Woman and Goddess in Hinduism

by Tracy Pintchman

  “Ultimate bhakti” is defined here as exclusive, favorable (literally “going with the flow” as a kula is the bank of a river), and constant service to Ka untainted by knowledge (jna) or works (karma). “Anybhilsit-sünyamx’literally translates as “devoid of the quality of being desirous for another” and underscores the theme of exclusivity. The exclusivity issue is highly charged, particularly as it appears in the sphere of social norms as the satl, or virtuous woman who has no other object of service and devotion than her husband.

  If we look at jna and karma not just as other spiritual paths in their external sense, but as attitudinal dispositions as well, we might gain further insight into the feminine nature of bhakti. Jna, “knowledge,” as a modality of speculative inquiry, has a decidedly masculine flavor to it; the founders of philosophical schools are all said to be men. Likewise karma, as worldly action, has a decidedly masculine flavor to it. Even if the stage of the world is running through fakti, it is men who are given the leading roles in this play. Here, both the modalities of knowledge and ritual activity are seen as impediments to the path of surrender, setting up the oft-discussed dichotomy between “austere masculine knowledge” and “sensuous feminine love.” One may also note the “d” (“etc.”) after jna and karma, indicating that any other “nonbhakti” path would also be considered an impediment.

  Moreover, the “male path” through yogic and aiva traditions has often been cited as one of (self)conquest, culminating in the identification of oneself with the absolute, the complete antithesis of feminine surrender. The important exception to this is found in tantra, which might be construed as an “alternative discourse,” and this would be a worthy subject of study. In any case, the male/female power dichotomy was amplified through colonial notions of masculinity, which were often thought of in terms of self-control and sexual abstinence, as well as through the contention that Indians were effeminate and hence weak (Nandy, 1983). The Indian nationalist reaction to these ideas severely weakened Vaisnava discourse on surrender for the contemporary period, as Vivekananda and his reformist contemporaries harped on the need for control and masculine conquest. Gandhi, interestingly enough, might be seen here as someone trying to negotiate the discourse of surrender with the discourse of conquest, as Veena Howard’s essay in this volume seems to suggest, but that is a matter for further inquiry.

  In the Bhgavata Pura and later Gaudya texts, the term tma-nivedanam (to announce or “present” oneself) appears. The term “tma” here would certainly be construed as “ultimate self,” hence the connotation of offering one’s full Self. Here there is a clear power differential as well as a particular protocol: one goes for refuge, falls down in front of, and offers oneself to the Lord. In terms of relationship, and particularly in light of the transactional nature of traditional Hindu society, surrender may be seen as the one relational position that neither asks, demands, nor expects anything in return. In a sense, it is putt ing oneself in the lowliest of positions. This understanding of surrender fits perfectly with the ideal of sev, as selfless service. Indeed, Vaiava texts from the Bhgavata to the Bhat Bhgavatmram like to “rate” devotees by comparing their degrees of selflessness.

  All of these attitudinal positions, of course, are ones that normative Hindu (i.e., Brahmanical) culture has claimed to be major components of the feminine ideal. A woman should be pure, exclusively devoted to her husband, servile, dependent, and the rest. To merely see surrender, however, as a construct of feminine weakness and dependency, or even purity for that matter, can be misleading. One can argue, as Ashis Nandy (1980) has, that the deeper sense of power in India has always been female—hence the male-institutional effort to control the feminine principle. Might these Vaisnava discourses of surrender point to a more profound and less overtly discussed sense of feminine power?

  The Gaudya position is perhaps the most pointed in this regard. On one hand, all individual beings are doctrinally considered to be spiritual females in subordinate position to Rdh whose service to Ka they eternally share. Thus, one may argue that the male God, as the only object of worship, holds a position that no human can approximate except through taking on the female disposition. An added consequence of this is that worldly sexuality is seen as being “counterproductive” (no pun intended), not simply in terms of it leading one further into the sticky nets of desire, but perhaps more fundamentally because it is seen as an effort to take the position of Ka, the leading male, and henceforth is repeatedly referred to as a disease.9

  FURTHER CHARACTERISTICS OF SURRENDER

  Another aspect of the discourse of surrender focuses on the idea of “the enjoyer.” Skhya sees the conscious witness Purusa as mesmerized by the dance of nature, Prakrti; wanting to enjoy her, but afraid of entrapment in the feminine world of matter, hence seeking liberation through detachment. To surrender, then, is to renounce the role of “the enjoyer” since the masculine Purusa is the enjoyer whose position should not be taken on by individual beings.

