Wall, L. Lewis. 1995. “The Anthropologist as Obstetrician: Childbirth Observed and Childbirth Experienced.” Anthropology Today, Vol. 11, no. 6 (December), 12–15.
C H A P T E R 8
The Feminine Concept of Surrender in Vaisn.ava Discourse
E. H. Rickjarow
THE DISCOURSE OF SURRENDER
A series of long-standing cultural, religious, and literary traditions of India have associated “sacred self-surrender” with the female voice. The great women of the epics are devotional, both to God and to their husbands, as exemplary devoted wives or pativrats (“vowed to one’s husband”). Their love breaks beyond the precincts of dharma as prescription, and moves toward self-sacrifice and ultimate self-surrender. As Charlotte Vaudeville (1962: 33) put it, “the pure Hindu wife, the Sat, is already a type of bhakta.”1
Likewise, in early Tamil poetry, Nammlvr speaks as a woman on matters of love. The seventh-century aiva saint Sambandar describes himself as a woman devotee prostrate at the feet of the “Lord with Matted hair.” The Padma Pura speaks of sages who in a long past age attained the realization of Absolute Reality and still prayed to become female maidservants of Ka in their next incarnations.2The story of Ka and his ultimate devotees, the cowherd women of Vrndvana, is often touted as the apotheosis of such surrender, and the religious practice (sdhcmà) of remembering Kna’s play on earth (ll smaraa), which was developed from this narrative by Bengali Vaisnavas, involves visualizing oneself as a youthful female attendant of Rdh.3
How one understands and locates the phenomenon of self-surrender and its connectedness to a feminine sensibility in Indian traditions certainly has a lot to do with where one stands. Specific lineages may articulate definitive positions, but since we live in a time of implosion, i n which teach i ngs and d iscou rses from ma ny periods and l i neages a re squished together as people on a public bus, critics as well as aspirants may find themselves in a postmodern Arjuna-like position: confused as to what is the “right path,” caught betwixt and between, trying to negotiate through a muddy middle.
In the spirit of Puric discourse, I appeal to anecdotal evidence, a long with texts and their contexts, in this exploration of the feminine concept of surrender. And while I am mixing strands from various eras, I take my methodological lead from the Puras themselves, the great Indian compendiums of epic lore that amplify important tropes rather than construct theories. The hermeneutics of intersubjectivity, advanced by this volume, would encourage such an approach because it allows the scholar to remain in conversation with the “Ot her” while continuing on the path of critical inquiry. Such an exploration, nevertheless, throws one into heated controversy, for “surrender” has become contested ground in terms of sharply disparate visions of feminine empowerment. Western colonialists and Hindu reformers have often looked at it with disgust and shame, seeing the ideal of surrender as reflecting an assortment of social ills and moral degradations. The archetype of divine love as a feminine province, however, continues to hold its own weight and makes its own claims, which may not only be as persuasive as any others, but also point to new vistas of human expression and possibility.
The r Yantra, a contemplative diagram of nine interlocking triangles around a central point (surrounded by two circles of lotus petals encased in a square frame), is an age-old symbol of the Goddess and may be a f itting entry point for this exploration, as it seeks to embody the unk nowable and inconceivable through a process of engaging and reconciling opposites.4 It embodies at once the transcendent Goddess in the vaulted heaven and the immanent akti, the devoted woman at the stove, offering the possibility of reclaiming opposites through engagement.
As a visual meditative device, the r Yantra can usher one into inconceivable realms of reality, presenting an extraordinary interactive mind-map that unfolds through meditation, with each precinct revealing a new set of projections, imaginings, and worlds within worlds to ultimately be dissolved through entry into the center of the triangle. All this “dissolution,” however, may reappear in a new way, as the nondualist advaitin Totapuri Baba found out when trying unsuccessfully to cross the Ganges with his boat refusing to move and the Goddess laughing at him, so they say, making him wonder if his “curing” the celebrated adept Ramakrishna from his “devotional duality” might not have been the last word on things.
