24 Women Writing and Women’s Lives

Vidyut Bhagwat

Section I

Why Women Writing and Women’s Lives

When we get introduced to women’s writing not only as literature but as a social document, we enter into the realm of feminist understanding of women’s expressions especially through their creative writings. Any written literature of women and in fact oral expressions of women through ovi, abhangas which have come to us through out many centuries can be read as texts of women’s reflections on their lives in their times. We should not look at the category woman, with an uncontested, uncritical gaze but we have to keep in mind that when women decide to express themselves creatively, orally or in written ways there is some resistance and some alliance, some interest group politics and some genuine concern for the whole humanity and women’s writing shows us that this writing has a vision of their own. Their imaginations, their dreams, aspirations are not only confined to cooking and cleaning and nurturance and maintenance though these are important areas of women’s writings but, these writings directly or indirectly do comment upon the public sphere that is around them. Hence it is very important to re-read the past literature with contemporary feminist lens which takes us into transformative politics.

If we accept feminism as political consciousness which tries to bringing transformation in the society ideologically and structurally then we also understand that in human society in every epoch power relations between men and women become specific and diverse. Inequality between men and women which is based on sexual difference is not natural and it gets constructed in human culture. Caste, race, class, religion all these structures when they get constructed patriarchy also is a structure and ideology which gets constructed. Hence patriarchy and gender both are constructed through women’s sexual, social, economic labor appropriation. The value system of any society has ‘male dominance’ as super structure and woman also internalize the same. In this situation how women’s self or consciousness of ‘me’ness gets constructed is a complex quest and we can look at women’s literature to understand this process.

Whatever women write can be re-read and re-interpreted with feminist consciousness but when this writing talks about women’s existence and search for totality of her ‘self’ we would call this expression as creative literature. Through writing if women writers applaud only agency of women or victimization of women we will not be able to see it as creative literature. But if any writing by women tries to de-mystify woman’s body if they try to bring out oppressiveness that creates victimization and if any situation fractures body and mind of any woman and it is written in the short story form or poem form we can say that women writing is saying commenting about their situation in a critical way. Three major studies on women’s images – Literary Women, Ellen Moers (1976), A Literature of their own, Ellen Showalter (1977), The Mad Woman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubbar (1979) are important for students to understand the trajectory of women writing.

Section II

My Own Journey

Friends, let us now turn to my own journey. As a daughter born in a family with middle class aspirations, the boys were sent to Sciences and Technology and I was ‘put into’ Literature that took a combination ‘Marathi’ – ‘Sanskrit’. This was all seen as natural and given. ‘Finish your B.A.’ and ‘get married to a foreign settled engineer or doctor and then while raising your children in UK and USA, your literature background will help you to protect our culture’ – so said my parents and elders. Looking back at this life plan, trap set for me by people around me, I can now see both – how in my caste and class location this was seen as the most suitable path and how women alter, evade or overthrow such life plans set for them.

I evaded this trap of studying literature to protect ‘our culture’ by reading literature in a creative and innovative manner and using the new space of conjugality that love and inter-caste marriages were opening up in the Nehruvian era. Of course marrying into a Brahmin progressive family living in the heart of Mumbai metropolis with writers of children’s literature and producers of new mass mediated woman’s programmes; the family had good cultural capital.

Marriage provided the space for pursuing my studies in Literature, to read, write and thus complete my post-graduation in Marathi literature. In the 1967 we studied literature in a compartmentalized descriptive manner, treating all that was pre-colonial as medieval and Bhakti, Colonial as Marathi prose reborn with English incarnation and thus modernity in Marathi literature seen as a gift of European Enlightenment. Studying and reading different literary texts several times remained at a verbal level and a sense of creative discovery was lost in this process. The history of Marathi literature then became a matter of memorizing, without contextualizing historical stages in the political economies that were shaping them. I felt vacuous and uneasy when I completed my studies and immediately joined as a part time lecturer in the Anjuman Khairul Islam’s Poona College, because I truly wanted to become a teacher and wanted to be connected with the students’ community.

