Precarious joy: Meena Alexander, postsecularism, and bhakti poetry

Abstract

1. INTRODUCTION

“A precarious joy, standing if you wish at the edge of the world”—this is how Meena Alexander describes the poetry of India’s medieval bhakti poet-saint Mirabai.¹ For Alexander, this joy is precarious because it emerges from sorrow and the perishing body, a “dwelling in the body that does not cut consciousness apart from that—the desiring, perishing body—and sings, sings through sorrow into joy.”² This precarity is “at the edge of the world” because bhakti, as personal devotion to and participation in God, in Alexander’s words, “toss[es] away the taxonomies of the world, high and low, brahmin and sudra, heaven and hell.”³ In this article I examine Alexander’s poetry—including its dimensions of precarity, questioning of taxonomies, and search for values—by comparing it with India’s traditions of bhakti (devotional) poetry. I analyze how Alexander’s invocation of bhakti, including placing Mirabai in contemporary settings, allows her to understand and challenge the hierarchies of gender, race, and religion. I argue that a framework of postsecularism can capture the qualities of both religion and secularism that appealed to Alexander.

One of postcolonial India’s foremost poets, Meena Alexander (1951–2018) was born in the northern Indian city of Allahabad. Raised in a Syrian Christian family, she grew up in the southern Indian state of Kerala and in Sudan, where she studied at the University of Khartoum. After earning her doctorate at age 22 at the University of Nottingham, UK, she taught at the Universities of Delhi and Hyderabad and at Jawaharlal Nehru University. Since 1979, she resided in New York City, where she taught at Fordham University, Columbia University, and, since 1987, at Hunter College. In 1999, she became Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the Graduate Center. Alexander’s work includes nine collections of poetry, two novels, two works of criticism, and her memoir Fault Lines (1993). While much has been written about contemporary, bhakti-inspired Indian male poets, such as Dilip Chitre, Arun Kolatkar, and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, comparatively less critical attention has been given to present-day women poets in India and its diaspora who draw upon bhakti, including to critique Brahminical (highest caste) patriarchy. These latter poets include Usha Akella, Priya Sarukkai Chabria, Meena Kandasamy, Mani Rao, Arundhathi Subramaniam, and Pramila Venkateswaran.⁴ These poets’ focus on gender, including the interconnected gendering of the body, race, and religion, illuminates the ways in which the secular and the religious are inseparable from one another. Alexander’s poetry falls within this focus, in both the content and form of her poetics.

Meena Alexander once stated that Mirabai is “very critical to my work and something few people see”⁵—I thus present here some brief background on bhakti. As devotional worship and poetry, bhakti emerged within Hinduism and spread throughout India from approximately 500 to 1700 CE.⁶ The Sanskrit noun bhakti (भक्ति) derives from bhaj and bhāj, which mean “to share, to possess”⁷ and “partake, participate.”⁸ According to John Hawley, as bhakti spread across India, it meant a “heart religion,”⁹ emphasizing an individualistic practice of devotionalism. Bhakti questioned prescriptive religion, including Hinduism’s caste hierarchy.¹⁰ It does not center on formal prayer or rituals, which can negatively view the body, particularly women’s bodies.¹¹ Instead, bhakti poets affirm bhakti as an embodiment that includes and extends beyond the physical body. Karen Pechilis terms this a “theology of embodiment,”¹² which means that “human worship is coextensive with the field of ordinary human activity.”¹³ This affirms the divine as present in the material, secular (non-transcendental) world. The bringing of gods into ordinary human activity makes bhakti poets, in Arundhathi Subramaniam’s words, “feisty iconoclasts” who choose “to consume [their gods]. To embody them. To become them.”¹⁴ In poet-translator A. K. Ramanujan’s formulation, the arts, including poetry, served as an important means for the bhakta (devotee) to “embody [a god] in every possible way.”¹⁵  Bhakti movements have informed major faiths in India: Islam (especially Sufism and its qawwali singing), Sikhism (and its singing of gurbani), Buddhism, Jainism, and Christianity.

To understand how a search for spirituality and values informs Meena Alexander’s poetry, we may also consider the influence of the Indian policy of state secularism. India gained independence from British colonial rule in 1947, the same year that the country underwent Partition, which divided Hindu-majority India to create Pakistan as a Muslim-majority nation-state. One of history’s largest and most rapid forced migrations, Partition led to between half a million and one million deaths, especially through violence among Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs.¹⁶ Against the backdrop of Partition, and as part of its nation-building project, India was founded on the principles of democracy and secularism, to ensure social harmony. Based in part on the American and French constitutional models of separating state and religion, state secularism in India has meant that there is no state-sanctioned religion, with the aspiration that all religions should be respected equally. It has also meant the state can reform religious practices to ensure liberty and equality.¹⁷