  Purnic literature is, likewise, filled with warnings about “entrapment in the feminine” in which the wiles of women, who are associated with emotionalism and sensuality, are said to lead to one’s downfall (Jarow, 2003). The issue of desire is crucial to all of this, for desire ensnares one in the binding constituents of nature (guas). Hence, in the discourse on renunciation, being an enjoyer is sinful and fraught with danger. Ultimately, only God—whose purview is considered to be far beyond the human—could occupy the position of enjoyer, and the nondistinction between human and divine held in tantric contexts is not congruent with a Vaisnava ideal of surrender.

  One may reasonably contend that in supreme devotion, parbhakti, conditioned constructs no longer apply. Much is made, in this regard, of the end of Jayadeva’s Gïta/jovindu, with Rdh riding triumphant on top of Ka, having taken the role of enjoyer at the height of ll. In the realm of prema or divine love, the argument goes, all conventions are nullified. Nevertheless, one never sees Rdh in the Gtagovinda, or anywhere else, dallying with other men as Ka does with other women, so her “triumph” is somewhat circumscribed.

  The ideal of surrender, then, to be enjoyed and to enjoy being enjoyed, is thought of as a feminine quality. Being enjoyed can still be said to smack of enjoyment, however, and so another thematic cluster in the discourse of surrender may be characterized as a descending movement “down” a scale from devotion, to self-effacement, to immolation. The bhakti rhetoric of complete and abject helplessness, as seen in the work of Ymuna, is taken more than a step further in the following poem attributed to Mira.

  Don’t go, don’t go, don’t go Yogi, I fall at your feet, your slave Unique is the path of prema bhakti, Lead the way there, My God With incense and sandalwood I will build my funeral pyre:

  Fire it with your own hands

  When I am utterly consumed, smear your body with my ashes.

  Merge my flame with your fire. (Alston, 1980: 124)

  Here is a level of surrender beyond the pativrats that approaches the ideal of the sat s ultimate vow of devotion: a liebestod that does not just see death as the logical end of love, but as a living doorway beyond mundane constructs and compromises epitomized by marriage and household.

  PSYCHOLOGY AND PHENOMENOLOGY

  Through the plethora of doctrines and practices in Vaisnava traditions, one sees the theme of surrender linked with the feminine at every turn, but how one observes this may be crucial, for insider/ outsider issues inevitably come into play here. When we look at them closely, they are rarely cut and dry. On the one hand there is the contention of the devotee that surrender is both a necessary means to the full realization of divinity as well as to the full flowering of divine expression. On the other hand, there are psychologically and politically aware observations that detail how the promotion of female devotional sentiment serves a particular social order and its ruling class. The milkmaids of Vrndvana stay safely out of the power dynamics of the world, and since the world can be dismissed as my, anyway, this is not seen as an
important issue. One result of this attitude, however, is that although Vraja-dhma may be known as the transcendental abode of ri Ka, it is also a polluted catastrophe, replete with poverty, political corruption, and thirty meters of tainted groundwater. Beyond the contention that the ideal of surrender promotes abstention from the world and its plays of power is the argument that it actually encourages economic and social injustice. Bhakti’s exalted vision of spiritual servitude may siphon off potential engagement and social effectiveness by encouraging “the best and the brightest” to retreat from the world into palliative and compensatory visions of bliss. From this critical point of view, the religious appropriation of normative tropes of ideal femininity as “pure” and “devotional” is seen as not only keeping women at the lowest rungs of social power, but also as sending men down there with them.

