for the exploration of agency and resistance in women subjugated by
monastic religious structures and who, in turn, exert their spiritual autonomy.
As Susan Bordo (1993) argues: “The body is a site of discipline, but also of
resistance to discipline. It is an arena where social norms are enacted,
enforced, and sometimes transgressed.” This transgression is also very much
evident in the poems of Tamil feminists, who also bring the play of caste
identity into their collective trauma. Buddhist notions of body and sexuality
are linked to the central Buddhist doctrine of renunciation, impermanence and
the non-self, and so, these poems from Therigatha are shaped by a tension
between embodied sexual experience and the need to transcend bodily desire. In
traditional Tamil poetry, on the other hand, women are always depicted as the
beloved, or a mother or a seductress. All these images are meant to satisfy the
cultural demands of being a second fiddle to the male counterpart. Women’s
voices are either submerged in a plenitude of male voices or are couched in
“beautiful” poetic terms.
An intriguing ambivalent attitude is
exhibited towards the feminine and women in the early Buddhist tradition. There
seems to be a lack of clarity regarding biological sex and social gender. This
is very well reflected in Buddhist literature as well. Alan Sponberg categorises
the multivocal attitudes to women in Buddhism into four: 1) Soteriological
Inclusiveness: characterised by the notion that one's sex or caste or class is
never a barrier to spiritual liberation, here, women are free to pursue their
spiritual goals as freely as their male counterparts. 2) Institutional
Androcentrism: With the institutionalisation of Buddhism after Gautama’s death,
certain precepts regarding the entry of women into the institution were put in
place. This naturally tended to be in line with the preservation and
reinforcement of the social standards of male domination and female
subordination. 3) Ascetic Misogyny: An attitude distinct from all others in
stereotyping women as the root of all evils, of impurity, ruin and destruction.
Relatively aggressive and hostile, this fear of the feminine portrayed women as
the snare of Mara, the incarnation of evil. 4) Soteriological Androgyny: An
overarching ideology that places both masculinity and femininity as
dialectically interactive modes that are in mutual complementarity to each other
and serve as the foundation of existence itself.
In the poems of the first Buddhist women
written two millennia ago, we find instances of women’s lives overhauled by the
spiritual turn of events. These women were once ordinary women who conformed to
the stereotypical roles of being wives, concubines or daughters of male
patriarchs. Some were rich belonging to the royal family or upper strata of
society, others belonged to the lower rungs, they were servants or prostitutes,
women who had no voices, whatsoever. Thus, Therigatha offers us a glimpse
into the lives of women of all class and caste distinctions of ancient India.
Their expressions are poems of self-transformation, a moment through unbearable
suffering to liberation through renunciation of the body. Eventually, all poems
in the Therigatha are announcements of freedom, the joy and the strength
of being free. In addition to being historical documents, they tell us about the
minimal change in the gaze accorded to the female body by the patriarchy, even
though centuries have gone past. In her study of the 6th-century Tamil poem
Manimekhalai, Paula Richman argues how the rhetoric of gender in literature
changes from stereotypical representations of women into transcending gender in
the context of the enlightenment of the Buddhist nuns. In a strictly patriarchal
order, these women take the path of liberation as the sole method to escape the
suffering inflicted on them.
Kisagotami and Patachara represent two
bhikkhunis who choose to free themselves from the cultural matrix, which regards
women who lost their sons as someone “who ate her dead sons” (Poems 74). They
form a community among themselves and support each other through the trauma,
showing another road, one that gives them meaning in their otherwise despised
existence. Disillusionment greets them after years of trials inside a thankless
and burdensome marriage ordained by societal norms and the intense emotional
tribulations of losing their children to death.
While the nuns followed a monastic
path of abandoning domestic life, it was the bondage of servitude, not the daily
experience of living, that they left behind. For Patachara, there was no need
for a bodhi tree; her mind was set free from suffering, and she entered
enlightenment right in her hut after the mundane act of putting out her lamp.
(Liang n.d.)
