Spirituality Studies 11-1 Spring 2025 77 Hari M. G. in the presence of her Lord in the innermost spaces of her subjectivity, she is often taken over by a desperate urge to be one with her Lord (Akka Mahadevi 1973, 83): What’s to come tomorrow Let it come today. What’s to come today Let it come right now. Lord white as jasmine, Don’t give us your ‘nows’ and ‘thens’! Bhakti, as we see in the poetry of Akka Mahadevi and many other saint-poets, is marked by an unbridled desire. The devotee is not against desire, but against limiting one’s desire to the material world. She desires the most profound experience of life in all its depth and dimension, and she wants it “now” – in this moment, defying time and space. The rational critic in Akka Mahadevi is nowhere to be found in poems like these. When she talks to the world, she is completely rational and confrontational; but when she addresses her Lord in the innards of her subjectivity, she is passionately feminine, desperately loving, and way beyond the realm of logic. But these poems while deliberately going against the logic of the world have a different kind of logic implicit in them. It is not the logic of the worldly-wise, but that of a lover. It is the logic that aims at strategies of self-effacing rather than rationally taking a stance vis-à-vis the world (Akka Mahadevi 1973, 86): Make me go from house to house With arms stretched for alms. If I beg, make them give nothing. If they give, make it fall to the ground. If it falls, before I pick up, make a dog take it, O Lord white as jasmine. This poem very vividly illustrates the poet’s attitude to the world. She may speak a few words of wisdom to those around her; but it never springs from a desire to have an active engagement with the world. On the contrary, she sees the world as a platform to undo her limitations by consciously choosing hardship. Even when the world shows mercy to her, she wants tragedies to befall her. It is quite ironic that when devotees are often seen as weaklings who seek God’s help to survive in the world, in one of the most moving depictions of devotion, Akka Mahadevi beseeches her Lord to make her life in this world as difficult as possible so that nothing remains in her other than her all-consuming desire to be one with the divine. The experience that she is seeking – “a body that cannot be seen by seeking, a bliss that cannot be had by coupling” (Akka Mahadevi 2024, 55) – is outside the ambit of all the varieties of life experiences that the world outside of her offers. It is an experience that can be had only in the most intimate spaces of one’s interiority. It is a daring journey that only a devotee can make because as Michael James (2024, 10) notes in his article on Bhagavan Ramana, “bhakti in its deepest sense is alone what motivates us to investigate ourselves deeply enough to see what we actually are and thereby eradicate ego”. To peel off one’s inner accumulations, one must ignite the femininity of Bhakti and make oneself available to a transcendental reality. 7 Bhakti and the Feminine William James (1902, 377) contends the ineffability of mystical experiences as their most defining characteristic: “the handiest of the marks by which I classify a state of mind as mystical is negative. The subject of it immediately says that it defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words.” Being an experience beyond logic and language, the mystical experience, essentially, moves beyond doctrinal constraints and institutionalized religion, entering a space of pure, unmediated experience beyond the limits of the body and mind. This ineffability makes mysticism feminine in the sense of being receptive to a mysterious dimension. This is even more true in the poetry of Akka Mahadevi. The feminine experience of bhakti in her poetry frequently oscillates between articulation and silence, between a passionate outpouring of love and a withdrawal from the world’s structures. It is an experience that demands intuitive listening, rather than rational comprehension. Cristina Mazzoni’s observation regarding the keenness of perception that mystic poetry demands from a reader is absolutely valid in reading the poetry of Akka Mahadevi: “God does unspeakable things with and to the mystic, and if her task is to tell these unspeakable things, the reader is to listen – across the mystic’s silence and contradiction, and oftentimes, across the reader’s own unbelief” (2007, 106). In other words, her poetry demands a feminine reading – an ability to be receptive to a subtler dimension of experience that her poetry radiates, not only through words but also through its silence. Another aspect of her devotion is an absolute surrender – she gives herself entirely to the Lord, consciously forsaking personal will and all investments in society. This surrender, however, is not passive; it is a dynamic and radical act.
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