Increasingly through this new job I could see myself as a teacher, my students were all from poverty stricken families particularly Muslim families who had to learn different ‘Marathi’s and the cultures that go with it. The student’s were mostly migrants from drought prone rural areas and were from the newly migrated working class families in Pune city. Marathi literary texts which were to be taught to these students invariably needed decoding at various levels. Awareness towards standardization of Marathi language and its relationship to the dialects like ‘dakhani’ which my students spoke at homes, took me towards doing more research in language and linguistics. Marathi literary texts that I was handling as a teacher seemed far away from the everyday life of these students. These students energized me to transform received understanding and to read further – to interrogate cannons. I wanted my students to think creatively and critically. This was the period of the magical 1970s where the new movements and collectives were emerging and as a part of many of these initiatives, I began to more seriously and historically pursue questions of domesticity, housewifery, motherhood and companionate marriage. Dalit Literature at this time provided moral stamina to encounter literary studies with many questions and interrogations.

Here we must note that in the late 1980s I participated in the project of documenting women’s writings in India from different regional languages under the guidance and editorship of Susie Tharu, K. Lalita. The two volumes were published by the New York Feminist Press, but what was more enriching was the search for women’s writing, efforts to delineate not a unilinear but meaningful tradition of the same became a preparatory ground for much of research in the 1990s. The work on the two volumes in the Women’s writing in India are put in together on anthology taught us many things. We did not want to claim that women’s writing was unique and special but we wanted to see why it was different and why it called for special attention. At one level women writers are as much victims to social ideologies about the subordinate status of women as men writers. We also do not want to argue on behalf of women writers and suggest that, their work is miss-represented or miss-judge and overall they are marginalized in the field of writing. While working on this project we as a group formed our answers in a tentative and complex way. We should also think about women writers in the same way. They are part of their times and their society and at the same time they are also reflective on the crisis and suffocations that they face while ‘becoming’ writers.

Section III

Women Writing and Regional Social History

In this module we will take some Marathi women writers and their lives as examples of how we read literature as a social document to have a sense of social history of their region. Women’s writing in every language needs to be studied against the grain of the text. And when we learn to read between the lines of these texts we will be able to locate women subordinate status in the society and how they resist and create a space for themselves and at the same time create their collectivity and community and make knowledge making possible for themselves and how they create a gendered form of knowledge and redefine the world of their times.

Section IV

Bhakti Literature as Women Writing and Women’s Lives

After a prolonged neglect by Indian as well as western intellectuals, the bhakti tradition is at last getting the necessary critical attention. Both as a part of this newly found interest in general and due to the impact of the post-1975 women’s movement and women studies programmes, a good body of work on bhakta women, particularly sant women, is now being published. The search by contemporary feminism in India for indigenous roots and the mobilization of bhakta women’s poetry to fill this need is one such effort. It is fraught with several dilemmas. Nonetheless, one could see it as part of a pattern in a range of fields in post-independence India, which have turned the searchlight on past traditions in their quest for an identity.

Spanning a period of over five centuries, the bhakti tradition in Maharashtra began with the generation of sants like Dnyanadev and Namdev, Muktabai and Janabai, and reached its zenith with Tukaram and Bahenabai. Its spread and impact covered the entire space of political economy, culture and language occupied by the Marathi-speaking world, and included even parts of Karnataka and Andhra. The sants entered almost every home through Vithoba—a domestic deity par excellence,Sants were very much a part of the peasant communities of their time. Jayant Lele (1981:107)   notes that they were ‘a community of active producers. . . Jnaneshwar explicitly rejects the renunciation of productive life and ridicules the claims of liberation through rejection of activity.’ The women of the period, especially those who were in search of creativity and freedom, realized that the doors of the Varkari Sampraday were open to them.

A.K. Ramanujan (1989: 9-10) clarifies that: There are many kinds of bhakti though we speak of it in singular… One way of looking at bhakti movements is to see them as a counter system, opposed to classical, orthodox systems, say in their views about caste, gender or the idea of god. For example, the Vedic Gods are not localized, but in bhakti they are worshipped in local forms in temples. The Gods… are as human as they are divine. Bhakti in Maharashtra always remained a mainstream movement of peasants and artisans offering a most potent source of critique of brahmanism. If we look at the variations in the expression of bhakti, north India produced nirguna (abstract) bhakti, whereas south India adopted saguna (concrete) bhakti. Maharashtra represented the confluence of the northern and the southern traditions.

