Arundhathi Subramaniam’s Wild Women channels unheard voices from sacred Indian poetry

Poetry can be a refuge, but it could also pull the rug from under your feet — sending you flying or leaving you sprawled on the floor with your shattered assumptions. Wild Women, the anthology of sacred Indian poetry edited by Arundhathi Subramaniam, deftly does both by the sheer power and range of voices it packs. The collection’s overarching feminine voice overthrows all previously held ideas on what constitutes sacred poetry, uncovers a realm of experience never collated in one place before, gently, offers clues on redefining pathways to refuge.

At the Bengaluru book launch of Wild Women she wanted to showcase the work of women of very “different temperaments, backgrounds, orientations and women who had made very different life choices” Thus, in this book, “you will find the voices of Buddhist nuns alongside that of vedantins, bhaktas, sufis, tantrikas and more. You will find poets — some cerebral, some devotional, some meditative and others more ecstatic.”

Whether they wore ochre, blue jeans or just their own skin; whether they walked alone, with a religious order or as householders with their partners as spiritual companions — she “wanted to honour the choices of each of these spiritual seekers.”

Arundhathi Subramaniam showcases the work of women of very different temperaments, backgrounds and orientations. | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

In a short e-mail interview, Arundhathi shares that the seed for this book was sown when she was working on an earlier volume of Bhakti poetry, Eating God. It bothered her that the celebrated women saints she read about “seemed to be pious devotees, serene songsters and docile followers… never presented as fierce spiritual warriors, wise foremothers, glorious ancestors.”

The specific idea for this anthology, however, was born when she curated a Music and Sacred Poetry festival, entitled Wild Women, at Mumbai’s National Centre for the Performing Arts in 2019. As the festival took shape, she discovered a “vast number of largely undocumented, unknown women — wild, wise and wonderful… who have been ignored or utterly erased by religious and rationalist narratives. The intensity, passion and irreverence of their work took my breath away!” she says. Wanting to know more about this “vast mystic sisterhood,” she set about creating a work that would “acknowledge their uniqueness and celebrate them in polyphony.”

The challenges were plentiful however. “I had no grant, no fellowship. It was a passion project — perhaps a lunatic project in some ways, sustained largely by my own eccentric curiosity. Other than the rigours of research, it also meant commissioning translations, which entailed endless email exchanges with translators. The content of this correspondence ranged from discussing broad approaches to translation to sometimes fretting over a single word,” says Arundhathi. The “biggest challenge was the magnitude,” with the compact list swelling to 56 poets! Though she enjoyed “the immersion and discovery, the unrelenting, interminable” nature of the project left her frustrated. “I considered abandoning it a few times… but the poems of some of these extraordinary women — Bhadda Kapilani, Lakshminkara, Jiradei, Janabai, Shenkottai Avudai Akkal, Habba Khatun, Tarigonda Venkamamba, among others, drew me again and again. And muttering under my breath, I would resume the journey!” she says.

For her, the greatest gift of this journey has been the women themselves — “fierce, courageous, sometimes outrageous — not demure or domesticated but with spine, nerve and astonishing chutzpah.” The project became “a way of re-drawing a family tree, reclaiming a lost genealogy, an erased history of female mentorship.”

Arundhati with Bharatanatyam exponent Alarmel Valli and well-known Carnatic vocalist Bombay Jayashri at the launch of Wild Women in Chennai | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

Arundhati exults in the gifts showered by poets like Punnika, the slave girl and Buddhist nun, who confronted a ritualistic Brahmin with questions on karma 2500 years ago, or in the voice of 17th century Kashmiri mystic, Rupa Bhavani, who declared she would never bow to the divine because she was aware of the sacred within her. “In a fragmented world, it helps to be reminded of those who refuse to separate flesh and spirit,” says Arundhathi, “women, who acknowledge the wisdom of their bodies and puncture orthodox ideas around saliva and menstruation.”

While the first section of Wild Women packs more than a punch in how it conveys the voices of women who owned their skin in all fullness, the second section of the book spotlights women as protagonists and not poets. The third section spotlights the Goddess — “one wild woman who never quite goes away.”

This book is a rare treasure because it remedies centuries of omission and erasure. It does not take out a flag march, but instead, sings out loud in celebration. The colours it throws into the air — if we could call the poems that — are of too many shades to be named. And yet, the unquestionable success of this book is in how it drenches us in those hues — leaving us both content and newly restless.