Chapter 3: Development of the Bhakti tradition in
3.4: Gender implications within the development
It demands no costly sacrifices or severe penances, and God‟s grace can be obtained without the long course of yoga ….Bhakti offers, in fact, a shortcut to an advanced spiritual state that may be obtained by other methods only through great striving, penance, and pain. The attitude of bhakti, however, is not something that can be obtained merely by the recitation of suitable hymns and prayers, or by vain repetitions. It involves constant consciousness and love of God”(Balsham 1989: 92).
Love was seen as more important than knowledge gained from learning, or books. Bhaktas asserted that self realisation was accessible even to the lowliest of people, and would denounce pride and self-righteousness, particularly found amongst the religious and other authority figures. The outward forms and rituals of Brahmanism were thus rejected, and the bhakti movement emphasised instead inner purity, devotion and personal religious experience.
would have had no power to stop him from pursuing this calling to God. In the case of a woman, however, her husband and in laws could physically prevent her from following her heart, and often this proved fatal for her.
Therefore most women bhaktas could only follow their hearts by discarding marriage altogether.
Ironically, this leaving of patriarchally-enforced relationships finds a theological basis within the bhakti literature. The love between Radha and Krishna is that of an older married woman, who pulled by the sound of Krishna’s flute, leaves a shadow of herself by her husband‟s side and goes out a night to meet him. This is essentially an illicit relationship, which would conventionally be described as adulterous, but it forms the theological underpinning of bhakti, which is the concept of love in separation. In actively pursuing her love for Krishna, Radha disobeys wifely duty, and we see her love for God transcending all social obligations.
For women bhaktas this leaving behind of all that was known, of all that defined their very being, required exceptional sacrifices. Most had to leave home, family, and all financial and economic security; many even faced death.
Because of the cost required of most of the women bhaktas in following this path, we find that they did not attract a wide following amongst other women, and remained the rare exception. However, their courage and integrity of being remains of huge significance within the society, as figures of hope and possibility.
A further element within this tradition is the place of gender and in particular of masculinity. Ramanujan writes:
Power entails the seeking of more power; power and privilege need defences. Men have to overcome the temptation for this kind of seeking. They have to throw away their defences. One of the last things they overcome, in these traditions, is maleness itself. The male
saints wish to become women; they wish to drop their very maleness, their machismo. Saints then become a kind of third gender. The lines between male and female are crossed and recrossed in their lives (Ramanujan 1989: 10).
Within this tradition, then, in sharp contrast with every other tradition in Hinduism, masculinity itself poses the greatest challenge and obstacle in the path to union with God. Ramanujan goes on to say that males within this devotional tradition are to take on female personas, learning what it means to be passive and submit oneself to something beyond oneself. But no female saint within this tradition ever takes on a male persona. Being female, she has no need to change anything to turn toward God. The female saint, like the untouchable and or a low caste person, does not need to shed anything: she has nothing to shed. She is already exactly where she needs to be. This is particularly true when the woman saint has already relinquished the only things which traditionally gave her identity within the community, namely, marriage and motherhood.
Mukta writes that even to this day male bhaktas sing in the female register which is termed stri vachya. She goes on to say:
When men of a society in which the male consciousness and male constructs are used as yard sticks for the whole of the human experience begin to sing in the stri vachya, then a radical shift occurs in the moral order. It requires a break from and a transcendence of the world as created and upheld by men. It requires the recreation of humanity in the female image. The world has to become strimay ie the world has to become female (Mukta 1999: 87).
This she says is much more than just empathy with the female subject, but an entering into the mind and heart of a woman.
Within this understanding, however, an incredible tension is implicit. When a woman embraces her own truth and follows her own calling, her life becomes
a profound and permanent challenge to the dominant socio-religious authorities and norms of society. It is a model which is felt to threaten the whole fabric of Indian society. Thus women saints, like Mira, are, on one hand, held up as religious gurus and models; but, on another, they are objects of great scorn and outrage.
David Lorenzen points out that once Mira and others make the decision to abandon home and to follow this religious vocation, they can never return to their husbands and their families. The reversal is permanent, forever irreversible. In contrast, a man may play the role of a female or low caste person, but when the role playing is over, an upper class male saint can safely return to his original social identity. For a short while he may behave as if social distinctions and divisions are unimportant; but he never permanently rejects or abandons his true social identity or the hierarchical norms that legitimize him (Lorenzen 1995:191). This is an insight we must never ignore.
Kishwar writes “the easy acceptance of outstanding women in unusual roles today does not indicate our society‟s willingness to grant ordinary women their basic human rights. This duality pervades all aspects of our social and cultural life….while Saraswati is worshipped as goddess of learning, most families still are more willing to sacrifice for a son‟s education, and consider a daughter‟s education a relative waste. Communities which legislate a life of utter powerlessness for women fervently worship female deities as incarnations of power, destroyers of evil” (Kishwar 1987: 6). She goes on to say that we have to work to expand these spaces within society so that
“women need not be exceptional in order to claim their fundamental rights.”
In this chapter I have focused on the development of bhakti within Hinduism, some of its key characteristics, and in particular the effects this movement has had on Hindu religion and society. In the following chapter I shall turn to the
equivalent emergence of the devotional tradition within Christianity and the effects thereof on Christianity and Western society.