Songs for Siva Read online

  Ironically, like a physician who contracts some dreaded disease in his efforts to cure the sick, this magnificent effort against the divisive walls of caste, gender and language has itself succumbed to the very ills that it set out to cure, and has been co-opted by vested interests. It would be outside the scope of this introduction to go into the question of caste, which continues to gnaw at Indian society from within. The caste system was a bold theoretical attempt to classify psychological types that failed miserably, at tremendous cost to culture, and we must decry its perversions as wholly inhuman and without any social or spiritual basis. A parallel in the West is the horror of the Inquisition. The point made here is that unilateral theories which exclude large sections of humankind cannot claim universal relevance. Spiritual aspiration must always be committed and inclusive, not limited by selfish preferences. The closed and static loyalties of clan, caste, tribe, sect and nation all have to be transcended before one can embark on open and dynamic ways of life. As a flood could contain within itself wells and ponds from the affected area, this transcendence is not a violent phenomenon. Not destroying, but fulfilling, as Jesus said.

  As human beings, we each find ourselves in a defined value system. We are exhorted to love the Lord God by loving our neighbour as our self. Seen in this way, spirituality seeks to clarify the relation between the individual (who inhabits a world of plurality and relativity) and the totality of the universal situation around him or her. As ‘happiness’ underlies all spiritual striving, it is in the context of what benefits all humankind that the high value of God must be understood. Atheists too are bound by the need to establish and affirm the day-to-day transactions that bind people to their fellow beings. Akka’s poetry consistently maintains the strict bipolarity of self and God through such human qualities as generosity, open-mindedness and adoration.

  ‘That in lightning which makes a person gasp and says “Ah!”, that is the Absolute,’ says the Kena Upanishad. The same Upanishad describes an event of special significance at this stage of our discussion. The Vedic gods of Fire and Wind, Agni and Vayu, along with their chief Indra, come face to face with the Absolute, which appears to them in the form of a mysterious being that they cannot comprehend. Eventually, ‘in that very space’ appears an ‘exceedingly beautiful woman, Uma, daughter of the Snowy Mountains’, who explains the being to them. We are reminded that Dante needed a Beatrice to lead him to the higher worlds. The role of the feminine in revealing the nature of the Absolute is thus clear to us from both Eastern and Western traditions.

  In Akka’s vacanas there is no attempt to explain away any normal human concern. In fact, Akka and her jasmine-tender lover together comprise all the attitudes that go to make up human nature generally. All psychic states, both positive and negative, are in force and only enhance the totality of the value dynamics between them. It is by transcending good and bad, not by denying them, or by just trying to be good in a one-sided sense, that perfection is to be sought: in the search itself, by itself, through itself. Jealousy in love is said to be incompatible with pure love. At the same time, one is asked to love one’s God with all one’s heart in all the world’s spiritual traditions. This necessarily implies exclusion of all that is extraneous to the dialectics of the affiliation. An example may serve to make this clearer: imagine a pond with hundreds of lotus flowers in it. The lotus is known for its love of the sun; its flowers open only when touched by the rays of the rising sun and close at sunset. Although there are many lotuses in the pond, each has a unique personal relationship with the sun, the source of light. The traditions also speak of the lotus of the heart, which is similarly placed in relation to a supreme sun risen in the firmament of consciousness. The lotuses are also related organically to each other at their roots.