Dissolution into the center can be construed as akin to surrender. It is the ending of the separate self—the psycho, the sexual, the spiritual, and the oceanic merging back into inconceivable oneness— absolute in its demand, with no partiality possible, no way around, no substitutes or protestations. One must turn toward the center. And while the triangles may induce oppositions and paradoxes through their variant perspectives, one is asked to traverse them, to not get locked into any one vision that would prohibit one from entry into the realm of nondual reality. Even so, the yantra remains, and the world remains, to be negotiated perhaps in a different way.
In tantric Buddhism, which has connections to both Vaiava and kta traditions in Bengal, the ultimate realm of reality is said to be nondifferent from everyday reality. In the everyday land of Vraja, the supreme goddess of love, Rdh, appears as a village milkmaid. The entire land of Vraja, where Rdh sports, is said to be a manala, a meditative locus taking one out of mundane space (a yantra of landscape, so to speak). In this land, on more than one occasion, one may overhear conversations in tea stalls that marvel at the ability of Vraja to encompass heights and depths together—sublime mysteries and crummy, overpriced tea (chai) in dirty glasses.
I am appealing to the r Yantra to facilitate consideration of divergent visions of “the feminine” without them canceling one another out. After all, there are so many paradoxical highs and lows, such as seeming contradiction between the sublimity of the Goddess and the nonsublime textual descriptions and social treatment of women. The yantra, however, keeps forcing one to consider “the other” side as every conclusion sets up its contrary one.
The “text” of the r Yantra, or the maala for that matter, cannot appear without a context, be it the mind of the aspirant or the social historical milieu, and context almost always insures contraries. Oppositions need not nullify one another. Sir Monier-Williams’ dutiful declaration that he created his dictionary to serve the Boden Chair’s stated mission of converting the natives of India to Christianity does not obfuscate the fact that he produced a remarkable work. Likewise, the mundane and the sublime, the woman and the goddess, can sometimes converge and sometimes diverge: one can not separate divinity from society, goddess from woman, or power dynamics from sublime heights of feeling. Therefore, the “spiritual” ideal of surrender will inevitably be intertwined with “worldly” experience as well as the “other-worldly.”
Although I am focusing on the “Vaiava voice,” I do not want to focus on one particular construct of “Vaiavism.” Not only are there variant Vaiava voices (vrs, Pñcartra, r, Vallabha, Gauya, and the rest), but also these voices are inextricably bound to other voices (skta, aivaite, tantrie, advaitin, secular). Therefore, I explore the issue of surrender through an amplification of the language, literature, rhetoric, and philosophies of this phenomenon to see how and why they most definitely tend toward the feminine sensibility in literatures informed by Vaisnava ideals. I also want to look at more contemporary social and political critiques of this ideal, not to deny or decry its sublime aspects, but to amplify its dimensions. My intent here is to highlight the deeply contrasting perspectives that exist concerning “surrender,” to see why it so often carries a feminine voice, and to suggest how it may be reclaimed in our time. Ultimately, I suspect that any understanding or discussion of surrender will prove to be deeply dependent on the context in which the term is employed. Contexts, however, may be multivalent, like Sanskrit virtuoso poems that literally mean two things at once depending on how one construes the euphonic combinations between words. Likewise with the phenomenon of surrender—it may be an ecstatic offering of ultimate pleasure, a blissful exti
nction, or it may be a pragmatic offering of submission, a white flag in the face of hopeless odds. My point is that, just as the Goddess need not exclude the disenfranchised woman, one living reality need not preclude another.
Inevitably, discussions of “surrender” become enmeshed in sexual politics and conundrums. Perhaps what appears as surrender is actually triumph. Jayadeva’s Rdh, for example, gets her way with Kna, but only under the cover of nightfall and secrecy. This immediately leads to the following question: “Does she really get her way, or has she been marginalized, eroticized, and theologized out of the daylight world?”
