Bahina Bai and mystical resistance

East-West Connections, Annual, 2004 by Cynthia Ho

"The Vedas cry aloud, the Puranas shout, 'No good may come to woman.'"

Bahina Bai

Max Weber compares Western and Eastern religions in Economy and Society and concludes that the distinctive element of Oriental mysticism is the believer's ability to accept contemplation not merely as a means to something else but as the goal itself. However, for Weber this mystical contemplation, a yearning to achieve absolute unity with the one God, does not have to be a flight from the secular world: "On the contrary, the mystic may demand of himself the maintenance of a state of grace against the pressure of the mundane" (Weber 1968, 548). Weber's "him" is not merely a grammatical construction, but an accurate reflection of the cases in his work. The example of the poet Bahina Bai is useful to test whether this generalization is true for an Indian Hindu female mystic and to ask how a woman, even more so than a man, can withstand the pressure of the mundane. Here, "mundane," especially for women, evokes the strong pull by the powers of cultural authority. For Bahina must struggle to make accommodation between her earthly self and her spiritual life: between marriage and the love of God.

Bahina Bai is a striking religious figure whose poetry has made her a canonical figure in Early Modern Indian poetry. All that we know of Bahina we learn directly from her writing. This collection is divided into several major parts, beginning with seventy-eight autobiographical poems, which relate her spiritual life history up to early adulthood. Beginning the story with a description of her family before she was born, she tells how she was the first, much loved daughter of a Brahmin family. She is married to an older Brahmin astrologer who joins her family in their wanderings brought on by financial problems. A series of experiences allows her to deepen the spirituality which she had shown from childhood, but her deep reverence for the things of God causes her jealous husband to beat her and threaten to abandon her. Her absolute devotion to God and her guru, the famous bhakti mystic Tukaram, gains her the praise of others but further antagonizes her husband. Only after a mysterious illness does he finally have a begrudging change of heart. In the course of telling her own life story, Bahina also answers her son's plea to tell him the stories of her thirteen previous lives as well. Bahina's additional poems, almost four hundred of them, concern saintly life, the praise of Brahman, and the duties of wifely devotion. Beyond its religious context, Bahina's text is unique in giving us an autobiography of a woman from a time period and place when very few texts of female direct address survive. The workings of caste, the wifely devotion and submission demanded of every woman, the need to mediate through a guru, and the dynamics of rebirth are all present, displaying a remarkable intersection of gender and religion.

The poems are written as abhangas, an elaborate, regularized form of the popular Marathi "ovi" meter, which is used in the songs women sing as they grind flour or husk grain (Tharu 1991, 107). The genre is particularly associated with bhakti and the saint-poet Tukaram. Although the poems have never been translated in their entirety into English, two partial translations exist by Justin Abbot as Autobiography and Verses and by Kristin Bahadur as Bahina Bai and Her Abhangas.

Bahina follows Vaishnavism or Vishnuism which worships Vishnu as the visible aspect of God in his various incarnations, or avatars. Bhakti, her mystical approach to worship, literally means "adoration;" it seeks a direct, affective encounter between the individual and God. Vitthala or Vithoba or Pandurang are all names for the manifestation of Vishnu represented in the temple at Pandharpur, the center of worship for Bahina Bai and her guru Tukaram (Vaudeville 1999, 201).

Bhakti, in its very definition, confronts Vedic/Brahman institutional authority by providing an alternative scenario for salvation (White 1988, 116). Mandakranta Bose in Faces of the Feminine in Ancient, Medieval and Modern India emphasizes the importance of bhakti for women: "Devotional Hinduism swept through India, taking root as an ideology that offered an irresistible alternative to the mystique of Brahmanical religion and gave legitimacy to the common individual, at least in the spiritual context. It gave space to people on the margin, such as women, lower castes, outcasts. Women, powerless and silent in many domains of community life, found strength in their sense of the divine and their own voice in poetry and songs " (Bose 2000, ix). By circumventing religious institutions, bahktas value personal experience in religion and question (either purposefully or inadvertently) ritualistic institutions and the power of establishment worship. In telling her own story, Bahina follows a distinctly female form of worship that includes the narration of personal stories (Northrup 1997, 71). And the kind of story she tells has a radically nonconformist nature that often reveals the fault lines in traditional authoritative constructions of religion.