One of the striking features in this context is the range of castes and occupations that came together within the Varkari Sampraday. Their articulations were in the idiom of their caste-based occupation, their everyday life practices. Sena Nhavi (a barber) would carry his critique of caste discrimination by upholding his occupational skill: ‘We are the barbers; we do “hajamat” minutely.’ Gora Kumbhar was from the potter community, Savta was a gardener, Chokha Mela was a Mahar, Narhari was a goldsmith, Bahira came from Jatved, Jagannath from the Vadwal sub-caste. Dnyaneshwar and his sister Muktabai belonged to an excommunicated Brahmin family. Namdev was from the Shimpi (tailor) caste. His disciple Janabai, from a Shudra caste, was a part of Namdev’s household as a bonded domestic servant. The community of sants in Maharashtra, therefore was from the artisan and service jatis, and the bhakta community included women from both high and low castes. The crucial feature of this formation, therefore, was the fact that every caste contributed to the knowledge building process on equal terms. Right from Dnyaneshwar, all the sants talk to him in a conversational mode. For Janabai, he becomes a helpmate in carrying domestic chores. Vithoba was no doubt a homely god. Varkari Sampraday built up a strong egalitarian, democratising, anti-hierarchical ethos of Vithoba bhakti. Celebrating earthly joys, their bhakti had a robust peasant like directness of expression.

Almost till recent times, women’s bhakti writings were more often than not studied only in terms of literary expression. The rigorous critique developed by them to challenge all kinds of caste and gender ideational hegemonies were either altogether neglected or pushed into the background. In reality, the Varkari women had dared to enter the Varkari movement as equal partners. They drew fearlessly from their domestic life-world and wasted no opportunity to challenge the unequal order that subordinated them. We have a long line of woman sants full of radical intent, critique and expression – Mahadaisa, Baisa, Ausa, and then Muktabai, Janabai, Soyara-Nirmala, Sakhu, Premabai and Bahenabai. From the 13th to 17th centuries, there is an uninterrupted tradition of radical women sants and sant poets.

Some writings of sant women were translated and printed in the early 20th century. For example, Justine Abbott’s preface mentions that the first printed edition of the 17th century sant poetess Bahenabai’s work was edited by Dhondo V. Umarkhane which appeared in 1914 and was soon out of print (Abbott 1985: 9). Eventually in 1929, Justine Abbott published a translation of chosen portions of her autobiography. ‘To introduce to the west a name there absolutely unknown but worthy of being known’, he had chosen such portions ‘as seemed best adapted to give to the English reader the thoughts of this Indian woman that found expression in her verses nearly three hundred years ago.’ (ibid.: ix)

It would be apt to say that this writing of women sants was seen for a long time, in fact up to 1975, only as a part of the spiritual realm, and women sants like Muktabai and Janabai were treated as women who had already transcended the physiological division of humans into ‘man’ and ‘woman’. But in this process it was ignored that women sants were very much a symbiotic part of the Varkari masses. They were also a part of the social historic reality of the Marathi-speaking region. After the rise of women’s movement in India, gender-sensitive academic and political discourses made conscious efforts to write women into history. Initially, women sants were treated as add-ons to the list of male sants. Muktabai, Dnyaneshwar’s sister, was designated at one level as ‘mahayogini’, highlighting her spiritual status, but her very complex writing is yet to be analysed seriously. Thus, these historical accounts did not recognize the agency of women sants. Moreover, mainstream history was preoccupied with ‘women in early India’ as enjoying a high status, a position of honour and dignity. This homogenisation had created a category of ‘women in India’ with Gargi and Maitreyi being seen as exceptional women seers and knowledge makers. The predominance of this homogenised category further blurred the agency of sant women of the medieval period. Their expressions were relegated to the sphere of ‘bhakti’ as only devotion, contrasted to the sphere of ‘knowledge’. Women s’ lives as well as writings were either not contextualised or rendered a tokenist treatment.