  The life of Akka Mahadevi

  Little is known about Akka’s life. Ever engaged in seeking the eternal as distinct from the transient, Indians have never cared much for history, finding their needs met by mythology. If you believe Akka Mahadevi to be an incarnation of the Goddess, what need is there for a birth certificate? This much can be gathered from legends: Mahadevi was born in Udutadi, in the Shivamoga district of Karnataka, in the twelfth century. Her parents were devout adherents of the Virasaiva movement, and she naturally followed. Initiated into Siva worship at the age of twelve, she would spend all her time in playful veneration of the village temple deity, Channamallikarjuna, a form of Siva. Channa means ‘beautiful’; mallika is jasmine; arjuna, meaning ‘bright’ or ‘white’, was also the name of the great warrior disciple of the Bhagavadgita. According to legend, Arjuna fought Siva on order to obtain a potent weapon from him. The Goddess turned all the arrows that Arjuna shot into jasmine flowers, so that Siva was covered in jasmines; thus he acquired the name Mallikarjuna. The intervention of the Goddess as a neutralizing influence in a war between man and god is to be noted. Equally important is the conjoining of the delicate and fragrant jasmine with the image of Arjuna, the greatest warrior in Indian mythology. As stressed throughout this introduction, the merging of polar opposites in the neutrality of an absolute, constant value which can be verified only by personal experience is the key to contemplation. The image of God needs salvaging from the thunderbolt-wielding, punishing presences found at various Olympian heights. ‘God Is Love’, hence the translation here of Channamallikarjuna as ‘jasmine-tender’.

  Mahadevi considered herself wedded to Siva and grew up into a very beautiful woman. The local king Kaushika saw her and fell in love with her, and sent emissaries to her parents to seek her hand in marriage. But Kaushika was a Jain and the parents were reluctant. When the king threatened to kill them, Mahadevi grudgingly agreed to the marriage, albeit on three conditions:

  I will spend time meditating on the Lord as I please.

  I will spend time in the company of other devotees as I please.

  I will spend time attending to the service of the guru as I please.

  If the king went against these three conditions, she would leave him.

  Once, when Mahadevi was asleep, a sage from afar arrived at the palace. When attendants came to inform the queen, the king sent them away without waking Mahadevi; but she awoke and, telling the king that two more promises remained, went to receive the sage. On another occasion, Kaushika, seeing Mahadevi seated in meditation, was sexually aroused and went to embrace her. Rising, disturbed, she reminded the king that he had just one more promise to break before she could be free. One night, Mahadevi’s guru came to the palace. In her eagerness to greet him she jumped out of bed and ran to the guru, who said, ‘Go and get dressed and come, my dear.’ She returned to the bedroom but the king, angrily abusing her, refused to let her have her clothes, saying, ‘Why do you need clothes, great devotee that you are?’ Mahadevi, telling the king that he had violated all three conditions of their agreement, left the palace with only her tresses to cover her.

  It is worth remembering that in some Jain traditions the contemplatives or ascetics are naked digambaras (sky-clad). Siva devotees too, quite indifferent to social norms of respectability, let their hair become matted in imitation of their wild God (evoking images of Dionysus, Robert Bly’s Iron John and even hippies). Long hair also hides the ‘person’ behind the appearance, as Dasimayya poignantly says in a famous vacana:

  If long hair and breasts come, they say ‘woman’,

  If moustache and beard come, they say ‘man’,

  The Self within, is it woman or man, O Ramanatha?

  There are as many scholars, both ancient and modern, who refute that Akka was ever married as those who believe she was, but all agree on her having had to deal with Kaushika, a Jaina chieftain. The Virasaiva movement had to face a theocratic orthodoxy on the one hand, and Jain heterodoxy on the other. The fact that Akka walked around as a digambari may denote that she was able to achieve in her own person some sort of synthesis of these rival traditions. Anyway, she makes use of the highest model of Jain spirituality.

  Akka means ‘ol
der sister’. Mahadevi was addressed as such by Allama himself, after he had been convinced of the genuineness of her experiences. Basavanna calls her ‘the mother who gave me birth’, thus according her the highest honour. Reverential references to her are found in much of the vacana literature. Whole works, medieval as well as modern, deal with her life and teachings. Interestingly, no mention is made of her by any of the other women writers of her time.

  Having lived for a time in the company of all the great devotees of the Lord, Akka sought, and obtained, their permission to retire to Srisaila, a holy mountain where the Jasmine-tender One awaited her. She walked into the banana grove there, never to be seen again. Her path, from the ‘alone to the Alone’ leading from her parental home to her Mount Carmel in Srisaila – via the palace of the husband-king, and the illustrious assembly of those who have found refuge in the Lord – reverberates all the way with her songs. Different stages and encounters can be recognized in them; some feel familiar, some strange.