Postcolonial India, however, has faced numerous crises of state secularism, not least as caste- and religious-based violence, the latter especially between Hindus and Muslims.¹⁸ These crises have intensified since the election in 2014 of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, leader of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). It is in this context of state secularism’s limitations that Arundhathi Subramaniam published her 2023 article, “When Bhakt and Bhakti Had a Different Connotation.”¹⁹ Subramaniam argues that the term bhakt (synonym of bhakta or devotee) has come to mean an uncritical devotee of the current political regime. She considers the regime and its followers a perversion of bhakti’s meaning as an inclusive practice committed to “self-discovery over self-definition.”²⁰ As Venkatarama Raghavan argues, bhakti’s “democratic doctrine … consolidates all people without distinction of caste, community, nationality, or sex.”²¹ The democratic impulse in bhakti is thus similar to the democratic aspirations of Indian secularism.

Within the context of postcolonial religious violence, as well as political and philosophical secularism, we may consider Alexander’s poetry as postsecular, given her poetry’s melding of the secular and the religious with one another.²² Her poetry affirms elements of political secularism while also searching for some spirituality and ethics without returning to the violence of politicized religion. Raised in a minority religion in both India and Sudan, Alexander would know the importance, as well as challenges, of state secularism. The “secular” in “postsecular” indicates that the writer wishes to retain the democratic strengths of political (state) secularism, while also searching (“post”) for forms of social harmony across divisions of religion, gender, race, and nation. The “post” in “postsecular” signals that the writer also searches for some awe, wonder, enchantment, and inspiration in contrast to the disenchantments of philosophical secularism, whose worldviews are centered in the natural, physical world, with skepticism toward spiritual or otherworldly possibilities. Alexander would be familiar with the manifestation of this philosophical secularism in Euro-American societies, through her years of residence in the USA and the UK.

Alexander’s postsecularism thus includes exploration and experimentation through what we could consider as the paradoxes of a non-secular secularism or a non-religious religion. I have argued that postcolonial postsecularism is a “negotiated term” between secularism and religion, with “‘post’ signal[ing] a form of commitment that risks moving beyond the ‘secular,’ defined in this context as ‘unbelieving,’ without falling prey to the ideology of the secular that defines such belief as irrational, intolerant, and unmodern.”²³ These are only some senses of secular and secularism, given the elusive sense of the “secular.” The religion-secularism distinction emerges within Christianity. Modernity, promulgated in part by colonization, can then view non-Christian religions—just as it viewed pre-Reformation Christianity—as irrational. Modernity can likewise view Western secularism as rational, in the process devaluing, if not excluding the possibility of, non-Western, (non-)secular rationalities.²⁴ Postcolonial postsecularism, incorporating postcolonial theory and working within the hybrid meanings of the secular and secularism, shows the limitations of the religion-secular distinction.²⁵ As demonstrated by Alexander’s poetry, itself embodying the flexibility of literary language, the religious and secular each dwell within the other.

2. READING ALEXANDER’S POETRY

Mirabai—as a poet-saint, a devotee of Krishna, and as a woman—serves as an important trope for Alexander’s poetry, which melds the secular and the religious with each other, so that understanding of one becomes that of the other. This poetic search is similar to the bhakti process of “self-discovery” as Arundhathi Subramaniam defines it above. A similarity shared by Mirabai and Alexander is their defiance—which, for both, was shaped by, and in turn shaped, their experience of gender. The hagiographer Nabhadas, who composed Bhaktamal (“Garland of Devotees”) in 1600, notes that Mirabai’s “signature mood” was defiance.²⁶ Not only had Mirabai abandoned her husband and palace life, she would also at times walk virtually unclothed, for she believed in Krishna’s protection and immanence. Defiance marks elements of Alexander’s biography given that she grew up within the social conventions of, in Rajeswari Sunder Rajan’s formulation, the “Indian woman [as] perennially and transcendentally wife, mother and homemaker.”²⁷ Defiance can be seen in at least Alexander’s pursuit of higher education, no less at a young age, and outside of India; her marriage to an American, Jewish man; her living and working in the USA; and her commitment to a feminist politics and poetics.

