SUSHMA
V MURTHY
Christ
University, Bangalore
Paper Title: “Littoral Drift:
Intertidal Corporeal and Spiritual Selves in
Akka Mahadevi”
Abstract
AkkaMahadevi is
one of the few Bhakta Saints who features prominently in the discourse of
mysticism and spirituality in India, often over-ridden by reformers,
spiritualists and philosophers of the Bhakti movement. Akka’sVachanas mark a
distinctive shift from traditional
approaches to the self and the divine, categories that are often located
with/in the binary of body and soul/spirit, and like most oppositional binaries,
further deeply entrenched in historical euro-centric readings of varied Indian
texts. The outwardness/inwardness of a spiritual journey, exemplified as
transcendence by way of worldly renunciation is often the definitive element
that clearly characterizes and demarcates beings, worlds, spaces, relationships
and utterances in dichotomousterms as the private and the public realms,
irreconcilable, therefore reproachable to men and largely unapproachable by women.
Akka’sVachanas
challenge not only the duality of the self and the world, but the very
constitution of the self, mirrored in the divine spirit as form. Akka’s
spiritual path unfolds with an evolving consciousness which she terms as ‘Arivu’,
a highly individual, therefore personal dialogue which she holds with “ChennaMallikarjuna”,
at once the self (her signature) and the divine (her lord), punctuated by joy,
doubt, suffering, shame, relentless freedom and bondage –speech-acts of an
unconsolidated subject who repudiates all notions of a displaced abject
literally within/out the garb of society. Akka was perhaps one of the first
women in India to question the materiality of the body in an overtly spiritual
realm, thereby the ideological apparatus that is established on it physically
by way of raiment, symbols and metaphors of identity that deny
self-identification on one’s own terms. Her dismissal of clothing is often
erroneously understood as renunciation of the body, not confrontation with it,
a process that consistently marks her relationship with the most visceral and
sensual elements of nature and translates into much erotic mysticism with her
husband/lord in the Vachanas.
The paper attempts to
establish the discursive yet individual consciousness of the divine in Akka’s
selectVachanas as a radical, fluid space of conversation between established
realms of the body and the mind/ spirit, in/as constant negotiation with
one/self. The corporeal and spiritual are therefore rendered seamless in a
littoral drift of consciousness, seeking not to transcend, but unhinge the
sometimes well-oiled, sometimes rusty bearings of being to unravel the
spiralling and inter-lockingmachine-work of self-in-divine existence.
Dr. Sushma V. Murthy is Associate Professor at
the Department of English, Christ University, Bangalore. Her teaching and
research interests range from British, American, Postcolonial and World
Literatures to Gender Studies and Feminist Writing. She was affiliated to the
University of Montreal, Canada in 2007-08 under a Shastri Doctoral Research
Fellowship. Her research publications have focused on Writing in the Feminine,
Translation, Feminist Aesthetics, and a critical introduction to Joseph Conrad.