This consideration may put the scholar in somewhat of a bind: surrender, as an ideal, is antithetical to conventional academic endeavors. It is predicated upon faith, experienced through emotion, and is free from any hermeneutics of suspicion (qualities that certain parties have attributed to women). But one can understand it in variant contexts as in the Bhagavad Gt’s assertion that all beings follow the path of Ka. And while the final instruction of the Gt is said to be one of surrender “abandoning all sacred paths, take refuge in me alone”—the text contains a final admonition, declaring who specifically should not hear its material, creating a qualification, another insider/outsider dynamic.5
“Surrender” can be both a theological position and a specific inner disposition (bhva). Theologically, it is both the means and end of devotional practice, where it is seen as the doorway into heightened realms of love and understanding. The devotee is intoxicated by divine love in a manner analogous to human lovers (specifically, as a young woman smitten by a young man). However, this analogy is but the jumping-off point, for surrender is also the linchpin of the process of moving from desire to love, from conqueror to conquered, from feigned master to abject maidservant, the crowning position of spiritual achievement. The “maidservant mood” is an example of the disposition of surrender, being absolutely dependent upon, and open to, the lead of God, and the mood is said to be supremely blissful.
Perhaps it is not so much the disposition of surrender, but the way it has played out in many cultural forms that have led to it being conceived of by critics as abject capitulation, a way of keeping women down, and a marker of weakness and impotence; thus feminine in a pejorative sense. Religious figures, such as Vivekananda, often promoted the contrary “masculine” yogic tropes of self-control and self-conquest, and such discourse would serve as fodder for various brands of Indian nationalism. As with the triangles of the r Tantra, however, the discourses of theology, the emotional realms of subjective experience, and the social institutions that surround them cannot be so easily separated.
Moreover, surrender has been construed as weakness and strength at once. The ideal of aranam-gati, “going for refuge,” is a “weakness” that allies one with ultimate power. One surrenders (hence apparent weakness), but only to the Supreme (a discriminative choice of strength). Hence the “purity” of St, construed through her singular devotion to Rma, is said to give her enormous strength and to carry her unscathed through a test of fire and through the wavering inconsistency of Rma himself. Likewise, the gops, who are the supine, yearning cowherd woman of Vraja, are also fearless devotees who are willing to offer the dust from their feet to cure Kna’s headache, even if doing so is an unpardonable offense punishable by eons in hell. And ruminating about all this can give anyone a headache, even God perhaps, who declares in the Bhgavata Pura that he is at a loss as to how to respond to the supreme devotion of thejjopïs.
From a doctrinal perspective, surrender is not capitulation at all. The Gïtâ is clear about this when it discusses four types of beings who “come to God”: the distressed, the seeker of wealth, and the seeker of knowledge, contrasted with the fourth—the one who has knowledge and whose surrender is understood to be a mature realization that Ka is everything (Bhagavad Gt VII. 16-19). Hence, surrender becomes a mark of knowledge and an awareness of how things actually are, which produces its own form of agency and indissoluble power.
Philosophical and theological discourse, however, cannot remove itself from the culture that has generated it. The relationship of surrender to social convention and propriety are well established. Vaudeville’s contention that the devoted wife (pativrat) of the epic is the prototype of the later bhakta is germane here. While the epic heroine does not manifest ecstatic love, her devoted service is a form of self-surrender that marks such action as the special province of the female. Such surrender it can be argued, however, has been envisioned as female through the imagination of men. Thus, the bhakti practice of a devotee assuming a feminine persona in order to enter into higher precincts of love and devotion again becomes suspect from a social perspective. Before coming down on one side or another of this argument, let us take a look at how “surrender” has been construed by major Vaisnava thinkers and writers.
ETYMOLOGIES
Throughout religious and literary texts, a number of principal terms have been used to indicate “self-surrender.” Most pervasive, perhaps, is the word arana (of speculative derivation from √—”to resort to”) combined with √¿¡am, “to go,” as in araam gati and araam vraja (Bhagavad Gît 18.66). The idea of going to someone for spiritual refuge is seen early on in the Buddhist declaration of the “three jewels” (buddham araam gacchmi, dharmam araam gacchmi, sangham araam gacchmi) and is probably derived from previous Vedic meanings of arana related to protection and defense.
