Multiple Voices in Akka Mahādēvi’s Devotional Poetry

Abstract

Akka Mahādēvi, a major female figure among the cadre of vacana poets of the twelfth-century Kannada-speaking region, has gained renown for her bold and lyrical articulations of intense devotion to the god Śiva, set against patriarchal society and siffling orthodoxy. In the Kannada original and in translations (most famously A. K. Ramanujan’s Speaking of Śiva), the poems voice Akka’s personal love to Śiva and the plight of having to live among non-devotees. Similarly, her remembered life story highlights her tragic desertion of family life and society to live as a naked, wandering recluse. This paper seeks to complicate the popularly-held representation of Akka charted above by paying attention to poems that remain outside scholarly considerations of Akka’s poetic oeuvre. Unlike Akka’s famous translated poetry about personal rebellion and imagined intimacy with the god, these poems include quotations of Sanskrit scripture and exhibit a catechistic worldview; their authorial voice is not of a solitary female who longs for union with the god but of an authoritative figure that is concerned with collective ritual practices and prescribed religious life. I shall pay particular attention to different language uses in Akka’s poems and consider the multiple literary constructions of Akka as an indication for competing visions and voices inside the tradition, while reflecting more broadly on strategies for gender construction in South Asian religious poetry.