  The Vacanas

  The vacana literary form arose as a part of the people’s movement against the oppression in the name of Sanskrit as the ‘divine’ language. The Virasaiva poets wrote in Kannada, refuting the millennia-old belief that ‘native’ languages were incapable of dealing with universal verities. The word vacana does not mean ‘poem’ at all. Literally it means ‘to give one’s word’, ‘to make a promise or a commitment’. Most vacana poets were no respecters of the poetic rules of scale and metre. The first known vacana poet is the tenth-century weaver Dasimayya. The beginnings of such indigenous literary effort must also be traced to Jain poets who used a mixture of Sanskrit and Kannada, a tradition known as campu.

  It is usual to see the vacana movement as part of the bhakti cults that began to spring up in India during the eighth century AD. This is only partly true. India at that time was a melting pot of different cultural and religious traditions. Islam had arrived. Casteist theocracies had made use of the intellectual brilliance of Sankara to defeat the noble challenge of Buddhism. There were numerous popular movements, some having their roots in the genuine aspirations of the people, others manipulated to stop the downtrodden from flocking to take advantage of the equality promised by the new religions. Virasaivism was not just a reactionary impulse; rather it was an appeal to an earlier stratum of spirituality. Thus it was a continuation of similar efforts made time and again since the Vedic subjugation of an older, more contemplative tradition associated with Siva, himself known as akula, ‘belonging to no family’. The reference to the pre-Aryan and Aryan must be seen only in the context of understanding the ‘challenge and response’ in spiritual traditions, and not in any narrow racial sense. To avoid any such confusion, let us also add here that there are no pure Aryans or Dravidians in present-day India.

  Virasaivism was unique in the equal status it accorded to the sexes. This, it must be remembered, is what made a Mahadevi Akka possible – not just her, but many others like her: there are thirty-three vacanakartis (women writers of vacanas) whose poems are available. Such equality applied not only in the matter of literary creation, which is a speciality, but in all aspects of daily life. Menstruating women, for instance, were not considered ‘unclean’ and could attend worship like all the others. How revolutionary that was becomes clear when we realize that in most Indian villages even today the ‘unclean’ woman must sleep outdoors. (Of course, they generally work so hard that the week’s banishment must be a respite.)

  A fine and scholarly introduction to the vacanas and to Virasaivism in general can be found in A.K. Ramanujan’s Speaking of Siva (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), which also contains selections from the works of Dasimayya, Basavanna, Akka and Allama, four stalwarts of the movement.

  To return to her story, the sky-clad Akka came before the ‘auspicious’ assembly of devotees at Kalyana, presided over by Allama Prabhu and Basavanna. Searching questions were put to her by the master poet – seer Allama – all of which she answered with the conviction arising from her own deep experience of the numinous within. For example, Allama asked her why, if she had outgrown the need for clothes, she had covered herself with her hair. She answered, ‘Unless the fruit is ripe the peel won’t come off; seeing the insignia of the god of love on my body might trouble you, I thought, so I covered myself.’ Both the question and the answer are well-known vacanas. They are exemplary in their terse suggestiveness and their layers of meaning that conceal still deeper meanings.

  Most of the vacanas are responses to questions or situations and, as such, are best read in their complete context (as found in the Sunyasampadane texts); even in Kannada, let alone in translations, their full meaning can be hard to discern. That something comes through in at least some of the poems, despite the many difficulties in the translator’s way, vouches for their eternal place in the discourse of wisdom. My work on the vacanas has been laborious indeed, and but for the joy of finding such rare jewels, I would have given up long ago.

  I cannot claim to have done Akka full justice, but I can say with all humility that I have tried my best to bring out the feeling of the original, often sacrificing readability in the interests of loyalty to the poet’s choice of images and phrases. The textual variants in different sources have sometimes been an obstacle: on occasion the same vacana can be given two exactly opposite meanings just by the adding or taking away of a single word. Vacana 41 contains a typical example. Beginning:

  Once you have eaten the fruit,

  Does it matter who prunes the tree?

