seduce him, a righteous man. He tells her that she has no right to pollute him
with her touch. Sulabha ̄ is not affected by his decrying her; she says that he has
confused the soul and the body, for she has not touched him at all.
True, our bodies should not touch, but I have not touched you with any part of my
body. I rest in you like a drop of water on a lotus leaf, without permeating it in the
least. How can you distinguish between souls which are in essence the same? How
can you call the contact of two enlightened beings unlawful? (Leslie 1983: 89)Sulabha ̄ concludes that anyone so obsessed with the external fact that she is a
woman cannot be enlightened (Leslie 1983: 99).
All three stories, all encounters between a male and a female, address the notion
of gender directly. In all of them, the male figure is the learned, wise patriarch,
the acknowledged “saint.” The first two stories reverse many hierarchies tradi-
tionally accepted in many Hindu communities – male gender, meditative focus,
priestly functions, learning are all questioned by a woman who is obsessed with
devotion to God. They, of course, highlight the importance of devotion over
ritual practice and male learning. If it were not for the last story (and many
others in the Hindu tradition) we would almost be tempted to think of traditional
learning as male and devotion as female. But it is not so simple.
The first story flows with the some of the moods in the devotional poetry
we saw earlier – the deity is the male, and all, including Jı ̄v Goswa ̄mi, are female
in relation to the divine. And yet, here and in many stories, the learned or the
high-caste male forgets it (Venkatachari), and the female devotee has to nudge
him, “awaken” him. In the second story, Mahadeviakka knows only S ́iva as a
bridegroom. She is gendered as a devotee, but she is oblivious to her body. The
outer signs of her biological womanhood do not matter to her as a person, yet
she is aware that the male saint is aware of it. Her answer is ambiguous; but
Ramanujan and others have interpreted her as saying that while she is indiffer-
ent to her body (and its sexuality), this nominal covering with her hair is her
concession to the male company around her. Eventually, though, she implies, it
will not, should not matter; that is just the shell.
Which brings us to the last story. Sulabha ̄ is clearly a woman and Janaka a man.
They meet as peers, as philosophers and aspirants in search of enlightenment.
Both are knowledgeable, both engaged in the practice of religious exercises.
Janaka thinks of himself as enlightened but is conscious, indeed, outraged over
his suspicion that Sulabha ̄’s femaleness will somehow compromise his enlight-
enment. Sulabha ̄’s answer is very different than Mı ̄ra ̄’s query to Jı ̄v Goswa ̄mi. It
is not the case that allbeings are female; it is that noneare female – or for that
matter, male. It is this last position, exemplified in the Sulabha ̄ story, that many
contemporary women gurus have taken. Ma A ̄nandama ̄yı ̄’s disciples thought she
was beyond gender. Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati, a guru originally from New York and
who works extensively with AIDS patients, also says “there is no male or female.”^7
gender in a devotional universe 581