As mentioned in my previous post,
evidence of Andal is purely literary. We do not know for sure if such as person
ever existed at all. Or whether ‘Andal’ was merely the pseudonym of an accomplished
poet who didn’t wish to reveal himself/herself. Rajagopalachari, it is said,
believed that it was none other Periyalvar (Vishnuchittar) who wrote as Andal. On
the other hand, certain studies on Andal opine that she was a devadasi who was
attached to the temple at Srirangam. Whatever the theories about her life –
they are just that, theories, most plausible at best!
But even going by popular
beliefs, Andal’s life story and her poetry were both non-conformist, given the social
environment of her times. Large parts of 8th century Tamil lands
were under the influence of the monastic religions, particularly Jainism, whose
philosophy was a total antithesis to the devotion of the Alvar saints. While
Jainism was atheistic, the religion of the Alvars was centred around a very
personal God. Where Jainism preached detachment, both physical and mental, the
Alvars’ religion was founded on an intense emotional attachment to God. With
Andal, the Alvars’ bhakthi reached the pinnacle of unorthodoxy in religion, for
her poetry is manifest with primal emotions of sexuality – the intense urge of a woman to unite with her lover.
In fact, some scholars like Champakalakshmi (Religion,
Tradition and Ideology: Pre-colonial South India) go as far to say that the chief enemies of the Bhakthi
movement were not so much the Vedic-Brahminical traditions as the ‘heretic’
faiths of Buddhism and Jainism, especially the latter, which enjoyed
significant royal patronage, especially among the Pallava Kings. If it was
indeed so, it further strengthens the case for Andal as a social maverick of
her times. This is because while the
Buddhists and Jains believed in negation of the human body, its sexuality, and
in breaking free of the desires of the flesh, Andal was singularly cognisant of
her sexuality and saw it as an instrument to unite with the divine.
While it was not uncommon to
find sexual undertones in the poetry of male saints (eg., Nammalvar first and
Jayadev later), who used the Nayaki bhava (imagining themselves as the God’s
lover) to give form to their emotional expression, Andal was the first woman saint
to give words to her bodily needs and sexual desires. Her desire to wear the
garland before offering to the god suggests that in her mind, she was
already in a physically intimate relationship with her lord, as exists
between married couples. Andal’s poetry thus expresses her constant longing and
yearning to unite with her divine lover. Some of the verses in her poetry are
explicitly erotic in nature.
It is possible that Andal’s
erotic expressions made her immediate society uncomfortable. Even today, some
explicitly amorous verses of her poetry are skipped when her poems are recited
in temples.
This discomfort could
explain the stories around the origins of her birth, her subsequent
canonisation and eventual deification. The story that she was found as a baby
in the garden (like Sita) logically culminates in her final deification as
Bhudevi, daughter of Mother Earth and consort of Lord Vishnu.
Nevertheless, in Indian culture, Andal's is the first female voice that dared to express the most intimate, erotic and sensual feelings of a woman!
It is interesting that while other girls of her probably
age chose to settle down with a partner in flesh and blood, she refused to
offer herself to any lesser mortal, instead choosing to dedicate herself, in
body and spirit, to her celestial paramour.
In a particular verse, she says
that ‘her voluptuous breasts will swell for the lord alone, and scorns the idea
of making love to mortal beings, comparing that with the sacrificial offering
made by Brahmins being violated by jackals in the forest.’
This sentiment resonates
once again, four or five centuries later, in the verses of Akka Mahadevi, a
Bhakthi saint poet from Karnataka. Believed to have lived in the 12th
century AD, Mahadevi too walked out of her wedded life, seeking union with the
divine. Akka Mahadevi
describes her love for Lord Shiva as adulterous, viewing her husband and his
parents as impediments to her union with her Lord. Terming relationship with
mortal men as 'unsatisfactory', Akka Mahadevi describes them as 'thorns hiding
under smooth leaves, untrustworthy.’
From their verses it
appears that both Andal and Akka Mahadevi refused to be confined to the
shackles of a restrictive family system and sought to break free from it. As Romila Thapar, in her History of Early India– From the
origins to AD 1300, says “Women participants in the Tamil devotional movement
renounced their social obligations….They created alternative possibilities
within the society by their poetry, their activities and their sublimation of
eroticism.”
And Andal did just that –
she rejected the mortal world and its restraining social contracts to explore
an ‘alternate possibility’. In this pursuit, she aspired for the unattainable
divine and was even successful in realising it. Her disdain for an unremarkable
mundane life, a life that every other girl of her age lived in her society, made
her an undisputed outlier of her times.
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