Assignment : GEC English Sanyukta Sharma(BMMMC)

Write a short note on the differences between the earthly and the divine
love that Mahadeviyakka talks of in her ‘Vachana’.

Bhakti movement that flourished across various literary cultures, gave rise to a
distinct genre of expression in Kannada. This was the vachana, loosely
understood as free verse poems or sayings, which arose within the Kannada
literary tradition during the 12th century sharana movement. While the
vachanas reflect various aspects of Bhakti, the vachana poets lay great emphasis
on the unity of speech and action. This unity, they stressed, is central to the
worship of Shiva. Thus, vachanas—these passionate dialogues in pursuit of
union with the ishtadevta (sharana’s chosen form of Shiva for worship)—not
only break with the existing literary tradition, but also reject social divisions,
hierarchies, formal structures of learning and worship, and pursuit of worldly
pleasures.

Mahadeviyakka, a younger contemporary of Basavanna and Allama in the

twelfth century, was born in Udutadi, a village in Sivamogga, near the
birthplace of Allama. She considered her moment of birth to be her initiation
into Shiva worship at age ten. She rejected love of any mortal man and chose
Siva—she referred to him as chennamallikarjuna (translated either as ‘the Lord
White as Jasmine’ or as ‘Arjuna, Lord of goddess Mallika’. ‘Cenna’ means
‘lovely, beautiful’)—as her husband. She fell in love with Chennamallikarjuna
and took his name for a ‘signature’ (ankita) in all her vacanas [poems].

Though this didn't stop suitors from approaching and, a king, and further an
unbeliever, Kausika, sought her hand. Their marriage brought only
unhappiness. Kausika, the wordling, full of desire for her as a mortal, was the
archetype of sensual man; Mahadevi, a spirit married already to the Lord White
as Jasmine, scorning all human carnal love as corrupt and illegitimate, wife to
no man, exile bound to the world’s wheeling lives, archetypal sister of all souls.
Significantly she is known as Akka ‘elder sister’. Many of Mahadevi’s most
moving vacanas speak of this conflict. Sometimes, the Lord is her illicit lover,
sometimes her only legitimate husband. This ambiguous alternation of attitudes
regarding the legitimacy of living in the world is a fascinating aspect of
Mahadevi’s poetry.

Her poems describe the conflict between her love for God and the social
conventions imposed on her. The story goes that Mahadevi left her home and
husband and took to the road. She even threw away all her clothes and covered
herself in the tresses of her thus outrageously challenging even the social codes
of modesty. Her poetry is a record of her 'madness' for Siva, of her search for
God and of the joys and sufferings of a god-intoxicated soul. She too, according
to a legend, died into 'oneness with Siva.

What aspects of Amir Khusrau’s ‘Ghazal’ enable us to read it as a Sufi

composition?

Ab’ul Hasan Yamin al-Din Khusrau, better known as Amir Khusrau Dehlavi, is
one of the greatest poets of India. He was born in 1253 in Patiyali, Uttar
Pradesh to a Turkish father an Indian mother. He went on to influence the entire
political, cultural, and literary panorama of his times he became one of the
brightest stars of Persian language and literature. Khusrow is credited for the
introduction of the ghazal into India. The ghazal is a poetic form characterized
by rhyming couplets that originated in pre-Islamic Arabia, took the Persian-
speaking world by storm, and soon reached South Asia.

In their introduction, Losensky and Sharma note that by Khusraw’s time, “the
ghazal … had become the most popular literary genre in Persian.” They write
that “The difficulty of categorizing Khusrau’s ghazals as either amatory or
mystical is all the greater since he was active in courtly and Sufi circles at once,
and the ethos of courtly love that informs his poetry can conventionally be read
as an allegory of longing for the divine.”

Sufism, as the mystical dimension of Islam, preaches peace, tolerance and

pluralism, while encouraging music as a way of deepening one's relationship
with the Creator. Based on the mystical branch of Islam, Sufi music seeks to
unite listeners with the Divine. The pain of separation from the Creator is at the
core of Sufi lyrics and music; and hence the intense longing to dissolve the
physical realm and transcend into the spiritual universe with Sama'a, the
practice of listening to music, chanting and whirling, and finally culminating in
spiritual esctacy.

The ghazal given to us is a classic example of the sufi genre, describing an

unidentified beloved (Persian actually has no grammatical gender, so the gender
of the beloved is unspecified, though it’s often understood to be a man). It
recalls the relationship between Khusrau and his contemporary poet friend Amir
Hasan Sanjari. Their attachement is interpreted as mysic love by some. The
natural images of water and flowers are characteristic of the genre, as are the
expressions of the poet’s longing and love. Khusro's compositions are rooted in
the theme of separation from the Beloved, a metaphor for the God within. His
verses bring out the intense Sufi longing to merge into this state of mind and
touche that inner space in every listener, transporting him to a different
dimension beyond the outer world of duality.

Does Rajinder Singh Bedi succeed in "rehabilitating Lajwanti" in his

woman centred narrative. Discuss.

Undoubtedly, the one historical event of the century that relentlessly haunts the
Subcontinent’s psyche is the horror wrought by Partition, although the simple
geopolitical fact itself has found broader acceptance, perhaps even closure.
However, the very real communal polarization and mounting economic and
political crises throughout India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh have transformed
the event into a fecund source of nostalgia, not to mention political apologetics.