Suffering becomes the crucible in which
they melt down, burn away their past and rise as enlightened beings. These women
see through the hypocrisies of the patriarchal society just as they see the
impermanence of worldly life. Kisagotami points out:
“Now I am someone with depravities’
darts cut out,
With the burden laid down
Who has done what needs to be done”
(Poems, 223-26, pp.53)
Similar is the case of Vassethi and
Sundari, who find inspiration in the life stories of Kisagotami and Patachara.
In the presence of an enlightened bhikkhuni, these women “split open the mass of
internal darkness”(48). They find strength in spirituality and consolidate
themselves as a community, weaving a history of women's solidarity and guiding
the next generations of similar women trapped in the system.
Apart from the domestic responsibilities,
the women confess in these poems about the urges of the senses. By the Buddhist
tradition of renunciation, these women see the “depravities that ooze from
within”(83) as a trap set by ‘Mara’, the personification of death and evil and
the tempter who seduces the ‘theris’ to catapult them down from their august
achievements. Theris like Sela, Chala, Khema and Siha (23) even attempt suicide
overwhelmed by the desires of the body. Here, Mara could be interpreted as the
male gaze on the female body, the cultural stereotyping of women as sexual
objects, and give us information about how women historically have succumbed to
this fantasised version of the female body and sexuality. Ambapali is an example
of such a manipulation by the patriarchy. Desired by many men and known as the
‘beautiful Ambapali”, she is made a prostitute by the authorities, saying, “Let
her belong to everyone” (136). Ambapali describes her journey from complete
identification with the beautiful image of her body, a body prone to seduce men
and her dis-identification with her bodily image post-enlightenment.
Transgressing the cultural norms,
bhikkhunis openly give up their sexuality and are not ready to be seduced as
they surrender to a new value system espoused by Buddha. They give up their
roles to be ordained to a higher reality. As they renounce their past life, they
shun their moral corruptions conditioned by the cultural world, all that holds
them back and enter into a new world of spirituality. Women’s divinities
immediately become sexless ((Upadhayay, 2020) when they trod the path of
spiritual attainment. They are not considered evil anymore but are accepted as
guides by their family and community members, even by male members. They garner
an identity that they are not allowed within the rigid patriarchal confines of
conjugality.
Tamil feminist poetry has its roots in
the akam and puram poetry of the Sangam period, which aligns with
the Tholkappiyam, a textbook on Tamil Poetics. Quite contrary to the male
perspective of objectification and sexualisation of women’s bodies enshrined in
these poems, a new female angle was given by writers Ambai, Sivakami, Salma,
Bama, and Malathi Maitri, to name a few. They, through their writings, subverted
the established order, challenged patriarchal notions regarding female
experiences, and gave vent to their most profound feelings of resentment and
rebellion. Drawing on Dalit literature, the intersections of caste, class and
religion with gender explored through these works unearthed many repressed
ghosts hidden deep beneath the female experiences. The very nature of their work
was destabilising the societal order, thereby raising many eyebrows and
vilifying them as “immoral women” who were bent on desecrating the Tamil
culture. Despite all the backlash, these women poets, including Kutti Revathi
and Sukirtharani, broke through the age-old reticence of women in describing
matters relating to body and sexuality. The translator of Wild Words: Four
Women Poets, Lakshmi Holmstrom, makes a pertinent note about the poets and
obliquely about the cultural context, which is essential to quote at length. She
opines:
It is perhaps helpful to remember that
the traditional values prescribed for the “Good” Tamil woman were accham, madam
and naanam (fearfulness, propriety, modesty or shame). Our poets have chosen,
instead, the opposite virtues of fearlessness, outspokenness and ceaseless
questioning of prescribed rules. …they have claimed as their foremothers, role
models and equals Avvai, Velliviidhi and Sappho; Anna Akhmatova, Sylvia Plath
and Kamala Das. And Eve, above all, who defied divine authority to pluck the
fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. (104)
In alignment with her knowledge of the
Siddha system of medicine (a naturopathic system of alternative medicine in
India), Kutti Revathi aspires to assert the centrality of the body and its
interconnectedness to Nature and the Universe at large. This is posited against
the rigid cultural and societal baggage and constant demands from the female
body. In her poem Breasts, which created an outrage among the traditional
mindsets, she points to the organic existence of the breast in the human body.
