The Hindus (61 page)

Artists, both Hindu and Buddhist, have always painted the eyes on a statue last of all, for that is the moment when the image comes to life, when it can see you, and you can no longer work on it; that is where the power begins.
⁵²
Rajasthani storytellers, who use as their main prop a painting of the epic scenes, explained to one anthropologist that once the eyes of the hero were painted in, neither the artist nor the storyteller regarded it as a piece of art: “Instead, it became a mobile temple . . . the spirit of the god was now in residence.”
⁵³
The Vedic gods Varuna and Indra were said to be “thousand-eyed,” because as kings they had a thousand spies, overseeing justice, and as sky gods they had the stars for their eyes. The sun is also said to be the eye of the sky, of Varuna, and of the sacrificial horse (BU 1.1) and we have noted analogies between human eyes and the sun. Varuna in the
Rig Veda
(2.27.9) is unblinking, a characteristic that later becomes one of the marks that distinguish any gods from mortals.
⁵⁴

In Buddhist mythology (the tale of Kunala
⁵⁵
), as well as South Indian hagiography (the tale of Kannappar, which we will soon encounter), saints are often violently blinded in martyrdom. The hagiography of the eighth-century Nayanar saint Cuntarar tells us that Shiva blinded him (darshan in its negative form) after he deserted his second wife but restored his vision (darshan in its positive form) when he returned home to her again. Many of Cuntarar’s bitterest poems are ascribed to the period of his blindness, including the poem cited at the opening of this chapter, which is in the genre of “blame-praise” or “worship through insult” that also became important (as “hate-devotion”) in the Sanskrit tradition. Cuntarar was known for the angry tone of his poems and sometimes called himself “the harsh devotee,” though the Tamil tradition called him “the friend of god.”
⁵⁶
His poems, which range from humorous teasing to tragic jeremiads, combined an intimate ridicule of the god with self-denigration.

The sense of personal unworthiness and the desire for the god’s forgiveness that we saw in the Vedic poem to Varuna is also characteristic of attitudes toward the bhakti gods, who are, like Varuna, panoptic, as is Shiva in this poem by the twelfth-century woman poet Mahadevi:

The divine gaze makes meaningless the superficial trappings of both gender (“male and female”) and sexuality (“covering their shame”).

Gender and sexuality are front and center in bhakti poetry. The gender stereotype of women as gentle, sacrificing, and loving became the new model for the natural worshiper, replacing the gender stereotype of men as intelligent, able to understand arcane matters, and handing down the lineage of the texts. The stereotypes remained the same but were valued differently. And so men imitated women in bhakti, and women took charge of most of the family’s religious observances. At the same time, a new image, perhaps even a new stereotype, arose of a woman who defied conventional society in order to pursue her personal religious calling. Only one of the Alvars, in the eighth century, was a woman, Antal, who fantasized about her union with Vishnu as his divine consort until he finally took her as his bride. Her life story is best known of all the Alvars,
⁵⁸
and many women saints followed her example; her poems express her protest against the oppression of women.
⁵⁹
Two of the Nayanmars were women whose words were never preserved, one a Pandyan queen and the other the mother of the poet Cuntarar.
⁶⁰
But a third Nayanmar woman did leave us four poems, Karaikkal Ammaiyar.

Karaikkal Ammaiyar probably lived in the mid-sixth century CE or perhaps in the fifth century.
⁶¹
According to Cekkiyar’s
Periya Purana
(twelfth century), she was born the beautiful daughter of a wealthy and devout merchant family. Shiva rewarded her devotion by manifesting in her hand delicious mangoes, which magically disappeared. When her husband saw this, he left her. Thinking that he might one day return, she continued her dharmic wifely responsibilities, keeping her husband’s house and taking care of herself. One day, however, she discovered that her husband had taken another wife. Feeling that she had no more use for her physical beauty, she begged Shiva to turn her body into a skeleton and made a pilgrimage to Shiva’s Himalayan abode, walking the entire way on her hands, feet in the air. Shiva granted her request that she join his entourage as an emaciated ghost or demon (
pey
), singing hymns while Shiva danced in the cremation ground. Eventually she settled in a cremation ground in Alankatu.
⁶²
Four of her poems found a place in the Tamil Shaiva canon, the
Tirumurai.
Here is one:

 