There have been serious controversies as to whether there was one Dnyaneshwar or two. Namdev is acknowledged for his organisational brilliance and skills. But the women sants were always clubbed together with the male sants as their dependants. As I have observed elsewhere, ‘we always talk of Mahadaisa of Chakradhar, Jani of Namya, ‘little’ Muktai of Dnyaneshwar, Bahenabai of Tukaram… This is a classic instance of how the hegemonic order manages to reappropriate emancipatory drives for its own legitimization’ (Bhagwat 1995: ws-25). As a result, as late as 1957, Neera Desai acknowledged the bhakti movement as an important movement, but concluded that the bhaktas’ ‘total conception of woman’s status was not quite free from the admixture of the then prevailing attitude towards womanhood’. Hence, in her opinion, the overall effect of the movement on women was rather limited (Desai 1957: 34-47).

During the 1980s, in the overall context of ‘gender politics’ and the second wave women’s movement in India, there seems to be a proliferation of scholarly writings on sant women. A.K. Ramanujan in 1973 translated love poems and published the Classical Tamil Anthology (Ramanujan 1973). In 1989 he talked extensively about sant women in an interview for Manushi. He began studying the detailed history of Mahadeviakka, a Virasaiva woman, and an extraordinary picture emerged before his eyes. He saw ‘marriage’ as an issue in the lives of Indian women sants in a way that it was not for male sants, both upper and lower castes. He saw the women going through five phases: (a) early dedication to God in the form of a particular deity; (b) denial of marriage; (c) defying social norms; (d) initiation by the guru; and (e) marrying the Lord. He notes, ‘The upper caste male’s battle is with the system as a whole, often internalized as the enemy within, whereas a woman sant’s struggle is with family and family values.’ The woman sant remains feminine because ‘she has nothing to shed: neither physical prowess, nor social power, nor prudity, nor even spiritual pride. She is already where she needs to be in these sants’ legends’ (Ramanujan 1989: 324).

Since bhakti movements, radical in their beginnings, eventually got routinised, Ramanujan suggested that the sant writings have to be constantly reinterpreted and rescued from the domestication that they undergo. In his opinion, bhakti writings do offer alternatives, humane and creative ways of being and acting. Hence, he gave immense importance to the lives and poems of women sants for studying Indian women’s voices, for finding alternative con-ceptions in Indian civilisation (Ramanujan 1989: 14).

Jayant Lele in his edited work on bhakti movements (1981) makes pertinent observations about women sants in the context of the tradition-modernity debate. He argues that when dharma speaks only as an oppressive moment, as a duty from which the joy of performance has been stolen, it becomes coercive. He sees sant women’s rebellious posture vis-à-vis the social order in the context of their reality as communally exchanged young brides in an alien patriarchal/patrilocal family, in an often hostile household. He points out: A sensitive woman under conditions of oppression, looks upon god as an alternative to her husband, she does not, I think, look upon the former as a mere alternative, but a determinate negation of that very being which a husband is not, but should be. The worldly husband symbolizes the lure, the bondage, the oppressive reality of family life, while the god as husband and lover signifies liberation… Their involvement with the lord was an all-consuming affair… They rejected repressive marriage and not marriage, oppressive sex and not love making (ibid.: 12). According to him, women sants’ love transcended the prison gates of legitimised duty, false modesty, enforced honor and oppressive kinship.

Section V

Contemporary Interpretation of Women Writing of Past

In the 1980s feminist scholars of the second wave of women’s movement were grappling with an extremely troubled situation in India. The statistics of deteriorating women’s status; the experience of Indian women’s overall victimisation and sexual exploitation complicated by their locations in different communities, castes, classes; an absence or invisibility of women’s collective resistances in historical narratives; an urgent need of writing cultural historiography in order to combat naturalising or essentialising ‘the woman question’: all these presented immense complexities. A nuanced understanding of recasting of Indian women during the colonial period (Sangari and Vaid 1989) was attempted. This also led to researching ‘women in early India’ and challenging the myth of the ‘Golden Age’ (Chakravarti 1989). The search for women’s voices in Indian history sought to make them audible as specifically women’s voices. This was the context within which women sants’ lives and writings were foreground and studied by feminist scholars of different ideological dispositions.

