The Brahman could maintain his privileged position at the summit of the hierarchy of nature only by conformity to his dharma, to the conduct prescribed for him in accordance with his caste and stage of life … His greatest enemy was the spontaneity of the senses and his highest virtue immunity to emotion in unwavering self-control.27
Given this external reality, the Brahmin as much as the peasant might pay heed to the old dictum, “When in public, be a Vaishnava. When among friends, be a Shaiva. But in private, always be a Shakta.”
But Tantra has also been practiced very much in the open, as at Kamakhya and thousands of other sites across the subcontinent. The colonial attack on Indian culture, often centered on sexual practices, gave rise to a reconstruction of history and the present, a kind of Vedic reformation that attempted to eradicate embarrassing traces of Tantrism and all that it represented. Yet, the past does not vanish so easily, it just hides itself. The mantras that priests chant in temples across India may be Vedic, but the rituals these priests conduct, the manner in which they worship the deities, the goddesses themselves, and the shapes of the temples—all these a mediaeval practitioner like Abhinavagupta would recognize as profoundly Tantric.
Within literary practice—that other arena for pleasure and self-understanding and self-construction—Indian women seem curiously absent from the record as we currently know it. There are poems by women in the anthologies and commentaries, but they are far fewer than those written by men. Classical Indian literature—or at least our current canonical version of it—seems quite male. Given the state of gender relations in India today, it is easy to conclude that Abhinavagupta’s sister died suppressed, mute, and inglorious. This is especially easy to believe when we read songs like the one written by Sumangalamata, a Buddhist nun from the sixth century BCE:
A woman well set free! How free I am,
How wonderfully free, from kitchen drudgery,
free from the harsh grip of hunger,
And from empty cooking pots,
Free too of that unscrupulous man.28
But there is evidence that women participated avidly in the production of belle lettres. In his Kavyamimamsa (Investigation of poetry), a sort of manual for aspiring poets, Rajashekhara devotes part of the tenth chapter to describing how a poet should utilize the quarters of a day: (1) study all branches of knowledge; (2) write poetry; (3) participate in a “stimulating talk” about poetry and aesthetics with other poets; (4) workshop the poetry written in the morning. He describes various types of poets and then he writes:
Women can be as good poets as men. Poetic power is born of saṃkāra (traces or impressions). These impressions are a part of the inner soul. Thus there need be no discrimination between men and women. There are any number of princesses, daughters of ministers and performing artistes who are endowed with ability born of knowledge of the śāstras [sciences] and with the ability to compose poetry.29
Rajashekhara’s wife, Avantisundari, was a renowned poet, learned critic and rhetorician; he quotes her in his book repeatedly, and she is mentioned in other texts of the period.
So if there was any number, some number, of women with the education, leisure, and inclination to write poetry, where is their work? Susie Tharu and K. Lalita, editors of the invaluable anthology Women Writing in India, write in their preface, “When we began work we were repeatedly warned, often by reputed scholars, that we would find few significant women writers in Marathi or Kannada or Urdu literature … We began, therefore, somewhat tentatively—hopeful, but uncertain.” As they researched, reading “social histories, biographies, and autobiographies,” they found “debates in which women had intervened … wives, companions, and mothers who ‘also’ wrote … rebel medieval poets, sixteenth-century court historians, and many unknown women poets, novelists, and polemical writers.”30 But locating manuscripts for some of the texts required much labor; one of the editors found handwritten copies of a nineteenth-century devotional poet’s poems in her own aunt’s prayer room: “Though Venkamamba’s work had found no place in public systems of distribution, it had been kept alive in an alternative mode, as it was handed across from woman to woman.”31
One story that Tharu and Lalita tell may stand as emblematic of how public systems of distribution can shape our sense of the past: the courtesan Muddupalani was famous for her poetry during the reign of Pratapasimha, who ruled the southern kingdom of Thanjavur from 1739 to 1763. “Music, dance, and literature flourished as did painting and sculpture,” and Muddupalani was one of the luminaries of this “Golden Age of Telugu Literature.”32 She was honored by the king for her poetry and her learning in Telugu and Sanskrit literature; she was praised by contemporary critics; literary works were dedicated to her. In her own work, she proudly proclaims her literary heritage—her mother, her grandmother, her paternal aunt, all poets—and tells the reader that she herself is “incomparable … among her kind.”33
Thanjavur was annexed by the British in 1855, and as elsewhere, entire classes of people who depended on traditional patronage—courtesans, artists, writers, artisans—disappeared into penury and obscurity. A great restructuring of values followed, and much of this process was articulated through the Western-style novels written by members of the new middle class. Particularly prominent debates raged over proper masculinity and femininity, over sexuality, over what it meant to be “civilized.”