The female saints flagrantly challenge Manu’s notorious statement about a woman’s constant subservience to her father, husband, and son. They are not usually bound to a man at all, and “It is more common for a married woman saint to get rid of her husband than to endure him.”
⁶⁴
Defying her parents, she may escape marriage in any of several ways. She may become a courtesan, transform herself into an unmarriageable old woman, or terrify her husband by performing miracles (as Karaikkal Ammaiyar does). Or she may become widowed, presumably by chance (though those women saints were capable of almost anything). Widowhood is not normally a fate that any Hindu woman would willingly choose, but in this case the woman would regard herself as married to the god.
^hd
Or she may simply renounce marriage, walking out on her husband, leaving him for her true lover, the god. A woman named Dalayi deserted her husband while he was making love to her, at the call of Shiva (a rare reversal of the more usual pattern of the worshiper’s interrupting the god when
he
is engaged in lovemaking). Or transgressing the transgression, she may
refuse
to have the god as her lover: The Virashaiva woman saint named Goggavve was so obstinate that she refused to marry the disguised Shiva, even when he threatened to kill her.
⁶⁵

The early, secular Tamil male poets often adopted a woman’s point of view and a woman’s voice. So basic was the woman’s voice to the language of bhakti that the bhakti poets took up this convention and developed it into a complex theological argument about men speaking with the voices of women; the fifteenth-century Telugu poet Annamayya wrote many poems in a woman’s voice. The female saints of course did not have to undergo any gender conversion (though some of the hagiographies tell of women who, with double-back perversity, “transformed . . . into a male by God’s grace.”)
⁶⁶

In a poem to Krishna, Nammalvar imagines himself as a woman abandoned by Krishna, the Dark One:

Sometimes the male poet, as worshiper, takes over from the earlier genres of love poetry (
akam
) the voice of the lovesick heroine, or of her mother, and addresses the lover as the god. Here the male poet assumes the voice of the heroine’s mother addressing Rama as destroyer of Lanka:

The fire that is already a cliché for lovesickness now also represents the fire of bhakti, and the expectation is that the lover/Rama can save the heroine/worshiper, as the incarnate god saved Sita from Ravana, but also that he may destroy her, as he destroyed Ravana, or even perhaps that he may just let her burn, as Rama let Sita walk into the fire of her ordeal.

Even the thoroughly male god Shiva, whom the poet calls “the lord of meeting rivers,” sometimes becomes a woman in Kannada bhakti myth and poetry:

The poem, quite straightforward, needs no gloss. But a Kannada listener/reader would hear echoes of this story:

“As if he were Murukan” is one of those switchbacks that the mythology of doubling and impersonation, so dear to Shaiva literature, delights in: A human woman might indeed treat her grandson like a god (in this case, Murukan, the son of Shiva), but in this story the god pretends that the child is his very own son, pretends that he himself is a woman pretending to be Shiva—a double gender switch too, by the way. Careful, down-to-earth details, such as Shiva’s sending “bundles” on ahead with his two wives, strongly suggest that this is a story about “women’s concerns,” surely a place to hear women’s voices. Shiva clearly enjoys being a woman, or else why did he not just stop the river from flooding so that the real mother could get to her daughter? He wanted to be there himself, to be intimately involved with this most basic of women’s experiences.

PARIAHS

One of the great bhakti legends is the story of the Nayanar saint named Kannappar, told in several texts,
⁷¹
perhaps best known from the
Periya Purana
of Cekkilar, dated to the reign of the Chola king Kulottunka II, 1133-1150 CE:

Kannappar may be a Nishada or some other tribal beyond the Hindu pale; one Sanskrit version of the story calls him a Kirata. The
Periya Purana
says that his mother was from the warrior caste of Maravars and his parents had worshiped Murukan, but Kannappar does not seem to know the rules of Brahmin dharma, such as the taboo on offering flesh to the gods. (Or with a historian’s distance, we might say that he does not know that high-caste Hindus, like the Brahmin for whose benefit Shiva stages the whole grisly episode of the eyes,
no longer
offer flesh to their gods.) He does not know about the impurity of substances, like spit, that come from the body, the spit that he uses to clean the image as a mother would use her spit to scrub a bit of dirt off the face of her child. (Or again, he is unaware of the centuries that have passed since Apala, in the
Rig Veda
, offered the god Indra the soma plant that she had pressed in her mouth.) He reverses the proper order of head and foot by putting his foot on the head of the god instead of his head on the god’s foot, the usual gesture of respect.

Kannapar does not understand metaphor: The normal offering to a god is a flower, perhaps a lotus, and in fact he gives the god flowers (though ones that have been polluted, in high-caste terms, by being worn on his own head). But Sanskrit poets often liken beautiful eyes to lotuses, and Kannappar offers the god the real thing, the eye, the wrong half of the metaphor. Moreover, Kannappar’s gruesome indifference to his self-inflicted pain may have had conscious antecedents in similar acts committed by King Shibi and by Ekalavya, in the
Mahabharata
(not to mention the blinding of Kunala in the Buddhist tradition).