Through their reading of the vrs and others, the r Vaisnava School developed their principal term for surrender, “prapatti” (√pad with the prefix pro).6 Prapatti also appears in the epics, but it was the seminal Viistdvaita theologian Rmnuja who promoted it as the supreme principle of religiosity. In his Adaabhedaniraya, Rmnuja delineates various “limbs” of prapatti, including niksepa (abandonment), tyga (renunciation), and nysa, (“to fall down”— further discussed as “to fall down before someone,” and equated with arana-gati).7
One significant point in the discourse surrounding these terms is their said sense of exclusivity (ekntitvd). One is charged to completely abandon other means of “elevation” or sources of refuge (rtbhsya IX.34. 1.1.1). This, as well as other factors, aligns prapatti with bhakti—both considered to be ever-coexistent. Their relationship, as well as their interactive nuances, would be the subject of much r Vaisnava speculation (Is one the prerequisite for the other? To what extent is self-surrender still an act of egotism? Is it the same “egotism” as mundane ahamkra or “ego”? Is one still subject to socially prescriptive duties?).
Rmnuja further discusses prpatti as an expression of emotional longing (rasa pmpta prapatti), coupled with aspects of prayerfulness and helplessness (ans’raya: literally, “having no other means of refuge”) while decrying other means as useless. Prapatti also becomes connected with antarañga, an inner attitude of service. Since women were socially viewed as possessing all three of the aforementioned characteristics (emotional, dependent, and interiorized), it was a short step for rVaisnavas to reference the devotee as a love-stricken woman. Ever further along this road, one could aspire to the state of kaimkarya, a deeply loving servitude in response to the absoluteness of the divine other.
Ymuncrya (the said preceptor of Rmnuja), whose Stotraratna had a strong influence on Rmnuja, used similar terminology. Along with prapatti, we find the word añjali with √kr, “to offer” (taking on this significance from its sense of being a gesture with the two open hands placed together and extended outward). Ymuna also speaks of parabhakti as “prapatti naistikam” a helpless servitude to God in a state of supreme resignation, while also declaring that the Lord requires the living being to realize God himself as all merciful.8
In the Stotraratna, Ymuna employs another principal Vaisnava trope of surrender: taking shelter (araam in one case, raya/rita in another) and specifically taking shelter at the “lotus feet” of Visnu. The image of surrender in prostration, with one’s ritually and anatomically “highest” part, the head, lain before the lowest part, the feet, continually
appears in religious and devotional literatures. While it can be looked upon as a cultivated quality of deep dependency, lowliness, and even abjection, the very inverse of agency and enjoyment, it can also be understood in its metaphorical sense of being absolutely overwhelmed. One is so permeated by the love and power of the “Holy Other” that one bows lowest in response to the highest. Note the sense of being prone, vulnerable, and dispossessed of will before the Lord. Ymuna offers repeated obeisance: “I bow again and again to the one beyond speech and mind, who is the one true object of speech and mind, the unlimited, all powerful, ocean of mercy” (Stotraratna 18).
Along with the recognition of God’s absolute nature, leading to complete dependence on his mercy, one also finds a corollary discourse of loss and abjection that will be amplified through the devo-tionally cultivated mood of viraba or “separation.” This sustained meditation of surrender is characterized by a complete disinterest in one’s own condition and therefore a full and deeply emotional focus on the other. Ymuna’s text is replete with praise first and then meditations on the form of Viu, who is seen as all and everything for the surrendered self, who is described as both “dependent” and “supported” (bharah). The rhetoric of loss and abjection will take this even further, advancing the idea that “seeking is more intense than finding” in terms of a full focus on and surrender to the divine object of devotion.
The Puimrga of Vallabha and Gauya Sampradya of Caitanya have their own perspectives on the aforementioned terms and bring the discourse on surrender to new levels. It is not possible to enumerate them fully here, but a few words may be in order. Pui itself literally indicates that which thrives and is abundant: hence, the polemic that without any effort, but by the grace of God alone, one attains bhakti. Caitanya’s deputy Rüpa Gosvm’s oft-quoted definition of bhakti gets to the heart of this matter: “ anybhilsit-snya jna-karmdy- anvtam / nkülyena knustlanam bhaktir uttam” (Bhaktirasrtasindhu, 1.1.9).
Woman and Goddess in Hinduism Page 22