In the late 1980s, feminism emerged as a critique of biologism and the sexual division of labour. It rested on the assertion of the right to chosen political affiliation and social identities above birth-bound ones. Women’s membership of any community and even of the state was seen as problematic due to their patriarchal modes. The roots of misogyny were rightly traced to traditional as well as modern male-dominated cultures. The stereotypical abuse of the weaker sex along with deep-seated phobic anxiety about the woman’s body and its reproductive ability was critically analysed by feminist scholars and activists. Sexism was defined as a process providing a rationale for the disempowerment of women in all spheres of life, secular and spiritual.

In this milieu, it is not surprising that the special issue of Manushi celebrating its 11th year sought to resurrect women sants as exercising individual choice and creating alternative tradition. Women sants were seen as ‘extraordinarily courageous and creative women who asserted right to their own life as they defined it’. Their writing was seen as a celebration of their individual choice and their religious path as an escape from the narrow confines of domesticity (Kishwar 1989: 7). Uma Chakravarti situates gender relations within the context of caste, class and delineates the issue of the control of female sexuality as the central issue. Chakravarti acknowledges bhakti as a rich tradition,

Particularly significant for women both for variations and commonalities in its social and religious implications. Here the dominant brahmanical ritual world is attempted to be turned upside down, boundaries operating in the social world collapse, and the shackles imposed by rigidly hierarchical social order are stretched to provide breathing space for some men and women. (Chakravarti 1989: 18)

She warns against homogenising bhakti into a neat unified tradition and simplifying its social content, and suggests that the extent to which bhakti dissolved gender lines needs to be investigated further.

Kumkum Sangari provides an analysis of bhakti thus:

In an economy where the labour of women and the surplus production of the peasant and artisan are customarily and ‘naturally’ appropriated by the ruling groups, high Hindu traditions sought to encompass and retain the management of spiritual ‘surplus’ and to circumscribe its availability along lines of caste and gender. In this spiritual economy, the liberalising and dissenting forms of bhakti emerge as a powerful force which selectively uses the metaphysics of high Hinduism in an attempt to create value grounded in the dailiness of a material life within the reach of all (Sangari 1990: 194).

Susie Tharu and K. Lalita compiling an anthology of Women Writing in India (1995: 35) argue that, ‘We might indeed learn to read them not for the moments in which they collude with or reinforce dominant ideologies of gender, class, nation, or empire, but for the gestures of defiance or subversion implicit in them.’

Tharu (1991: 57) observes:

The path of devotion set up no barriers of caste or sex. The women poets of the bhakti movements did not have to seek the institutionalized spaces religion provided to express themselves and women’s poetry moved from the court and the temple to the open spaces of the field, the workplace and the common women’s hearth.

Tharu and Lalita do acknowledge sant women’s writing as expressing a new sense of self-worth, new dignity to domestic chores, new self-confidence and even their access to a wider world, but note that their options were limited. They, too, doubt whether patriarchal controls were radically questioned and lives of ordinary women changed.

Vijaya Ramaswamy’s work Walking Naked: Women, Society, Spirituality in South India appeared in 1997, mapping the spiritual history of women in the context of societal structures though historical time and space. Her study looks at the issues of gender inequalities in the context of dominance and power, and the debates over female sexuality and education.

In Marathi, Indumati Shevde’s Sant Kavayitri (Women Sants) was published in 1989 under the guidance of Suma Chitnis, the editor of the series of books Stri Muktichya Maharashtratil Paulkhana (Footsteps of Women’s Liberation in Maharashtra). It was, in Shevde’s own words, an effort to search for the seeds of contemporary women’s movement in the past in order to create an understanding of the struggles of contemporary women in search of ‘self’.

During those years I, too, was engaged in researching the complex weave of sant women’s compositions in Maharashtra. ‘Man-Woman Relations in the Writings of the Sant Poetesses’, written in 1991, is an effort to show how women sants were talking differently as women and hence even as sants. ‘Marathi Literature as Source for Contemporary Feminism’ (Bhagwat 1995: ws-24) argues that:

The feminist movement in the [Maharashtra] state ignored its own tradition of a succession of women sants and other women writers who had inverted, and occasionally even subverted, the classical ideals of womanhood embodied in the hegemonic texts. The movement paid a price for this failure; it appeared to be based on dry, upstart ideas lacking roots in the soil.