One of the main British accusations against Indian culture was that it was sexually degenerate, that Indians were promiscuous and perverse. The narrative of history developed by Western historians posited a very distant past when Indian civilization had been great; from those properly classical, chaste Vedic heights India had undergone a long descent into depravity, into the darkness of moral confusion and unspeakable Oriental vices and societal decay. Tantra was prime evidence of this degeneration; it was “nonsensical extravagance and crude gesticulation” (H. H. Wilson); it was “Hinduism arrived at its last and worst stage of medieval development” (Sir Monier-Williams); it was “black art of the crudest and filthiest kind” (D. L. Barnett); and it was politically subversive: “The unnatural depravity represented in the form of erotomania is certainly more common among Hindu political fanatics” (V. Chirol).34 The British, who were the rational, ethical post-Renaissance inheritors of their own classical past, were obliged to take power in order to restore order, cleanliness, and moral hygiene. The Indian reformers who responded to this narrative often understood modernization to comprise a suppression of aspects of Indian culture which were now understood to be uncivilized, primitive, embarrassing, Oriental, as well as a restructuring of chaotic Indian traditions to remake them in the image of coherent, unitary Western intellectual and religious systems. A new nationalistic Hinduism was invented; this creed mirrored the monotheism of the Abrahamic religions and insisted on a uniformity of practice and interpretation across the subcontinent. Old stories were reinterpreted—for instance, one of the most famous and alluring episodes of Krishna’s life, his erotic dalliances during his youth with the rustic women of his village, was now to be understood to be purely metaphorical. No actual sex happened, you see; the dances and embraces were only symbolic representations of the soul’s yearning for union with the Lord. The stories were spiritual, not sexual; they couldn’t—or shouldn’t—be both.
Tharu and Lalita tell us:
Increasingly over the nineteenth century the respectability of women from the emerging middle classes was being defined in counterpoint to the “crude and licentious” behaviour of lower-class women. Decent (middle-class) women were warned … against the corrupting influence of the wandering women singers and dancers whose performances were laced with [bawdiness] and a healthy disrespect for authority … Artists, such as Muddupalani, who had been acceptable figures in royal courts came to be regarded as debauched and their art as corrupting.35
By the early twentieth century, Muddupalani’s work had vanished. A woman named Bangalore Nagarathnamma—a distinguished patron of t
he arts, historian, and descendant of courtesans herself—found a mention of Muddupalani’s poetry in an old commentary on Telugu literature. The critic described Muddupalani as a “great poet” and quoted some lines from her poem Radhika Santwanam (Appeasing Radhika). Nagarathnamma managed to find a copy of the poem only with great difficulty, and when she did she remarked, “However often I read this book, I feel like reading it all over again.” She decided to publish the work herself, “since this poem, brimming with rasa, was not only written by a woman, but by one who was born into our [courtesan] community.”36
But the eponymous heroine of the text, Radhika or Radha, was not the sort of woman who would be allowed unchecked into modern India. Radha is Krishna’s lover, who crosses all social and worldly barriers for her passion. The Radha of Muddupalani’s poem is sexually aggressive, forthright in her pursuit of her own pleasure. In Krishna’s words:
If I ask her not to get too close
for it is not decorous,
she swears at me loudly.
If I tell her of my vow not
to have a woman in my bed,
she hops on
and begins the game of love.
Appreciative,
she lets me drink from her lips,
fondles me, talks on,
making love again and again.
How could I stay away
from her company?37
The publication of Radhika Santwanam caused furious controversy. A famous novelist who was the doyen of the social reform movement in the region dismissed Muddupalani as “one who claims to be an expert in music, classical poetry and dance.” He declared:
This Muddupalani is an adultress … Many parts of the book are such that they should never be heard by a woman, let alone emerge from a woman’s mouth. Using sringara [erotic] rasa as an excuse, she shamelessly fills her poems with crude descriptions of sex …
[This is not surprising because] she is born into a community of prostitutes and does not have the modesty natural to women.38
The colonial government banned the book. The publishers and various scholars protested, pointing out that by these standards you’d have to ban many, many works of premodern Indian literature. Nagarathnamma observed that many premodern “great men have written even more ‘crudely’ about sex.”39 The petitions were dismissed and all copies of the book were destroyed. After Independence, the ban was repealed and a new edition was published in 1952. But the norms about what was natural to women persisted. In the late eighties, Tharu and Lalita’s curiosity was aroused by
the harsh dismissals of Muddupalani’s work in almost every contemporary history … Critic after critic assured us that her work was obscene and simply not worth reading, though many of them had never seen the text. Students of Telugu literature, even ones sympathetic to women, echoed their judgement.40
Premodern India was by no means a utopia of gender parity and sexual freedom, but many beliefs and practices we may firmly believe to be “traditional” and “eternal” are in fact of very recent manufacture. And modernity is infused with its own virulent strains of misogyny and fear of women’s sexuality. Muddupalani’s “book was no longer banned, but Radhika Santwanam had been decreed out of existence ideologically.”41 After much searching, the editors of Women Writing in India were able to find copies of the printed editions of Radhika Santwanam; they were never able to locate a palm-leaf manuscript. Muddupalani and her poetry came close to not existing, at least in contemporary awareness. Like women in many other domains across the world, she had been erased; the recovery of Muddupalani was effected, as always, through active efforts toward investigation and reconstruction, through the writing of new histories.