They distil love, milk, blood and tears, the co-relatives of all human emotions-
lust, love, maternal warmth, suffering and intense sorrow.
“Breasts
are bubbles rising in wet marshy lands
As they gently swelled and blossomed
In due season, at Time’s Edge,
I watched over them in amazement”
(“Breasts”, Wild
Words, 58)
These lines resonate with all girls at
puberty and the association of their feminine identity with the breasts; the
amazement gradually wanes to shame at the patriarchal gaze as she is distanced
from her body image. The poet further reiterates:
“They have never forgotten
To enthuse the seed-beds
of all my changing seasons” (58)
They change with the ever-changing
seasons but are always with the person. The body and the seasons are
interconnected, one enthusing the other, reflecting each other like the mirror,
like the river. They are corporeal, transient, and made of earth. There is a
sense of awe and wonder at the swelling and blossoming of the breasts following
the seasons. One cannot think of a better symbiotic connection other than with
the body and the universe, a natural and biological connection that stands
against the societal inhibitions and restraints put on it. Set free from the
shackles of the outward clothing of culture, it reunites with the earth, its
seasons and its natural flow.
The poem ‘Rain River’ uses the
image of "red earth and pouring rain” and interacts with a reference from an
Akam poem of Sangam literature from the second century AD. In the act of
lovemaking, the lovers transform into time and season: intense images of
nature's action are plenty, its force, pull, fierceness, whirling, and tossing
packed into the sea, offering a glimpse into the ferocity of nature itself.
“You are the hastening of time;
I am the blossoming season” (Wild
Words, p.60)
Here, the bodies lose their individuality
and identification with the cultural conditioning. They are let loose and are
free to embrace because there is no other way of bringing this chain of events
to a climax and, thereby, restoration. In contrast to the stereotypical images
of a dominant male and a submissive female in sexual union, these lines reveal
the agency and the participation of the female counterpart as they both traverse
the boundaries of pleasure. The poem vehemently subverts the conventional dictum
of passive women being fertile lands on which men sow seeds in the act of
copulation.
Sukirtharani’s poems are bound in
forceful imagery of nature: the mountains, the river, the trees, the tiger, and
the volcano all converge into one thing – her body, lying still. The body is
felt as a whirling vertex agitating the earth. There is a strong sense of
oneness with the universe. At the same time, the opposites blend harmoniously in
her line, hollows and cliffs, day and night, heat and coolness, which are very
much characteristic of the Yin Yang nature of the universe. There is no mention
of the culture or its precepts. The body is unmindful of them. It flows on its
own, following nature’s rhythm.
Paradoxically, this still body becomes a site of resistance, redefinition and
empowerment. We see this still site in her poem “My Body”, where a Dalit woman’s
body is being violated just as a deer is hunted out in the forest ferociously,
brutally by a tiger. The poet claims: “In
the end, Nature becomes my body, lying still”.(Sukirtharani, “My Body”, p.83)
In the poem “Nature’s Fountainhead”,
the oneness of the person is disturbed by the violence of the ‘other’. Here,
you see the other setting off an attack on the land, and the images of control,
domination, and premeditated violence take over the scene. The poem provides
some stark contrasts. The whole motif is centred on destruction and domination
by the other and resurrection of the self. The immense possibilities of life
extend itself before impending death. As the eternal source of life - energy,
the “I” in the poem inundated the other as a river in sudden flood, never to be
confined, becoming the elements of nature, free and untamed. The tamer is
subdued in the process as his intentions of domination become trite and
meaningless. The lines within the quote “I myself will become earth, fire, sky,
wind, water, the more you can find me the more I spill over (85)” strongly
reminiscent of Maya Angelou’s Still I Rise.
