Female Ascetics in Hinduism

6. Sainthood, Society, and Transcendence: Legends and Poetry of Women Saints

139 6 Sainthood, Society, and Transcendence Legends and Poetry of Women Saints LEGEND AND SOCIETY The Hindu tradition abounds in spiritual heroines. Popular characters such as S¥tå, Savitr¥, and Santo„i Må, who serve as models for appropriate behavior in the world, have received the attention of scholars. But those whose lives are lived in struggle with the world [Note: Earlier chapters in this book looked at different lifestyles for women. First is the ideal woman of orthodox sociolegal texts, submissive to her husband, indeed vowing to serve him—observing pativrata—and scrupulously adhering to the rules of purity, social class, and stage of life. Then there are three ascetic ways of living outside this paradigm , available to women who have either chosen or been forced to abandon the life of the married householder: those of the celibate student (brahmacåri£¥), the renouncer (sannyåsin¥), and the extra, even anti-social tantric. They illustrate these life-styles with data from Varanasi, primarily of a sociological kind. It is clear that LTD intended to supplement this with more ethnography of actual people and places. Fragments of this appear in the previous essays, but nothing remains in her papers that could be reconstructed into a complete chapter. In this last chapter, written as a freestanding article in 1984, she considers data from texts. In the earlier version of it she wrote in a note that she had also “collected the life histories of four contemporary women saints and observed the transformation of biography into hagiography, life history into legend .” It would have been fascinating to have had biographical data for these individuals to enrich the formal and sociological analyses she gives, and to have had what would certainly have been thought-provoking remarks on the kinds of relation she perceived between texts about contemporary saints and behavioral-sociological realities as she saw them. But at least we have this chapter to set her analyses of womens’ lifestyles, ascetic and not, in the context of individual personalities, albeit mostly legendary—S.C.] 140 Female Ascetics in Hinduism of normal social relations and, quite often, with themselves, remain largely unexamined. The heroines I refer to are mystics, ascetics and saints whose lives are rarely considered exemplary. Rather, they are evidential: evidence that mok„a is possible. This chapter takes material from legendary accounts of a number of women saints in order to discuss the relationship between sainthood, society, and spiritual liberation.1 In the large stock of legends, folktales, and biographies of women saints available to us, one is struck by their extreme personalization, their dissimilarities , their precious eccentricities. If one relies on legend alone, their lives appear quixotic and contradictory. Sainthood emerges in varied circumstances, ranging from that of the widow who voluntarily subjects herself to starvation, to the sensuous obsessions of the young girl who marries her beloved deity, to the intellectual mysticism of the homeless and naked female ascetic. All symbolic action described in legend is perfectly real behavior. The tragedies of miserable marriage, widowhood, and physical unattractiveness may be reinterpreted and presented in texts in such a manner as to divest them of their personal significance and pain, but such symbolic acts are quite real. All forms of religion in South Asia have precise behavioral specifications governing social interaction. Social existence is the arbiter, avenue, and evidence of spirituality. By clarifying the overall structure of Hindu society and of the possible ways of being religious, legend becomes sensible. So my perspective is both literary and sociological, that is, I apply the logic of social analysis to legend. The data are literary in two senses. First, and most fortunately for us, a large number of women saints were also writers and poets, and we have the verbal testimonies of their spiritual struggles and, sometimes quite explicitly, of their struggles with society. Second, and as already stated, the literature is legendary. I am well aware of the mythical character of legendary biographies and have no doubt that there exists for female saints something analogous to the myth of the magus. These women are indeed ritual heroines, more specifically, spiritual ones, and a comprehensive study of their lives would reveal certain stock features (Butler 1979, 1–2). But here we focus on cultural specificity and thus on their Hinduness. In addition to their universal or archetypal quality, hagiographies select and elaborate essential religious themes as defined by the specific society of a saint. The term saint...