Arshia Sattar*

Love of god made these women renounce everything, including their clothing

For a culture that is so conservative about women’s bodies, there are a surprising number of stories about women who take off their clothes. Typically, the women do so when they are ecstatic, having found the love of god in their temporal lives. Along with their clothes, they reject their husbands and their families and break all social bonds so that they can experience this love more fully and completely.

In both North and South India, stories of such beloved women poet-saints as Lal Dedh and Akka Mahadevi tell us that they wandered naked after they had reached union with the divine.

The love-drunk mystic

Lalla’s legend is that she was married off at the age of 12 and suffered hugely at the hands of her mother-in-law. When she was 26, she left her husband’s home and sought her true beloved, Shiva. Even though she had given up wearing clothes, she kept the company of holy men who were able to look past her naked body and recognised her for the love-drunk mystic that she was. One story that talks of Lalla’s nakedness goes like this: she did not see ‘men’ and ‘women’ but is said to have uttered, “I saw a man, I saw a man!” when she encountered the Persian Sufi, Shah Hamdani, and hid herself.

Akka, too, has a similar life story. She was married to a Jain king but, unhappy with world and all its demands, she renounced her domestic life and went away to live with those who, like her, had immersed themselves in the contemplation of god. Apparently, Akka’s husband had said to her that everything she had was his and so, she left even her clothes behind when she decided to surrender to god. Akka’s nakedness was a part of her love for Shiva but it is said that her first guru, Allama Prabhu, was not comfortable when she participated in the ritual gatherings of saints and other holy men. Akka felt that if he were truly her teacher, he would have understood her nakedness rather than noticing it. Akka soon left the community and set off, alone, to find her divine lord, Chenna-Mallikarjuna.

Crucial to these hagiographies is the fact that when they gave up their clothes, both Lalla and Akka covered their bodies with their flowing tresses. The long hair that protected their modesty mediates the narrative of their nakedness and curtails the power of their utter and complete rejection of social conventions and patriarchal notions of what constitutes ‘shame.’

Arshia Sattar is writer works with myth, epic and the story traditions

Further, we refer to these unrestrained and powerful poets of god as sister (Akka) and grandmother (Dedh). By doing so, we bring them back into the fold of the families they had so firmly renounced. We domesticate their nakedness by making it the desexualised nakedness of our female relatives. It is no longer a nakedness that is transgressive or dangerous. It is certainly not one that challenges the hierarchies of caste and gender in the public world.

*The writer works with myth, epic and the story traditions of the sub-continent