Kutty Revathi and Sukirtharani, through
invoking a natural body, identify themselves with the universal principle. In
doing so, they rise against the constructed world of social mores and decorum,
splits the veneer of civilisation and stands boldly naked in front of the world
as an organism. This is the way to freedom, a self-willed act. After renouncing
the age-old values and veils that hide the woman’s body, we see the body
pristine in its natural surroundings, the same in which organisms thrive. The
poem, “The Last Kiss”, conjures up the image of the Garden of Eden
and the forbidden fruit and explores a similar garden in which the lovers are in
their elements and gracefully partake of the bliss of the union without any
cultural baggage of shame and guilt. There is an absolute abandonment of the
need for societal approval and acknowledgement. These women inhabit a wild,
fiercer realm of elemental life. Here, pleasure and pain occupy their proper
places and balance each other out, as Kutti Revathi suggests:
“from the press of an embrace,
they distil love;
from the shock of childbirth,
milk, flowing from blood” (“Breasts”,
p.59)
These Tamil poets emphasise how caste is
marked on their bodies and adds to additional layers of repression and
invisibility. It forms the ideological basis for control and domination in the
Hindu social order (Banerjee & Ghosh, 2019, pp. 5–6). Kutti Revathi notes
how a woman's body is used as an instrument to keep the caste practices alive.
Over centuries, women have not been
allowed to utter a word in public, not to learn anything, celebrate their
sexuality and body – not to perceive themselves as human beings at all. It is
very much a strategy of men of the upper caste who are very used to inculcating
Hindu values and practices into the people of the soil. (Language.Kutti Revathi
| Spark, 2012)
Sukrtharani, in her poem “I speak up
bluntly,” speaks about how she, as a child, always tried to hide she was born
into a Dalit family in her town, in her classroom, silently suffering the fate
of the downtrodden in India. Towards the end, she builds resilience by speaking
up before society, saying, “I am a Paraichi” (79). Mangalam, in her study
on Sukirtharani, points out: “The affirmation of Paraiyar as a term of
resistance and interrogation of dominant groups’ vocabulary brings together
questions of language, identity and affinity with land that figure repeatedly in
Sukirtharani’s poetry” (78). Thus the Dalit feminist standpoint on the
rebellious female body is a double-edged sword, one which strikes back at
patriarchy and casteism with equal vigour. However, it is not without the
attendant trauma markings on the female body. It is not an easy affair for women
to break out of the taboo shell of one’s own body.
As opposed to the female body being
considered the embodiment of beauty and evil by the patriarchal gaze, the poems
of the early Buddhists and the Tamil poets conceive it as an intellectual and
organic space. Throughout the poems of the Therigatha, we find references
to the conventional description of the female body as beautiful, adorable and
subject to the male gaze. Yet, in the articulation of the enlightened women,
there is the acceptance of their bodies in their decrepit and destitute states.
The decoration of the body to meet the demands of the societal gaze is no longer
a concern for the bhikkhunis as they move up into a higher reality. In this
reality, they are individuals pursuing a goal that gives meaning to their lives.
What the bhikkhunis overthrow or ignore is the cultural sheaths attached to the
body and not the biological body, for they look at the body as a vehicle for
liberation. Opposing the privilege that the patriarchal system accords privilege
to the young, beautiful female body, the body in its infirmity and senescence
during the advanced ages is equally celebrated. Ambapali’s verse shows this
convergence as she describes:
“Once my body was beautiful,
like a polished slab of gold,
now it is covered
with very fine wrinkles.
It’s just as the Buddha, the speaker
of truth, said,
nothing different than that.”(63-64)
On the other hand, the Tamil poets come
out of the cocoons spun by the cultural and social world and find a new
language, an ecriture feminine, “a language still afloat in the womb…
which no one has spoken so far” (Sukirtharani, Infant language”,77) to relate to
their biological body, the desires of the body and its interconnectedness with
other lives around it and to the Nature itself. They respond to the natural
desires of their body, celebrate them, give them ample expressions. They also
break the taboos around the female body and sexuality as part of the age-old
caste and religious attributions. The articulations reveal the continuing
systemic oppression of the patriarchy throughout centuries, nevertheless, it
shows the constant rebellion of the female and a transformation in their
attitudes making them bold to voice opinions as they steadfastly strive to
reclaim agency. Both these are bold attempts at self-realisation and
metamorphosis and a journey towards finding freedom, the ultimate value of human
life and in their journey, though divided by space and time, the bhikkhunis
and the Tamil feminist poets forge a community of inspirational women among
themselves.
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