Is my daughter possessed by
the Lord of the earth and the sea?
What can I tell my daughter,
who claims to know the earth and the sea?”
(Tiruva ̄ymoli, 5.6.1)In this poem the “mother” of the heroine speaks in wonderment about her
daughter who exults in her “union” with her lover. Namma ̄l
̄
va ̄r, the male, is
speaking as a “mother” of her “girl” who is acting like the male deity. This double
switch (male acting like a female who is “possessed” by a male”) is not very
common, but shows the fluidity of gender. “She” seems possessed by him;
empowered and hardly distressed.
A dominant paradigm in Hindu literature, as we saw, is to depict the soul’s
separation from the deity by having the male take on the voice and role of the
female. The overarching archetypes are the cowherd girls separation from Kr.s.n.a
and the separation between the “hero” and “heroine” in Tamil poetry. Both these
work themselves out in texts, arts, and rituals all over India. Although this
assumption of a female role is common, we must note that such an assumption
in not necessarily always one sided. We just saw a male assuming the role of
other males who have experienced the “separation” situations.^5 In some rituals,
a woman saint may take on the role of a male; thus in rituals in S ́rı ̄Villiputtur
in the state of Tamilnadu, A ̄n.d.a ̄l, the eighth-century woman poet sometimes
wears the dress of the male deity, Kr.s.n.a.
Whether it is a male or a female then, what is stressed is the intensity of the
passion which can be depicted in many voices. The hierarchies seem to shift but
it is not based only on gender – the mother, courtesan, or friend does not cringe in
front of the lover.Here and elsewhere (Narayanan 1999) we see that gender is
only one of the terms in Hindu hierarchies: there is caste, class, stage of life, age,
and relationship among other factors which contribute to hierarchies. Gender
here seems functional; when the mood warrants it, various roles are taken and
there is no unilateral hierarchy in the literature. The many voices are important
in the poet’s articulation of love and no hierarchy (at least the south Indian
examples) is seen in between the various kinds of love. The voices of women and
men in certain kinds of relationships are valued and privileged in this discourse
and in the changing roles, hierarchies are done, redone, affirmed, and subverted.
The Gender of the Soul: Three Encounters between
Exemplary Men and Women
The poet, the human being assumes and moves between various gender roles. It
is clear that in text and ritual, the human being assumes various genders. But,
does the soul have a gender? We saw in the ritual of Namma ̄l
̄
va ̄r in S ́rı ̄ran.gam
and in the songs of many male poets that they think of themselves as a woman.
gender in a devotional universe 579