There is a vastness of material that remains to be investigated, an ocean of rivers of stories that remain latent, that need to be reactivated and brought into the present. The corpus of pre-print Indian manuscripts is mind-bogglingly vast and still mostly unexplored. The scholar Dominik Wujastyk writes:
The National Mission for Manuscripts in New Delhi works with a conservative figure of seven million manuscripts, and its database is approaching two million records. The late Prof. David Pingree, basing his count on a lifetime of academic engagement with Indian manuscripts, estimated that there were thirty million manuscripts, if one counted both those in public and government libraries, and those in private collections. For anyone coming to Indian studies from another field, these gargantuan figures are scarcely credible. But after some acquaintance with the subject, and visits to manuscript libraries in India, it becomes clear that these very large figures are wholly justified.42
The library at Koba in Gujarat, for example, has about 250,000 manuscripts. The Sarasvati Bhavan Library in Varanasi has more than 100,000 manuscripts. “A one-year pilot field-survey by the National Mission for Manuscripts in Delhi, during 2004–2005, documented 650,000 manuscripts distributed across 35,000 repositories in the states of Orissa, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, and field participants in that project report that they only scratched the surface.”43 For scale, one may compare the collection of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, one of the biggest repositories in Europe, which contains about 40,000 mediaeval manuscripts in Latin and Romance languages.44
The Indian manuscripts are not fragments; they are full works “typically consisting of scores or hundreds of closely written folios, most often in Sanskrit, and containing works of classical learning on logic, theology, philosophy, medicine, grammar, law, mathematics, yoga, Tantra, alchemy, religion, poetry, drama, epic, and a host of other themes.”45 A very small fraction of the manuscripts have been cataloged—I have heard numbers ranging from 5 to 7 percent, but nobody really knows because there is no reliable count of the total; a rough calculation by Wujastyk shows “half a million catalogued manuscripts out of a minimum total of 7,000,000.”46 There is an urgency to this Big Data problem. Palm leaf—the most common material—can last more than a thousand years under ideal conditions, but it does deteriorate. The ancient and mediaeval texts have survived because the manuscripts have been copied and recopied, but this practice has died out over the last two centuries. “The future survival of this Indian literary and intellectual heritage today depends on the discovery, conservation, preservation and reproduction by digital means of the last generation of Indian manuscripts,” Wujastyk writes. “A back-of-an-envelope calculation based on estimated figures and attrition rates suggests that several hundred Sanskrit manuscripts are being destroyed or becoming illegible every week.”47
The poet Vidya lived in the seventh century CE. Rajashekhara called her the “Saraswati of Kanara” (a district in South India). We have thirty of her poems in Sanskrit. This is one of them, in Andrew Schelling’s translation:
Black swollen clouds
drench the far
forests with rain.
Scarlet kadamba petals toss on the storm.
In the foothills peacocks cry out
and make love and none of it
touches me.
It’s when the lightning
flings her bright
veils like a rival woman—
a flood of
grief surges through.48
And also:
“To Her Daughter”
As children we crave
little boys
pubescent we hunger for youths
old we take elderly men.
It is a family custom.
But you like a penitent
pursue a whole
life with one husband.
Never, my daughter,
has chastity
so stained our clan.49
And—Shilabhattarika lived in the ninth century CE, or perhaps the eleventh. She was perhaps an intimate of the poet-philosopher-king Bhoja, who built a temple to poetry and learning. We have only six of Shilabhattarika’s poems. One of them is among the most famous lyrics in the Sanskrit tradition:
Nights of jasmine & thunder,
torn petals,
>
wind in the tangled kadamba trees—
nothing has changed.
Spring comes again and we’ve
simply grown older.
In the cane groves of Narmada River
he deflowered my
girlhood before we were
married.
And I grieve for those far-away nights
we played at love
by the water.50
To think that tomorrow, or perhaps yesterday, a manuscript will disintegrate, has disintegrated, taking with it one more poem by Vidya, one more poem by Shilabhattarika—this is maddening.
Shakti is female, Shiva is male. As Ardhanarishvara, they come together in one androgynous, half-female, half-male form, to signal that the primordial reality is beyond gender. But for the most part, gender seems inescapable, a lens through which we always interpret the world and ourselves. Entire races and nations can be gendered. Sir Lepel Griffin thought that Bengalis were “disqualified for political enfranchisement by the possession of essentially feminine characteristics.” The Indian subcontinent itself has often been figured as female by the West. “The masculine science of the West,” wrote an American in 1930, “has found out and wooed and loved or scourged this sleepy maiden of mysticism.”51 Another observer pointed to the common belief that India’s irrationality required “a stern man who will impose on her the discipline she is too feckless to impose on herself.”52 In Indian editorial cartoons, the United States often shows up as a gun-toting cowboy or large-stepping Uncle Sam (sometimes appropriately sinister, with his halo of drones).