Arundhathi Subramaniam gives voice to women waiting for centuries to be heard

A rare anthology of sacred Indian poetry

Poetry can be a refuge, but it could also pull the rug from under your feet — sending you flying or leaving you sprawled on the floor with your shattered assumptions. Wild Women, the anthology of sacred Indian poetry edited by Arundhathi Subramaniam, deftly does both by the sheer power and range of voices it packs. The collection’s overarching feminine voice overthrows all previously held ideas on what constitutes sacred poetry, uncovers a realm of experience never collated in one place before, gently, offers clues on redefining pathways to refuge.

At the Bengaluru book launch of Wild Women, Arundhathi called this book an attempt to “recover a powerful ancestry.” She wanted the poets whose voices we have barely heard over time, “to be named, to be accorded the dignity and attention they deserve.” She started with an “elegantly curated list of 20-25 poets” but ploughed through when at least double the number sprung out of research and demanded to be included. “I think this was a parallel, subterranean stream, waiting to be acknowledged,” she says.

She wanted to showcase the work of women of very “different temperaments, backgrounds, orientations and women who had made very different life choices” Thus, in this book, “you will find the voices of Buddhist nuns alongside that of vedantins, bhaktas, sufis, tantrikas and more. You will find poets — some cerebral, some devotional, some meditative and others more ecstatic.”

Whether they wore ochre, blue jeans or just their own skin; whether they walked alone, with a religious order or as householders with their partners as spiritual companions — she “wanted to honour the choices of each of these spiritual seekers.”

In a short e-mail interview, Arundhathi shares that the seed for this book was sown when she was working on an earlier volume of Bhakti poetry, Eating God. It bothered her that the celebrated women saints she read about “seemed to be pious devotees, serene songsters and docile followers… never presented as fierce spiritual warriors, wise foremothers, glorious ancestors.”

The specific idea for this anthology, however, was born when she curated a Music and Sacred Poetry festival, entitled Wild Women, at Mumbai’s National Centre for the Performing Arts in 2019. As the festival took shape, she discovered a “vast number of largely undocumented, unknown women — wild, wise and wonderful… who have been ignored or utterly erased by religious and rationalist narratives. The intensity, passion and irreverence of their work took my breath away!” she says. Wanting to know more about this “vast mystic sisterhood,” she set about creating a work that would “acknowledge their uniqueness and celebrate them in polyphony.”

The challenges were plentiful however. “I had no grant, no fellowship. It was a passion project — perhaps a lunatic project in some ways, sustained largely by my own eccentric curiosity. Other than the rigours of research, it also meant commissioning translations, which entailed endless email exchanges with translators. The content of this correspondence ranged from discussing broad approaches to translation to sometimes fretting over a single word,” says Arundhathi. The “biggest challenge was the magnitude,” with the compact list swelling to 56 poets! Though she enjoyed “the immersion and discovery, the unrelenting, interminable” nature of the project left her frustrated. “I considered abandoning it a few times… but the poems of some of these extraordinary women — Bhadda Kapilani, Lakshminkara, Jiradei, Janabai, Shenkottai Avudai Akkal, Habba Khatun, Tarigonda Venkamamba, among others, drew me again and again. And muttering under my breath, I would resume the journey!” she says.