Finding her voice

For years women's voices in art and culture that challenged social mores and moral codes were silenced. A few artistes are making them mainstream again

It is doubly ironical that in a country where both speech and wisdom are goddesses (Vac and Saraswati respectively), strident female voices in poetry, prose, worship and other spheres have been either erased from public spaces or nudged into the cracks. Be it the women varkari poets of Maharashtra, who composed songs in praise of Vithoba (a pastoral folk deity), or the poems of mystic Lal Dedh in Kashmir, or Andal’s works in Tamil — the silence around their words is universal and systemic. But a group of writers, performance artistes and curators is drawing their work out into the public domain and in the process, teasing out the troubled relationship between women in the arts and the gatekeepers of culture.

Shruthi Vishwanath, a classical singer trained in the Carnatic and Hindustani styles, sings the songs composed by women varkari poets. Janabai and Soyrabai are her favourites, both Dalit women whose ways of defying oppression and reclaiming their spaces she finds hugely inspiring. Vishwanath composes the music, sings the abhangs (as these compositions are called) and translates them for an audience that is not familiar with Marathi. She has even sung them in the villages that the women once lived in, to local audiences largely oblivious to these folk traditions, using a grant from the India Foundation for the Arts to spread the word. 

The poems are hard-hitting, they don’t mince words, she says. Hence, they are not sung, not even by the women who undertake the annual pilgrimage to the temple of Vithoba in Pandharpur, Maharashtra. When Vishwanath asked them why, they said, “Kay stree kay purush?” (Why discriminate between men and women?) But then, why not sing the women poets? That the women and the men refused to answer. 

Somehow, by not singing them or performing them, the women were supposed to be erased from public memory. Fortunately, the printed word has kept them alive. The varkari poems have been translated by several, the most recent by Jerry Pinto and Neela Bhagwat that is part of an anthology called Eating God: A Book of Bhakti Poetry, edited by Arundhathi Subramaniam. 

If the women have had a hard time staying alive in public memory, the music and performances by other marginalised communities have had it worse. Shilpa Mudbi-Kothakota and Adithya Kothakota are working with the devadasis and jogathis (a transgender community in Karnataka) to revive the Yellamma myth. Yellama, also known as Renuka, is the mother of Parasurama and her story is performed as the Yellammanaata. “Mainly the queer and marginalised community members perform it,” says Mudbi-Kothakota. Over the years, people have moved away from these performances that were once commissioned by the wealthy members of society for an entire village. She adds that these performances are becoming rarer as the number of teachers and practitioners dwindles. 

Arundhathi Subramaniam, who recently curated a festival at Mumbai’s NCPA called Wild Women, says, “The subcontinent has some wonderfully rich poetry by women mystics that I believe needs to be heard, reclaimed and celebrated. These are women whose voices have been sanitised and domesticated by the grand narratives of religion, and rendered utterly inaudible by the somewhat barrenly rationalist worldview that we are also heir to today.” 

Documentary filmmaker Shabnam Virmani, who spoke of female mysticism at the festival, says, “When women reclaim their power of surrender from patriarchy and submission, dangerous things begin to happen. Like Lal Dedh, like Mirabai and Akka Mahadevi.” These women challenged the oppressive influence of society on their lives and their art and many were ostracised for that, during their time. Kashmiri mystic saint Lal Dedh (translated by several, including Ranjit Hoskote, I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded) was declared a lunatic by the elite of her times.

This was a common tactic, say those who are now bringing their words to life. Call a woman mad, hysterical or illiterate and her work soon becomes insignificant. “There are many ways in which women’s voices can be rendered inconsequential. It doesn’t have to be about forcible muzzling. There are a host of other subtle ways in which women artists have been trivialised, and in some ways, continue to be. In the case of the women mystic poets, they can be deified as glorious asexual icons, as religion often does. Or they can be turned into poster girls for progressivism, as proto-feminists, as it were, which is something the modern secular world often does, in the process, often overlooking that their radicalism was deeply linked to their spiritual commitments,” Subramaniam says. 

All those involved in performing the women poets or writing about them say that their words resonate deeply with the world we live in today. Vishwanath, who recently sang a song about impurities and caste at IIT Mumbai, says she interprets the songs within the contemporary context. But, she does not really have to do much to make them relevant — various women saints challenged societal norms on women entering temples during their periods. “Look how little has changed today when we are still fighting for the right to get into temples,” she says with a sigh.