The last decade has posed several challenges to feminist scholarship in India, and new directions and issues have been opened up. As Rajeshwari Sunder Rajan (2000) has argued, feminist scholarship’s move from victimisation of woman to resistance and agency of woman has emerged in the context of majoritarian religious politics and its mobilisation of women, and the failure of the state and its laws to ensure women’s safety or rights. The other important con-text of the 1990s, at least in western India, has been the challenge posed by dalit-bahujan feminist perspectives and organisation to feminist and non-Brahman historiography and epistemology. These challenges have led us to reflect on questions like: What constitutes resistance? Can the resistance to patriarchies and brahmanism/caste hierarchies be neatly separated even if only for analytical purposes? We are impelled to reflect on what we hide when we privilege the voices of women sants as voices of female resistance, as if they are unmarked by their caste location. For instance, Soyarabai, a Mahar sant, questioned untouchability: ‘O God, every human being carries impurity along with purity, then why should some human beings be treated as untouchables?’ (Pawar 2003) Or Janabai, as a bonded slave, as a dasi, that too of a Shudra caste, consciously stated, ‘I am low-born and kept outside the temple.’ Her declaration that Chokhamela, the Mahar sant, was the only true Vaisnava is important in understanding her as a member of the Varkari community. When we read their voices as voices of specifically female resistance, we edit out the fact that early feminism in India had dalit-bahujan beginnings and that these women were resisting the principles of brahmanical patriarchy. In fact, their consciousness, expressed through their poetry, spanned different locations of gender and caste, and thus offered a universalist and humanist critique of oppression.

No doubt there has been important feminist historical research and emancipatory interpretations of the lives and works of women sants. However, the caution that most feminists express about reading ‘too much’ into these voices may at least partly be explained by the fact that there has been very little work on the ‘living tradition’. The meanings that these women sants have in the lives of contemporary bahujan women as well as the co-option of the egali-tarian tradition by the latter, needs documentation. The imprint of the egalitarian practices from the Varkari movement in the literature of the early decades of the 20th century are apparent, for instance, in the autobiographical accounts of dalit women. Shantabai Kamble, for example, in her 1990 work Mazya Jalmachi Chitterkatha (A Kaleidoscopic Story of My Life) recalls early childhood memories of practices of untouchability in the movement. Her dismay at being asked about her caste and then served water from a distance by a fellow Varkari and her disappointment after being told by her mother that the untouchables could pay respects only at the steps of Chokhoba and Namdev at Pandharpur is a case in point.

I   would suggest, therefore, that the essentialisation of sant women’s writing as ‘women’s writing’ has often rendered invisible their resistance to brahmanical patriarchy and that this needs to be brought to the foreground. I do not suggest thereby that there is some readymade indigenous dalit-bahujan feminist solution in sant women’s writing that can deal with multiple patriarchies of the contemporary situation. An analysis of Bahenabai’s contributions can help explicate the argument in this context: Bahenabai (1628-1700) was the last great woman sant in this tradition. Born in a poor Brahman family, married at the early age of 3 or 4 to a 30-year-old Vedic pandit of a Shakta cult, beaten up by her husband, Bahena chose a Shudra guru and actively participated in bhakti by becoming a Varkari. Her writing consists of historical accounts of the Varkari Sampraday, a commentary on Vajrasuchi, a Buddhist text attacking dogmatic brahmanism by Ashwaghosha, an autobiography that is an important source for the social history of Maharashtra and almost 729 abhangas. As Dilip Chitre (1998: 5) notes, ‘The crisis that arose in Bahenabai’s life was noted simply as bhakti of “the god vs. duties of the pativrata” kind.’ Her struggle was a complex weave of questions on varna hegemony, self-perception of brahmanism, true meaning of the Veda and the discipline of ritualism. This Marathi Brahman woman changed the conservative frame of mind of her husband, redefined the concept of pativrata-dharma (wifely duty) from ‘loyalty’ to ‘pursuing a higher goal’ for both men and women, chose a Shudra guru and actively participated in the Varkari Sampraday. In university courses in Marathi literature, we were taught to read her texts and underline her skills in drawing a balance between the fulfillment of her wifely duties and achievement of spiritual excellence. The context of her times was thus completely lost. There is a need to highlight the system of her times, which treated women as subordinate beings having no right over material or spiritual property and no right to the knowledge-making discourse. Her whole life then is a quest of building an open community. She thus redefines the concept of a Brahman not as born, but as one who understands truly ‘Brahma’, that is, truth that is universal for the whole of humanity.