When Alexander states that she takes “root” in Mirabai, who “has no home except for Krishna, her ishtadevata [cherished or personal deity],”²⁸ we can view this search for rooting as shaped by Alexander’s migrations and dislocations, the latter including from social conventions. Alexander’s privileges and career in the USA gave her the space, time, and freedom for writing and for self-understanding, especially as a woman, and particularly as a racialized woman. For example, Alexander imagines Mirabai in New York City and asks, “what might this putting together of a racialized body mean? A body not male, but female, haunted by its femaleness, earth it cannot shed. Will Krishna put her together again?”²⁹ The postcoloniality and urgency of these questions are brought into relief through Rajalakshmi Nadadur Kannan’s elucidation that “postcolonial women’s bodies are products of historical traumas and often still carry that trauma forward” in a context of “gender politics that have policed, gaslighted, and penalised embodiment.”³⁰ Within this intersectional politics of postcoloniality, gender, and race, I agree with Lopamudra Basu’s assessment that Alexander’s lyric poems about suffering and violence seek “to dilute some of the shock of traumatic experience.”³¹

It is also within an intersectional politics that Alexander turns to Mirabai for insight into the poetics of a racialized woman poet. Here is Alexander’s imagining of Mirabai in New York City: “[Mirabai] needs to slip out of her flesh in order to sing, yet it is only by being drawn back into a larger, more spiritual body, the mouths of many others, the hands that labor in sweatshops, on the street corners, in the marketplaces, and, yes, in the academies, that she can write.”³² This shows bhakti’s welcoming of people from all classes and grounding its faith in a spiritual body. Alexander’s turn to Mirabai can be considered postsecular because it both reinforces an inclusive secularism and also risks spiritual affirmation in the form of an enchanting “spiritual body,” one which no less enables writing. This spiritual body is not based on doctrine or ritual but on self-discovery hard-won through precarity. Alexander also affirms the strength and fellowship of “the mouths of many others.” This recalls the image in the Bhagavad Gita, one of Hinduism’s foundational texts, of Krishna’s opening his mouth and revealing the entire universe, as something emanating from and controlled by him. This affirmation of Mirabai is Alexander’s acceptance of select elements of Hinduism by interpreting them through her lived experiences, including the continuous vulnerabilities of gender, race, and dislocation. Alexander’s affirmations inhere in a spiritual precarity because they are tentative, searching, and exploratory.

In the last poem she wrote, “Krishna, 3:29 AM” (2018), Alexander becomes a kind of Mirabai through her invoking Krishna as she endured cancer in the final days of her life. Alexander stated that Krishna as a “god formed in the image of desire … makes great sense to me.”³³ As with bhakti poets, Alexander depicts Krishna dwelling in the observable world, as in the opening line: “In a crumpled shirt (so casual for a god).”³⁴ The poem alternates among third-, second-, and first-person narration, blurring the distinction between whether Alexander is speaking of herself or of Krishna. It undoes the opposition between—and shows the inseparability of—the physical (secular) body of Alexander and the spiritual body of Krishna. This is a reaching, a search for some meaning to understand her life. The following lines are the only italicized ones in the poem: “The many births you have passed through, try to remember them as I do / mine / Memory is all you have.”³⁵ This could be Krishna speaking to Alexander, or vice versa. It could also be Alexander speaking to her younger self, or even vice versa. John Carman highlights that bhakti poets often refer to themselves in their poems, to show their agency and that bhakti for them is their individual address to God.³⁶ Alexander’s awareness of her impending death (the poem refers to legal terms of a will) makes her address to Krishna and her reflections on memory all the more poignant, even urgent. The Bhagavad Gita states that by focusing on bhakti, one can be liberated from karma (the forces of action and re-action) and thus from the cycles of multiple lives, which result from karma. Ramanujan explains that “bhakti, and its faith in the Lord’s grace, is the answer to the inexorable logic of Karma.”³⁷ The poem’s melding of selves between the divine and the mortal is a marker of bhakti. It shows that Alexander’s search for spirituality—through Krishna, and even Mirabai—encompasses her gendered, racialized, perishing body and her migrations across continents.

If memory is all that Alexander has, then that includes the memory of Mirabai. According to Alexander, Mirabai’s desire for Krishna “burns her out … of the mortal coil, the coil of the domestic, of the ordinary, of the chartered world.”³⁸ In writing her last poem, Alexander felt the precarious edges of both the “mortal coil” and the “chartered world.” The chartered world includes social conventions and hierarchies. Contemporary re-workings of bhakti show how a heterodoxy of belief can not only disrupt rituals and doctrines, but affirm bhakti’s presence within lived, worldly experience. This worldly experience includes the physical body and its experiences of gender, race, and dislocation. As I have argued, “searches that are simultaneously postcolonial, postsecular, and literary enact their contestations and experimentations … with some hope—however minimal, fragmentary, incipient, or illusory—of survival and affirmation.”³⁹ Perhaps Alexander imagined that in leaving her physical body, she might “live on” through, and thus affirm, the “spiritual body” of (bhakti) poetry and prose, possibly becoming a source of memory and inspiration for future readers and writers. As Karen Pechilis has argued, poets encouraged bhakti as participation by sharing their personal experience with others, just as they locate God in their individual contexts.⁴⁰ In its closing, Alexander’s poem refers to a child who crosses a border. The poem ends with the lines “Out of her pink skirt whirl these blood-scratched skies / And all the singing rifts of story.”⁴¹  Bhakti is marked centrally by songs. These lines show how faith in singing can emerge through the struggles of worldly experience. Songs, verse, poetry, story: all of these were for Alexander, as they were for Mirabai, key vehicles in the search for knowledge of oneself and of the divine. Both of these knowledges dwell—inseparably and inextricably, as “parts” of the secular and the religious—within each other.