  Within the greater sphere of Hindu dharma, there are variant contentions about the true nature of surrender. Nondualists (advaita-vedntins) insist that surrender is a provisional means, but not an end, since one already exists in flawless unity. Likewise, some tantrics might see the ideal spiritual aspirant to be a hero, as opposed to a maidservant—a lover of the Goddess—a position that is attainable by a human, albeit rarely. Even in tantric kta traditions, however, the hero-lover is a secondary phenomenon. The child of the Goddess is seen much more than the lover. In fact, the arrogance of Mahisa, the great buffalo demon in the primary myth of the Dev, is his belief that he can be the lover of the Goddess, a notion that leads to his quick demise. Thus, even in service to the Dev, as June McDaniel (1989: 114-115) points out, the feminine form is believed to be preferable. McDaniel cites the following passage from the Dev BhgavMa Purna:

  O auspicious one! How can we understand thy sport? O Mother! We are transformed into young women before Thee; let us serve Thy lotus feet. If we get our manhood, we will be deprived from serving Thy feet and thus of the greatest happiness. O Mother! O Sire! I do not like to leave Thy lotus feet and get my man-body again and reign in the three worlds. (III.5.13-15)

  Even in the non-Vaisnava world then, devotion eschews masculinity. In her study of classical Indian poetry, in an obliquely related example, Martha Selby (2000: 111) finds that “the masculine becomes largely unsymbolizable” with images of male desire and anxiety mediated through the feminine subject. Hence, one might say that in the mainstream world of religious India, surrender to the divine is the feminine prerogative.10

  Perhaps, historically speaking, reclamation of the feminine voice could not occur until it had reached its nadir of legitimacy and prestige. The trope of heightened spiritual femininity came in for severe criticism, both from Western colonialists and from Hindu reformers influenced by their discourse. Toward the end of the colonial era, connections were drawn between the feminine posture and the submission to colonial oppression, as a new generation worked to shed the bane of “unmanliness and inferiority” (Minor, 1986: 64-68). Vivekananda pointedly despised “effeminate men who take on the mood of women” (Kripal, 1995: 26) as a good deal of Indian religious culture became less enamored with the feminine sweetness of Vraja.

  The fact that the “critics of surrender” were hardly limited to non-Hindus emphasizes the key point that there are no fixed insider and outsider dichotomies. The triangles of the yantra keep intersecting with one another, leading to new perspectives, but not to conclusive resting places. In the spirit of creative dialogue, I would like to look at three major arguments against the feminine concept of surrender, and then see how practitioners might reply and how history might reclaim this unique spiritual disposition.

  THE IDEAL OF SURRENDER

  IS A RESPONSE TO COLONIALISM

  One perspective on the feminine concept of surrender is to see it within a context of patriarchal ideologies of domination that fix the locus of communal power in the polis. Since women are generally not part of this power structure, the “feminine qualities” they are said to embody move toward the margins of society. Norvin Hein (1982) advanced a like suggestion, in this regard, speculating that the “erotic community,” contiguous with the rise of Rdh, might be a response to a loss of political and social power. The worship of Visnu as a powerful regent becomes more of an embarrassment than anything else when another people and their perspectives have overrun the worshipper’s culture. The move toward a pastoral deity, along with an ideal of feminine surrender, reflects a safe social solution, or at least a politically expedient move. One could conceptualize this as a movement away from vrya and toward madhurya, from manly heroism to feminine sweetness. Aside from the much-celebrated civil disobedience of Caitanya against the local Kazi’s ban on public chanting of the name of God, there were no serious efforts by bhakti practitioners or theoreticians to challenge or transform the social order, likewise verses such as the following one from the Nrada Bhakti Stras allow Vaiavas to completely remove themselves from the political sphere, “Now that (Divine Love) is achieved through renunciation of both attachment and of the objective world.” The “surrendered soul,” therefore, need not worry about the miseries of the world, for he has surrendered himself, the world, and the Veda (niveditmtalokavedatvt).11

  All this reminds me of events that took place in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s when groups such as the Jefferson Airplane sang, “When the truth is found to be lies and all the joy within you dies, don’t you want somebody to love?” Eros is taken out of a fractured social order, privatized—or in the case of the United States, capitalized—and amplified into a supreme value that remains marginal enough to slip under the radar of power interests.

