Chosen Moments: Mediation and Direct Experience in the Life of the Classical Tamil Saint Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār

Familiar patterns of interpretation can quickly tame a new text; that is their blessing and their curse. I had occasion to reflect on this issue of domestication—the moment at which a pattern of interpretation shifts its burden of illumination onto the text itself, so that it domesticates the text as primarily an illustration of the patterns’ own formulation—in new ways when I discussed my findings on the story of the classical Tamil saint Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār, who is dated to the sixth century, with a group of feminist colleagues across academic disciplines. I have always thought of the story of Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār as rather transgressive, unexpected, and confrontationally perplexing, but as I continued my discussion of the story I was surprised by what I understood as a response of easy assimilation; for example, colleagues vigorously nodded their heads as if the next narrative element in the story was exactly the right, and totally expected, move for the story to make. Of course, I was stressing the story’s resonances with feminist patterns of interpretation, and thus was encouraging such connections; yet I was unprepared to see these points of intersection morph into the intimacy of familiarity, and it troubled me.

Let me note at the outset that I received much encouragement and creative feedback from my colleagues, and I am grateful to them for spurring me to ask difficult questions of my subject, my subjectivity, and my methodology.¹ Subsequently, I have tried to identify the nature of the intersections of interpretation I experienced in the discussion, and during the course of this reflection, the pattern of oppression and empowerment emerged as a dominant motif. I believe that our meeting of the minds as feminists, through my presentation and my colleagues’ responses, was within the contours of this pattern. So much of the saint’s story seems to lend itself to the familiar pattern of oppression (the loyal, dutiful wife; her domesticity; her silence; the incompatibility of wifehood with religious devotion) and empowerment (direct contact with God; self-expression possible through religion; creation of canonical poetry), that there is almost an inevitability to understanding the story in this way; but this ease of assimilation and sense of inevitability should give us pause. If we pause, then we will be able to see our interpretation as foregrounding specific chosen moments from the text, as well as specific readings of those moments.

The pattern of oppression and empowerment is a progressive, interpretive metanarrative that is widely used today by groups advocating social (including political and economic) change. It is a potent, politicized way of characterizing the challenges and possibilities of lived experience for marginalized people. In thinking about a story of a classical woman saint, I am exploring the pattern’s relevance to a historical woman who was not involved in overtly political activities.² Only in the second half of the twentieth century did in-depth studies of women in history begin, simultaneously with renewed activism for women’s rights. In asserting that patriarchy is a reality, it was (and is) necessary to discover patterns of oppression and empowerment in history. And the patterns are there, in feminist narratives as well as stories about historical women in world religions; for example, in the survey of women’s religious history provided in Serinity Young’s Sacred Texts by and about Women sourcebook.³ I undertake a critical examination of this image that is present in, though not exclusive to, feminist perspectives, in keeping with feminist scholars’ engagement in deconstructing patterns of feminist interpretation, in the interest of advancing our understanding of the meaning and activities of women today and in history, as well as the possible links between them.⁴

In their groundbreaking cross-cultural study of women in religion, Nancy Auer Falk and Rita Gross identified two major themes across cultures in the lives of religious women. The first was the “contrast between extraordinary callings and everyday concerns in women’s religious lives,” recognizing that “the...