  Akka goes on to ask, after some vivid analogies,

  Once Channamallikarjuna, jasmine-tender,

  Is known, does it matter whether

  The body is eaten by dogs or rots in water?

  Now, it is possible to read the same passage as:

  Once Channamallikarjuna, jasmine-tender,

  Is not known, does it matter whether

  The body is eaten by dogs or rots in water?

  Both are correct and plausible, and both are found in different editions of the Kannada texts; the two versions exist in the oral tradition as well. But not all texts give the alternative reading. While in the original just the addition or omission of the syllable ya in the verb meaning ‘to know’ – arida and ari-ya-da – makes all the difference, I have thought it best not to deprive the reader of both possibilities, and have rendered it as ‘Is (not) known’. Admittedly it looks awkward, but giving the alternative in a footnote could affect one’s initial understanding of the meaning. Such considerations have been always in my mind, and you will find other examples.

  I have sometimes found it impossible to render the whole dialectics – of words and sense – in the translation and have had to make do with second best. Vacana 28 may be cited here:

  I begged of every plant to sustain the body,

  They gave from the bounty of their being.

  Begging, I was caught in becoming;

  Giving, they became devotees

  In the original, the sustenance craved is for the body, anga, and the plants give forth from their linga. Not only do the two words sound alike, they are dialectical pairs: anga is the gross body while linga is the causal body. Savouring the homogenous essence of both together, linga–anga sama rasa, is the goal of spiritual effort in the tradition. In the last two lines, getting caught in becoming, bhavi, has its dialectical counterpart in bhakta, the devotee. The original words convey all this in themselves, and are fully understood by the reader or listener, while the hapless translator is left to do the best he can. But despite the difficulties involved, I have enjoyed my ten years’ work on these vacanas and hope to have passed on some of the great inspiration that they have been to me.

  Terminology and usage

  A brief explanation of the concepts guru, linga and jangama is in order, as they recur often in the text and are fundamental to the Virasaiva philosophy. Guru embodies a double negative in that it means literally ‘that which dispels darkness’. We know that light alone
can dispel darkness. Why then is it not stated directly? This question brings us up against a characteristic feature of the language of mysticism: the negative way or nivritti marga. It is through a process of reducing external phenomena that we come to the numinous core within, from where we can build outwards. More particularly, the guru principle stands for the ultimate vision achieved in the context of wisdom communication, while the disciple’s earnestness in searching is the starting point. The affiliation to the guru saves the seeker from being a victim of the delusions and hallucinations of his own mind. That the guru is a relinquisher ensures that he has no selfish motives, and is thus interested solely in guiding the disciples to their own inner sanctum. Sharing wisdom ‘blesseth him that gives and him that takes’, as Shakespeare so tellingly said of the quality of mercy.

  The guru initiates the disciple into the ‘secrets’ of wisdom (secrets only in that they are not seen or recognized by all). In the Virasaiva tradition, the guru initiating the disciple gives him a linga, literally a symbol. The Sivalinga, the phallic stone image, is a much misunderstood item of Indian iconography. A vertical scale of values is what is implied, sometimes represented by a pillar of light, a jyotir-linga.

  There is also the story of how Brahma and Visnu, taking the form of a swan and a boar respectively, fly up and dive down to find the ends of a column of light, a manifestation of Siva. For all we know they are still at it, as the vertical series of values represented by the pillar of light, is endless. Thus the miniature linga that the guru gives to the initiate stands for all life values in the context of self-realization. It can also be seen as a symbol of the self or soul of the aspirant. It is important to note that one is not born a Virasaivite but becomes one only after initiation by a guru.

  Jangama (literally ‘one who comes and goes’) is the mendicant devotee. Philosophically, it is the opposite of sthavara, the static or fixed. Whereas the stone linga is firmly fixed, the aspirant who has been duly instructed in the teachings moves about freely, and is worthy of worship as one in whom the word has met its own meaning. Jesus also tells us to ‘become a passer-by’.