Spirituality Studies 11-1 Spring 2025 75 Hari M. G. The man she is talking to is a king; but the way it is said clearly gives a feel that he is quite powerless when confronted with the might of her will. Akka Mahadevi not only left the palace, shunning all the social investments associated with it, but she also decided to live naked, in a very radical defiance against the gendered idea of being a woman. As a sāraṇa (Sa. “seeker completely devoted to Shiva”), she rejected societal norms that dictated modesty and submission. Many of her vāchānas defend her nudity, and as A. K. Ramanujan (1999, 275) notes, “Mahadevi throws away her clothes and with them the investment in society that the division between male and female differential clothing signifies; abandoning modesty, she walks naked, covered only by her tresses.” The adjectives and imagery she uses in the poems about her nudity are dense with laser-sharp logical thinking pertaining to the essence of her outlook toward life (Akka Mahadevi 1973, 84): To the shameless girl Wearing the White Jasmine Lord’s Light of morning, You fool, Where’s the need for cover and jewel? She calls herself the shameless girl. Usually, this term is used in a derogatory sense; but Mahadevi uses it to refer to a state of being beyond shame, in fact, beyond all social contexts of one’s existence. As far as she is concerned, she is not naked; she wears her Lord’s “light of morning”. The sensuous description of being covered by the grace of Shiva, makes it not just an abstract image, but the lived experience of a concrete reality. Her rejection of clothing signifies her vairāgya (Sa. “detachment” from worldly concerns and material attachments). Through her defiant stance against the vacuity of quotidian social conventions, she transforms feminine vulnerability into spiritual strength, embodying anubhāva (Sa. “direct experience of the divine”), which is central to the Bhakti movement. She addresses the judging world of social orthodoxy by calling them “you fool”. It is not the voice of someone who assumes a spiritual superiority, but of an intelligent woman who has a very logical reason for calling them so – what is the need of clothes when she is covered in the grace of the creator himself? Akka Mahadevi’s poetry embodies a radical reimagining of devotion – one that transcends mere ritual and enters the realm of complete self-effacement. For her, the physical body is not an entity to be adorned or hidden but a transient form, insignificant in the face of divine truth. In rejecting clothing, she does not reject dignity but instead exposes the superficiality of worldly attachments. Her words challenge the reader to reconsider the nature of purity – not as something external, dictated by social customs, but as an internal state of absolute surrender. She compels us to ask: if the divine pervades all existence, what meaning remains in human notions of concealment and exposure? This challenge is poignantly captured in some of her poems (Akka Mahadevi 1973, 85): People, Male and female, Blush when a cloth covering their shame Comes loose. When the Lord of lives Lives drowned without a face In the world, how can you be modest? When all the world is the eye of the Lord, Onlooking everywhere, what can you Cover and conceal? …can you peel The Nothing, the Nakedness That covers and veils? By stripping away physical garments, Akka Mahadevi symbolically rejects the layers of “illusion” (Sa. Māyā) that obscure true knowledge. The poem suggests that modesty is a human construct, a reaction to the vulnerability of the body, but in a world where the divine is omnipresent – where all the world is the eye of the Lord’ – there is nothing that can be hidden. If God sees all, then the very idea of concealment becomes meaningless. Furthermore, the closing lines emphasize the paradox of perception: humans attempt to “cover and conceal” their physicality, yet they remain blind to the deeper nakedness of existence – the emptiness of worldly attachments and the impermanence of material identity. The “nothing” that she speaks of is not mere absence, but a profound state of spiritual realization, a stripping away of falsehoods to reveal the ultimate truth. Through these verses, Akka Mahadevi extends a critique of both social conventions and metaphysical ignorance. Her nakedness is not just physical but existential, a declaration that she belongs to nothing but the divine. In this way, her poetry offers a powerful testament to spiritual defiance, liberation, and the transcendence of human-imposed constraints. The intellectual clarity in these words is the apt reply for critics like Jantzen (1994, 191) who argues that mystical experience only domesticates women: “The alleged inexpressibility of mystical experience correlates neatly with the silencing of women in the public arena of the secular world: women
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