Introduction:

 

If they see

Breasts and long hair coming

They call it woman,

If beard and whiskers,

They call it man:

But look the self that hovers

In between

Is neither man

nor woman

O Ramanatha. 

 

The notion of the Virah or love in separation is central to the Indian Bhakti corpus. It is used in both Saguna and Nirguna traditions.  Viraha explains Vaudeville, ‘is a complaint sung by a young woman who is separated from the one she loves’. In Viraha Bhakti, this role play is evoked, wherein the absent Lord is seen as the husband to whom all devotion is directed to by the devotee who sees himself/ herself as the wife.

 

 

This type of Bhakti which viewed God as the husband is termed as Madhura Bhakti and was seen as the highest form of Bhakti by the Vaishnava school of Bengal. It is interesting to study this phenomenon where Bhakti itself appears feminine in nature in contrast to the largely masculine, hegemonic Vedic tradition which was present during this time. It is my intention, through this paper to study this use of the female devotional voice in Viraha Bhakti through the poetry of two Bhakti saints: Mirabai and Kabir.

 

God is the only male, all humans are female:

 

The Bhakti tradition viewed the female condition as the universal condition of mankind. But why was the condition of the woman taken to be the representative human condition in a patriarchal world?

 

Perhaps an oral Urdu tale involving Birbal and Akbar could be useful in understanding this feature in the Bhakti tradition. Akbar asks Birbal to bring him four individuals with different traits: a modest person, a shameless person, a coward and a heroic person. The next day, Birbal appears with a woman and asserts that she possess all the four different character traits that Akbar had wished to see. Birbal proceeded to explain his stance when he saw Akbar’s puzzled face. He said: ‘When she stays in her in law’s house, out of modesty she doesn’t even open her mouth. And when she sings obscene insult songs at a marriage, her father and brothers and husband and in laws and caste people all sit and listen, but she is not ashamed. When she sits with her husband at night, she won’t even go alone into the storeroom and says, ‘I am afraid to go’. But then, if she takes a fancy to someone, she goes fearlessly to meet her lover at midnight, all alone with no weapon and is not afraid of robbers or evil spirits’. Hearing this answer, Akbar is said to have been pleased and rewarded him handsomely.

 

Raheja and Gold point out that this tale expresses the stereotypical South Asian misogyny that sees the woman as ‘a split between virtue and sexuality, weakness and strength, essentially duplicitous or hypocritical because of its multiplicity’.  But it was this precise heterogeneity that was thought to be inherent (by the predominantly male population of Bhakti saints) in choosing womanhood as the representative state of the devotee. However, this depiction leads us to think that womanhood was perceived of as a site of elasticity of character traits, whereas manhood was doomed to be seen fit with perhaps two or three ‘strong’ inelastic attributes of personality: that of chivalrousness, strength and machismo.

 

This, then leads us to the second reason which explains why men wanted to sing as women. Womanhood was taken as a central metaphor for the helplessness (which was seen as one of the dominant character traits of a woman) and dependence felt by the devotee (symbolic of the wife) in relation to a male God (signifying the husband) who was powerful and bountiful to all his devotees in his love, an objectified application of patriarchal order that prevailed within domestic confines.

 

Thirdly, to sing in a female voice was to confirm to the heterosexual norm. This was safe and acceptable and suggests that for the male poet ‘though I am a poet named so and so, I speak to/of my beloved in the voice of this pining woman; my normal self would be inadequate to the purpose’.

 

Viraha Bhakti thus comfortably accommodates all these strands of thought and allowed the devotee to center all his/her love towards a God who is forever physically absent.