Bahena challenges brahmanical patriarchy through a subversion of meanings of the pillars of its coercive structure. Her ‘brahm’ is ‘karma’ that is, active intervention. ‘Wifely duty’ for her is recognising her own self. She takes a Shudra guru and challenges the very presence of god in brahmanism.

She writes (and I have translated the following songs from Javdekar’s sant Bahinabaicha Gatha)

(1979: 126):

One who recognises her own self

She is the true pativrata

One who treats worldliness and other worldliness on par

She is the one who holds the sky.

She tells us about the beatings that she suffered.

Whenever it pleases him, he beats me a lot, binds me like a bundle of sticks. (abhanga 161)

She tells us that:

The husband says we are Brahmans

We will always recite Veda

Who is this Shudra Tuka?

My wife is spoiled by him.

(abhanga 32)

Bhakti was her chosen path towards bringing freedom and equality for both women and shudras.

She raised questions like:

My husband earned a living through practising Veda

Where is God in this?

(abhanga 575)

She tells her God that her body was tortured at the hands of her husband:

But my mind has taken a vow

I will not leave singing for devotion

Even if I die.

(abhanga 588)

She had a large following of people. Her husband detested this popularity. She says

Every moment his hatred grows

Will she be possessed by the God?

Will she be fed by the God?

Baheni says this is how he worried

The God understood all this.

(abhanga 31)

She challenges brahmanical patriarchy’s vicious propaganda about the sinful birth of women and

Shudras, and refuses to be deceived by the mirage of rebirth. She says:

A pativrata when she serves her husband

Blesses both the families

Baheni says my soul is rested eternally

By my husband putting a stop to

The cycle of birth and death.

(abhanga 38)

Bahenabai lived on for many years after her husband’s death and worked till the end for the suffering community of Varkaris. She actually managed to convert her husband to the Varkari sect and persuaded him to accept Tukaram as his guru.

I suggest that woman sants were very much a part of the early modernity of lndia. Hence, their struggles and negotiations within their cultural context will have to be understood and reinterpreted as emancipatory cultural histories. Drawing them out solely as women’s voices often excludes their agency in challenging the political priesthood of their times and blurs their historical relevance as early voices against brahmanical patriarchy. Their voices more than being ‘specific voices of women’, are expressions of freedom and equality emerging from their lived experiences as women in specific communities. Their message thus has universality. These voices against patriarchal political priesthood are a demand for a new world, to be realised not in the next life through karma, but in the empirical world. This heritage of bhakta women’s voices as renderings of nascent modernity has several clues for today.

Our present is marked by a world order that collapses capitalism into democracy, equating freedom with choice and equality with access. Third world women’s issues are thus being equated to issues of poverty and their agency is being collapsed into efficient management of poverty and a mirage of ‘choices’. In India majoritarian fundamentalism opposes the ideas of secularism and equality, labeling them as ‘Western’. This challenge has underlined further the limitations of several academic trends, which pose undifferentiated ‘collective tradition’ against the ‘modernity’ of the West. Feminist scholarship that seeks to redefine democratic politics must, in retrieving emancipatory collective traditions, separate the brahmanical and the non-brahmanical, and inegalitarian from egalitarian aspects. The voices of freedom and equality of the bhakta women, which were at once directed against the intrinsically inter-linked caste system and patriarchy, contained an urge to transform the world. It is this tradition of equality and rights in the ‘early modern’ period that provide a rich heritage and can become a resource for redefining feminist democratic politics.

