Ladies in read: Inside a dramatic new collection of sacred poetry by women

“Flung into the company of foolish zealots

who piteously whine in piety;

the qazi, the brahmin pandit

goad me to read the Kalma, the Purana.

They seek in the written script,

my ferryman Lord

who stands outside

and beyond all this.

I say, says Peero,

how will they lead who themselves are lost?”

That’s from a devotional poem by Peero, a courtesan who fled the kothis of 19th-century Lahore, driven by love for a man from another faith, the Sikh mystic Guru Gulabdas. With him, she found her spiritual calling too, and wrote, in poem after poem, of the high-octane love that now filled her life.
“Her fearless interrogation of all orthodoxies makes her inspirational,” says the poet Arundhathi Subramaniam.
Originally written in Punjabi, this translation is one of 338 works that feature in Subramaniam’s new anthology of devotional poetry by women, Wild Women: Seekers, Protagonists and Goddesses in Sacred Indian Poetry.
The book features poems translated from 20 languages (Pali, Khasi, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Manipuri and more), and a few originally written in English. It is a sequel, in a sense, to Eating God (2014), her anthology of Bhakti poetry by women seekers.
Some of the poems in the new collection date as far back as the 6th century CE.
“Like the flame’s unbinding / Was the liberation / Of awareness,” writes Patachara, a Buddhist nun from this era, arriving at a self-realisation while pulling up a candle wick in her room.
“Here, at this mysterious depth / I find myself entirely at home,” writes Daya Bai, an 18th-century Delhi mystic.
“Like the full moon / Brimming intoxicated / I emptied into a radiant, infinite sky,” writes the 18th-century Tamil mystic Avudai Akkal.
Down the rabbit hole
Naively, Subramaniam says, laughing, she started out with a list of 25 names. “I thought that was adequate. I thought my work would then largely consist of selecting verses and commissioning translations.”
Instead, the carefully manicured list was soon “thrown to the winds”. “Every burrow I explored led to a veritable rabbit warren,” Subramaniam says.
As she puts it in the preface to the book: “Women started emerging from everywhere. They blinked up, kitten-eyed, from the footnotes of familiar books. They parachuted, uninvited, into conversations. They toppled off forgotten shelves.”
She ended up featuring 56 women, who occupy only a third of the anthology. Another third is dedicated to poems featuring woman protagonists, but written by men (think, Shah Abdul Latif and Kabir). The third segment is a tapestry of “goddess poems”.
“I wanted women questors, but I also wanted those female archetypes that stand radiant, at the end of the quest. From the religious canon to tribal, folk and tantric goddesses, I wanted a whiff of them all,” Subramaniam says.
This last section closes with contemporary poems dedicated to female deities. These include The Mother and the Goddess of Night, by the Sri Lankan poet Aazhiyaal, dedicated to the Greek goddess Hecate. And The Kingdom of Kali, an ode on that Indian goddess by the American poet May Sarton.
“Every creation is born out of the dark.
Every birth is bloody. Something gets torn.
Kali is there to do her sovereign work
Or else the living child will be stillborn…”
Sarton writes.
The end of the quest
In all, it has taken six years to finish Wild Women.
Subramaniam let poems fall into her lap from random shelves and leap out at her from the pages of obscure books, she says.
Some seemed destined for her collection.
The translation of the poem by Peero, for instance, was ready and waiting, in an unpublished work by Neeti Singh, associate professor of English at MS University, Baroda. Singh shared her new book on Peero with Subramaniam, for feedback. “I was struck by this extraordinary tale of love, courage and spiritual alchemy that led from marketplace to monastery, brothel to dera, and blurred the boundaries between them,” Subramaniam says.
Another favourite, if she had to pick, would be the one below, written about 2,500 years ago by Punnika, a slave girl and water carrier who became a nun after hearing the Buddha preach.
“Who taught you this
— the ignorant to the ignorant —
‘One, through water ablution,
is from evil kamma set free?’
In that case, they’d all go to heaven:
all the frogs, turtles,
serpents, crocodiles,
and anything else that lives in the water…”
Punnika writes.
Sacred art
Two things unite the women in the collection, Subramaniam says, and it underlines the essential difference between a seeker and a scholar.
“These women were not interested in defining the sacred; they wanted to experience it. And, irrespective of personality or religious allegiance, there was a sense of wonder, gratitude and jubilant freedom in almost all of them.”
Whether it is the unfussy awakening of Patachara or the searing interrogations of Punnika, “we are being invited to the shock — the hoarseness, the amazement, the dazed incoherence — of event turning to word”.
“These,” Subramaniam says, “are utterances born of a naked-wire, first-hand experience of transformation.”