  In the previous scenario, the feminine concept of surrender serves the social order by siphoning off potential rebellion, even as it dismisses the social order as insignificant. The strategic movement here is not really to “feminine eroticism,” but to transcendentalism in a female form. One can only wonder, in this regard, if the repeated and severe insistence on the other-worldliness of the relationship between Rdh and Ka in Gaudya and other tracts from two or three generations ago were direct reactions to (or defenses against) the onslaught of colonial-generated discourse that proclaimed Hindu deities to be licentious and abominable (Inden, 1986: 401–446).12

  One cannot speak of the “erotic community” without further discussing its repudiation within Indian society, particularly at the dawn and subsequent development of the nationalist era (indeed this might further bear out Hein’s thesis). Interestingly enough, one way it was repudiated was by turning it “inside out.” I am thinking particularly of the Brhmo Samj and Arya Samj’s “discourses of accretions” that proposed a “pure Vedic tradition” of selected Vedas and Upanisads, with the Purnas as well as regional, “licentious,” “irrational,” and nonbrahmanical practices thought of as toxic accretions upon a pristine, essential tradition. The British trope that Indians demonstrated “effeminacy of character” was too often taken to heart (whether this trope was a response to the dispossessed feminine of the colonial peoples is a fascinating subject that cannot be tackled here) and the culture of bhakti came to be seen as regressive. In her discussion of Hindi versus Braj, in this regard, Heidi Pauwels (20 01: 4 49 – 481) cites a declaration of Hindi professor Badrinth Bha that “the sweetness of Braj had turned India into eunuchs.”

  The “insider response” would insist that the spiritual practice of devot ion occurs in a spiritual realm that need not conflict with worldly duties, citing perhaps the well-known devotional discourse described in the Caitanya Caritmrta between Caitanya and Ramnanda Raya, in which the inner reality of Rdh and Ka reveals itself at the end of a long progression, beginning with the strict following of varns’rama rules and regulations. Moreover, the Bhagavad Gt itself counsels a surrender that is congruent with the fulfillment of political and social functions. Arjuna is a warrior, and remains a warrior, even after receiving the teachings of Ka. This discussion brings one, however, to what may be the core of contemporary activist discourse: Can one conceive of spiritual liberation as se
parate from political, social, and economic freedom?

  While many contemporary critics would answer resoundingly, “No,” the castigation of the “effeminate Braj sweetness” by modern Hindi poets, swamis, and nationalists, the return of Rma as a martial emblem of political empowerment, and the ubiquitous rise of Hanumn, associated with the cultivation of physical and martial strength, tend to muddle the inexorably interwoven fields of politics and religion. Again, opposites converge—manly conquest and feminine receptiveness, as popular religious sentiment blows back and forth with the prevailing winds of time.

  Sentiments shift, however, and the reclamation of the feminine in this regard may have to do, not so much with gender politics as with a larger cultural transformation. Bhakti, after all, began as a revolt against brahmanical hierarchy. To surrender to God meant not to surrender to the social order. This implies more than revolt; it points to the affirmation of the inner life, of feeling, of sweetness, as a value in and of itself and in face of martial and like values. If Rma was so easily able to sacrifice St for the “good of the polis” (as Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia to go to war) perhaps the “bhakti answer” is not to start a gender war by drowning the returning king in his domestic bathtub, but rather to restore the value of surrender that the measure of a human being may be revealed by what is felt as well as by what is achieved.

  IRON VERSUS GOLD

  The next issue I would like to look at here is the nature of “surrendered love” itself. Vaisnava discourse continually emphasizes that worldly love and spiritual love are diametrically opposed to one another. More specifically, there is the insistence that kma (worldly desire) is phenomenologically distinct from prema (pure, “otherworldly” love), a distinction often spoken of as a comparison between iron and gold. This “definition” of the purity of love seems to generally appear uncontested, but I believe it deserves closer scrutiny.