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I Keep Vigil of Rudra:
The Vachanas
The compositions included in this volume are drawn from Kannada literature, particularly of the 12th century. They have come down as vachanas, meaning utterances, of women, who might have been epigones in their day-today life but in the context of their feeling and emotions, they fared as defiant human beings. They are 33 in number who had recourse to these utterances. They couched them in debate and diatribe, discussion and discourse of the indignant even unabashed type that does not sound hyperbolic or doctrinal in any way. To adorn their utterances with appurtenances of metrical arrangement, image-making, alliterative enunciation is not their concern at all. What is usually termed as symbolic is held by them at bay and what is semiotic is brought to the fore through uninhibited, rather unabashed denunciation of the authority exercised through institutions, conventions, rites, rituals, privileges and priorities of all types. Interestingly enough, the acme of such enunciation was reached when the Vijanagar empire was in full swing spread over the area going beyond what is known as Karnatka at the present juncture. It was a Hindu kingdom, prosperous, powerful and a dominant power in the whole of the whole of the southern portion of India. It was a paradox of history that surrounding this kingdom from all sides were Muslim states, which were not kindly disposed. In due course of time, the Muslim states formed a league against the kingdom of Vijanagar and after internecine, warfare pillaged and destroyed it. Due to the danger that lurked around the kingdom, ultimately to result in its destruction, the rule was strictly enforced from above. This resulted in the enfolding of rites and rituals, ceremonies and customs, restrictions and prohibitions. The overwhelming burden of them all was reserved for people of the lower castes, particularly the women, who had to face it in manifold ways. Along with political and social oppression, they had to suffer sexual and gender-specific suppression, which wrenched these utterances from their agonised hearts. "Why be a captive in the bed/ while mating in love?" or "Fond of the well of piss and the pond of shit/ Biting each other driven mad" are utterances of the sort, which strike at the root of power and pelf, priority and privilege, authority and discrimination. It may not be out of context to point out that such utterances came to the fore in the Punjab during the rule of Maharaja Ranjit Singh. They came from Muslim women on the one hand and the Hindu and Sikh women on the other. In terms of poignancy and intensity, the utterances made by Punjabi women pale into insignificance before those of the vachankaranas, i.e., female enunciators of the southern part of India, that too when medievalism was overarching and no glimmer of modernity came from any side. In the Punjab, Punjabi women had recourse to pallid and pale versions of those utterances in the 19th century when colonialism had spread its tentacles in large part of India and had begun to entertain the wish to integrate this kingdom into their empire spread over several continents. Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s kingdom was of the unfolding sort that in return entertained the wish to conquer areas in the west and the north of the Punjab. The Sikh sardars did not demand strict observance of rules and regulations, ceremonies and customs, rites and rituals from the lower classes, no less so from women, though feudal they were in their feelings and aspirations. No wonder, the discontent that Punjabi women, mostly the epigones of religious persons, experienced was only of the pale and pallid sort. So, it was in comparison with the rage which women of the south, several centuries earlier, experienced in passionate intensity.
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