Rajinder Singh Bedi’s Lajwanti weaves together disparate ideas of home and
records how in the wake of Partition, each of these conceptions and
representations privileged patriarchal paradigms due to which abducted women
found themselves at the fringes of sociopolitical and cultural existence. The
story records how Partition eroded the traditional value of home and delineates
the process through which a woman is virtually rendered a stranger within her
own home. Bedi’s story foregrounds the implications of this historic event by
mapping the trajectory of the relationship of a young couple amidst political
turmoil, mayhem and violence. Before Partition, Lajo, described as the “gay
and slim girl of the village—the daughter of the soil” falls in love and marries
Sunder Lal. Though Sunder Lal proves to be a dominating and abusive
husband, thrashing her on the flimsiest pretexts, Lajo’s world revolves around
him and the story effectively establishes how Lajo is content despite being
enmeshed in an intrinsically patriarchal household and society where it was
important for a man to know how to “control a chit of a woman”.

Lajo gets seperated from Sunder Lal during the sectarian violence. Sndar Lal
distraught over her loss, deeply regrets the way he treated his wife. Each day, he
takes to the streets and rallies for the humane treatment of once kidnapped
wives who, after being rescued and returned to their families, find themselves
ostracized and shunned. Many husbands and parents in India and Pakistan
refused to accept abducted women back into the family, knowing that they had
likely experienced a man’s touch on the other side of the border. Sundar Lal, on
the other hand, is so distraught at the thought of his beloved kidnapped wife
that he swears to himself that not only will he accept her, but he will also treat
her better than he ever did in past. On one occasion Sunder Lal debates Narain
Bawa who offers the rusty example of Ram ejecting Sita from his “ideal
Kingdom,” causing Sunder Lal to burst out, declaring Sita’s innocence and
placing the blame entirely on Ravan’s ten demonic heads; he even adds an
eleventh head to Ravan, “the head of a donkey” responsible for foolish
attitudes. Then a villager reports sighting Lajwanti at the border; at once Sunder
Lal becomes gripped by an unknown fear. When husband and wife are reunited,
the husband notices her dupatta is worn in the typical Muslim fashion, and
before long every detail he notices about his wife somehow disorients him, not
because of his jealousy but because of his goodwill and his baffling need to be
right, to be even better than Sri Ram. Also, with his wife’s return Sunder Lal is
shocked into yet another awareness about his wife and about himself - he is
dismayed that she looks healthier and a little plumper than she did when she
lived with him; he had expected her to be gaunt and weak.
But he remains true to the rhetoric he’s been preaching all over the village. He
takes Lajwanti home. Sunder Lal addresses Lajwanti as ‘devi’ or goddess
placing her identity, agency and everyday experiences with the other
community under erasure. While he places the ‘blame’ for the stigma attached
to Lajwanti’s honour on social conventions, he also invalidates her potential to
resist those conventions. The narrative suggests therefore, that the ambivalent
terms of Lajwanti’s reintegration into the community and nation state require
her to surrender her identity as a woman who can question her husband or
renegotiate the terms of her patriarchal patronage.

As time passes, and even as her husband remains obliviously content to have
the “queen of his heart” back, Lajwanti is increasingly disturbed: Sundar Lal
won’t let her talk about what’s happened. She feels that she is losing herself as
her husband treats her less like the woman who has stoically endured abuse
from him and abduction from others, and more like the delicate flower that is
her namesake, so fragile that even her husband won’t get close to the real her.

She tries throughout the course of the narrative to share her gruesome
experience of her abduction in order to wash away her sins through tears, but
Sunder Lal always shrank away from hearing her story. The plight of Lajo
encounters a new twist that despite her acceptance and new freedom she is put
behind a strange apprehension. This kind of a silence itself forced on lajo can be
considered as a different form of violence coded by the patriarchal nation state,
in the form of rehabilitation process and by the patriarchal community’s notion
which called defilement a sin and the abducted women impure. Though Lajo is
facilitated with a patriarchal patronage, Sunder Lal becomes the managing
power of his civil and domestic responsibilities.

The story fails when it largely evades Lajwanti’s suffering, for Bedi is still
insistently focused on the eventual chastisement of Sunder Lal, who of course
continues to work for the cause and starts calling his wife “Devi,” although
what she really desires is a little genuine love as opposed to the worship that he
proffers. On one occasion he works up enough courage to inquire about her
captor, and the first thing he asks is, “He didn’t beat you?” Her answer humbles
him, and in some ways one can understand how a humbled husband can
continue to ruin a woman who is only asking for a little understanding of “the
secret locked in her breast”—as Khushwant Singh puts it in his own translation
of “Lajwanti.” That the readers can guess the nature of her secret and her
suffering is all the more reason for them to expect a greater engagement with
Lajwanti as a character. In fact, once she returns from captivity, the story that
started off with so much promise begins to self-destruct, mainly because of the
authorial straitjacketing of Lajwanti the character, whose name demands a
certain symbolic ending for this story which is really about rape and silence and
about a man’s inability to face up to a woman’s suffering.

Even if the author’s aim is not to dramatize the lingering consequences of rape
and large scale violence against women, what undercuts the power of this story
is his insistence on explaining away such harsh realities as a rupture of the old
harmony—in other words, a family life based on a wife-beating male whose
peaceful domesticity is established at the expense of an uncomplaining female!
At the end of the story Lajwanti is unnerved by Sunder Lal’s unsustainable,
unknowable devotion to her, for she prefers the certainty of her husband’s old
violence. Unforgivably, in the end, the author even goes on to conclude that
“she was in fact a lajwanti, a glass object too fragile to withstand the barest
touch” but the question remains whether she was suffering because of her
peculiarly female experience of Partition or because of the naïvete of her
husband whose private heroism does not match his public courage. Ultimately
this story also fails in terms of revealing the dynamic of the post-captivity, post-
Partition domestic story, although it starts off with such a precise moral
authority and sense of irony.