Bahiṇābāī’s Early Modernity

Abstract

This paper focuses upon the figure of Bahiṇābāī (fl. 1628), a seventeenth-century poet-devotee (bhakta) associated with the more widely known Marathi poet-saint Tukārām (c. 1608-1649). As scholars and readers have variously noted, Bahiṇābāī appears to stand apart from most women bhaktas insofar as her poetry—and religious practice as such—sought no radical release from social mores (specifically, matrimony), but a subtle reconciliation of conjugality and ascesis. Drawing upon the strikingly autobiographical verses that make up part of Bahiṇābāī’s fragmentary gāthā, I foreground some of the ways in which Bahiṇābāī used her first-person poetic voice to stage and perform this ethical reconciliation. I further consider how the “figure” of Bahiṇābāī made her/its way into the roughly contemporaneous notebooks of kīrtan performers, and the plural resonances of her memory in the religious life of present-day Maharashtra.