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ABSTRACTS
SESSION I:
EMBODIED BHAKTI
The Bodies of Medieval Female Mystics: A
Tamil Case-study
Karen Pechilis, Drew University
 My proposed paper is a study of the poetry of
the Tamil saint Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār (KA), whom scholars date to 550
C.E., which corresponds to the early medieval period in Western
historical designations.
There are four poems attributed to KA (total of
142 stanzas). This paper will be an intertextual study among these
poems under the theme of representations of the body in her poetry.
To date, I and other scholars have concentrated on the authoritative
biographical text about KA, attributed to Cēkkilār in the
twelfth century. My justification for this approach has been that
knowledge of the saint up to the present day is very much mediated
by this story. With the emphasis today on recovering women’s voices
in history, and on the nature of devotional expression itself, the
time seems right to bracket the domination of the biography in favor
of foregrounding her poetry.
Bodily participation is a thesis of Tamil Śiva-bhakti.
In addition, current scholarship on female mystics in medieval
Western tradition emphasizes their knowledge through the body. How
much of KA’s body is in what I call her magnum opus, the Arputat
Tiruvantāti (Poems of Wonder)? If I find that this, her longest
poem, focuses mainly on the body of Śiva, what does this mean? What
would be the relationship of the grisly cremation ground mis-en-scène
of one of her shorter poems—which may contain an autobiographical
bodily description--to this longer poem? The aim of this study is
both to challenge, and to advance, our notions of women, religious
knowledge, and the body.
Bodies of Desire, Bodies of Lament:
Marking Emotion in a Messenger Poem of Medieval South India
Steven P. Hopkins, Swarthmore College
 This paper focuses on the charged emotional landscapes of divine,
human, and animal bodies in Haësasandeóa (“The Goose
Messenger”), a fourteenth-century Sanskrit messenger poem (sandeóa-kåvya)
by Veíkaìeóa—also known as Vedåntadeóika—the renowned South Indian
bhakti poet-saint, theologian, and åcårya of the
àrâvaiòïava community in Tamilnadu. The paper is concerned not with
the political, social, or geocultural landscapes of Veíkaìeóa’s
Haësasandeóa but rather with the emotional landscapes of
bodies in the poem: the bodies of lovers who desire and who
lament in separation, and the bodies of animals that inspire and
enflame the longings of lover and beloved. Veíkaìeóa’s
Haësasandeóa not only valorizes the excellence of particular
South Indian landscapes, marking holy rivers, mountains, fields, and
shrines, but also eloquently marks emotional landscapes—the powers
of erotic love and the turbulence of desire—onto the particular
bodies of lover and beloved and also onto the body of the messenger,
in this case a royal goose (haësa). I explore ways in which
Veíkaìeóa refashions the story of Råma and Sâtå using motifs of
vulnerable love and violent emotion that inhere in his own South
Indian Tamil bhakti (devotional) tradition: the agonies of
love-in-separation (viraha), the torment of loss, confusion (mayakkam),
the madness of longing (pittu), and the hoped-for time
transfigured by love regained. The austerities of Råma’s and Sâtå’s
viraha find fruition in a vision of anticipated union that
bestows auspicious blessings (óreyas, “well-being”) on the
bhakta listener/reader who savors the divine love play in the
imaginative structures of the poem.
Embodying Bhakti: Fashioning Devotional
Bodies
Barbara A. Holdrege, University of California-Santa Barbara
 This paper interrogates the role of embodiment
in bhakti (devotional) traditions. My analysis focuses on the
Gaudiya Vaisnava tradition, an important bhakti movement that
originated in sixteenth-century Bengal, which provides a striking
example of the elaborate discourses of embodiment and systems of
embodied practices developed by certain bhakti traditions.
Drawing on Sanskrit and Bengali sources and on field research, the
paper examines the system of practices, termed sādhana bhakti,
through which the Gaudiya Vaisnava bhakta (devotee)
disciplines the body-mind complex and constructs a "devotional
body."
In the first phase of sādhana bhakti,
vaidhī bhakti, the bhakta performs practices with the
external body, sādhaka rūpa, and undertakes a regimen of
sexual disciplines, food practices, and devotional rituals designed
to purify and transform the psychophysiology. Bhaktas
reconstitute the body of bondage as a body of devotion through
practices that engage five mesocosmic modes of divine embodiment
through which Krsna descends to earth and becomes accessible to his
devotees: (1) They revere Krsna’s embodiment in śāstra,
scripture, in the Bhāgavata Purāna, through recitation (bhāgavata-kīrtana)
and through ritual veneration of the concrete book; (2) they
celebrate his embodiment in līlā, play, through communal
singing (līlā-kīrtana) and dramatic performances (rāsa
līlās); (3) they engage his embodiment in dhāman, place,
by traversing the sacred geography of Vraja-dhāman through
pilgrimage (tīrtha-yātra); (4) they venerate his embodiment
in mūrti, image, by worshiping his “image-incarnations” (arcāvatāras)
in temples and shrines through pūjā and other forms of
mūrti-sevā; and
(5) they celebrate his embodiment in nāman, name, by invoking
his “sound-incarnations” (varṇāvatāras) through meditative
repetition (japa) and communal chanting (nāma-kīrtana).
Through these practices the bhakta refashions the body by
focusing all aspects of the psychophysical organism on Krsna,
including the mind, the senses, and the organs of action.
He engaged his mind on the lotus-feet of Krsna, his words in
recounting the virtues of Vaikuntha, his hands in cleaning the
temple of Hari, his ears in hearing glorious stories about Acyuta,
his eyes in seeing the images and temples of Mukunda, his sense of
touch in touching the bodies of his servants, his nose in smelling
the fragrance of the tulasī placed at his lotus-feet, his
tongue in tasting the food that had been offered to him, his feet in
traveling by foot to the holy places of Hari, his head in bowing to
the feet of Hrsikeśa, and his desire in serving him. . . .
In the advanced phase
of sādhana bhakti, rāgānugā bhakti, the bhakta
enters into a more intimate relationship with Krsna characterized by
passionate love (rāga). In this phase the bhakta
continues to engage Krsna’s mesocosmic forms with the external body,
sādhaka rūpa, while at the same time cultivating a
state of inner absorption that culminates in the construction of an
eternal body, siddha rūpa. Having constructed a
perfected devotional body, siddha rūpa, the bhakta
enters into Krsna’s transcendent dhāman beyond the material
world and becomes an eternal participant in the unmanifest līlā
that goes on perpetually as self-referral play within the Godhead.
The intoxicated rapture of the realized bhakta is marked onto
the external body, overflowing into all the senses and the organs of
action and erupting in ecstatic singing, laughing, weeping, and
dancing.
Without the hair of the body standing on end, without the heart
melting, without being inarticulate due to tears of joy—without
bhakti how can the heart be purified? He whose speech is
stammering, whose heart melts, who weeps repeatedly and sometimes
laughs, who unabashedly sings and dances—such a person, united by
bhakti with Me, purifies the world.
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