Section VI

shtra and Women Writing Today

Finally, I would like to conclude this by stating that a lot is happening in Marathi Literature as far as women’s writing is concerned. Many women writers are writing bravely, openly and in different genres. They write plays, short stories, long stories, poems, novels, novellas and even essays. They appear on various channels and are actively participating in different political parties and truly there is a lot of visibility and presence for women across castes, classes and communities after 1990. In universities Departments of Marathi Literature have one paper on ‘women writing’ and so far Marathi literary criticism is stuck into the framework of ‘images’, especially while looking at Dalit and women’s writing. We really need complex and healthy feminist literary criticism in Marathi, which is currently missing. If we look at women’s writing as critical intervention in the patriarchal structures and ideologies which are getting reconstituted in the changing political economy today, we need this urgently. Women from tribal, rural, peasant groups as well as from the urban milieu and even NRIs are writing seriously on various subjects. I will dare to make some generalized observations here. I want to state that women’s writing is no doubt crucial as social documentation but at the same time the established definitions of ‘literature’ will have to be interrogated and in order to claim literary status for different kinds of their writings. In short, ghettoizing women’s writings and magazines as a limited world – of the women, by the women, for the women – will not do any justice to contemporary writing of women. Essentializing women is a dangerous trap of identity politics. We can see many new social movements caught in the trap of this kind of ‘identitarian’ politics and we need to be wary of this danger. The need is therefore to revolutionize women’s writing as a site. There is no claim here of an automatic ‘sisterhood’ for women, however, one needs to see the building of ‘sisterhood’ as a political activity requiring writing by young men and women imbued with feminist consciousness.

For a long time one question haunts my mind. In the earlier time, Tarabai Shinde ended her life alone and almost like a crazy mad woman. Pandita Ramabai with so much of brilliance ended up in Kedgaon, almost in the Ashram (Ramabai Mission) very lonely, as if in exile, without much support and Anandibai Joshi after having succeeded in her achievement in the medical field faced illness and ended her life without completing her mission as a doctor who wanted to use her knowledge and provide services to her sisters. I see a similar pattern in almost every decade – women who dare to intervene in the Indian context, in the rigid framework of patriarchal structures, end up either in insanity, suicide or infantilization. As a result, in India, women’s creative contribution is invariably invisibalized or if recognized they must have sanction of their great dynasty and their upper caste background etc. Recently, we witnessed Ajita Kale – Marathi writer living in the US – who hanged herself tragically at a very young age, Priya Tendulkar, a sharp and eloquent short story writer who died untimely, Gauri Deshpande a committed woman writer with a liberal perspective died due to alcoholism. All these creative writers including Kamal Desai never wanted to be counted as women writers because they felt that this would lower their literary capability and evaluation. I do not want to see these women’s life as exceptional but I only want to point out that if they end up this way, what would happen to those women who live ordinary lives and still dare to write?

I also want to point out that there is no dialogue, no conversation, and no political effort to build up sisterhood in the real sense of the term. Women working as domestic servant or sex worker or anganwadi sevika, nurses or primary teachers write about themselves but their writing is more in the form of autobiographical narratives. Women writing from such groups and even peasant or tribal groups rarely write about their dreams and aspirations, their bodies, sexualities. At the same time urban women writers who are autonomous and sovereign – at least they claim so, they create complex weave of text but their writing does not create new consciousness among bahujan women. If women’s writing is taken seriously and engendered with caste, class, community consciousness there is possibility of Marathi women creating a new wave of feminist writings. This kind of hope for the very strong statements from women writers emerges from my own experience in the last two decades when one witnesses many translations from different language groups – Telugu, Bengali, Tamil even Gujarati, Kannada etc. into Marathi. And the compilations like “Women Writing in India Vol. I and II” (Tharu, K. Lalita eds., The Feminist Press, 1991) “Writing caste/writing gender: narrating Dalit women’s testimonios” (Rege, Sharmila, Zubaan, 2006) do provide this possibility. Thus, the urgent need right now is for more projects like these which read literary texts in their own and our context, each seeking to illuminate the other and for those with an explicit pedagogic intent, so as to make women’s writing a critical site for the production of new knowledge’s and beginnings of a new feminist consciousness.

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