Each iteration of a spiritual search, whether as medieval bhakti song or as contemporary diasporic poetry, represents an individual faith against the grand narratives, both past and present, of religion (and religious nationalism) that authorize sanctioned belief (and national histories). The flexibility of poetry, as literary language that can blur and meld categories, is reinforced by John Hawley’s argument that Mirabai is found “more in the performed, poetic bhakti vehicle where she is remembered, and less in the royal genealogies.”⁴² For Hawley, this remembering is shaped by “historical contingency: its history as a history of reception, perception, even production.”⁴³ There is thus no master, authoritative bhakti—there are orthodox and subaltern varieties.⁴⁴ Similarly, a postcolonial postsecular framework can signal the malleability and mutual dwelling—gestured toward by the flexibility of literary language—in Alexander’s poetry of the secular and the religious, and their multiple meanings. Alexander exercises and broadens her poetry’s flexibility by challenging and searching through gender, race, migrations, secularisms, and religions.

Alexander also invokes bhakti to understand the secular and the religious in her final collection of poems, In Praise of Fragments (2020), which she wrote and compiled in the last year of her life. The book features poems about the Italian Jewish poet Sarra Copia Sulam (1592–1641), who lived in Venice and kept a literary salon where Christians and Jews met, akin to bhakti’s openness to peoples of all faiths. Two significant details of Copia Sulam’s life inform Alexander’s poems. First, the Catholic priest Baldassare Bonifaccio, a member of Copia Sulam’s salon, accused her of heresy for denying the immortality of the soul. Copia Sulam responded by publishing her Manifesto (1621), which defended her belief in the soul’s immortality.⁴⁵ Second, Copia Sulam had fallen in love with the Catholic monk and Genoese writer Ansaldo Cebà. Although they never met, they exchanged about a hundred letters over four years.⁴⁶ While Cebà’s letters were published soon after his death, Cebà’s and Copia Sulam’s original letters have been lost.⁴⁷ Alexander’s poem “Transmigration” is in first-person narration from the perspective of Copia Sulam. The poem presents an unclothed Copia Sulam, akin to Mirabai. It ends by referring to Copia Sulam as Radha searching for Krishna, who covers Radha’s body with petals. This suggests that Cebà is like a Krishna: a lover that is unseen, but with whom Copia Sulam regularly communicates.

The poem “Sarra Copia Accused of Heresy In the Year 1621” can be considered hagiographic, as indeed were poems about bhakti poet-saints, in its short lines praising Copia Sulam (e.g. “She is the star of Abraham / She is Rachel’s gold”⁴⁸). The poem also includes Copia Sulam’s perspective, as in “I am drunk on jasmine” (p. 14). This could be an allusion to another influence on Alexander, the bhakti poet-saint Akkamahadevi (c. 1130–1160), who walked naked in the faith that her god-husband Shiva protected her. Akkamahadevi’s poems frequently referred to Shiva as jasmine, with the “white jasmine Lord’s / light of morning”⁴⁹ covering her nude body. In the poem “Wind Sound (A Performance Piece, New York City, in the year 2017)” Alexander situates Copia Sulam in twenty-first century New York City, in contemporary attire. The end of the poem features a term from ancient Indian philosophy, akash, which the speaker defines as “atmosphere” and “betokens sound—stemming from the Sanskrit root kas—to become apparent, to shine” (p. 33). The following lines then appear:

Sarra is a woman tattooed with bits of light. Her life stitched with

sabda, sound. Rising to sruti (that which is heard, revealed) (p. 33)

Bhakti in India is marked deeply by time and space: it is a tradition, it has been extant for centuries, and medieval poet-saints are recited across regions, caste, and class strata as if they were still alive. By bringing bhakti and Indian philosophical concepts (akash, sabda, sruti) to Copia Sulam, Alexander affirms bhakti as giving strength through historical continuity and also situates bhakti in spaces different from India. By showing her feminist solidarity with Copia Sulam, Alexander recuperates Copia Sulam away from heresy and toward a framework of devotion and affect. If poetry is fundamentally an oral art, then Alexander invokes Copia Sulam with not just sounds, but sounds of the divine—akash, sabda, sruti. It is as if Alexander’s poem is an incantation that allows Copia Sulam’s voice to be heard across the centuries. Alexander’s poetry, in representing Copia Sulam’s capacity to feel and express desire, whether for a mortal or divine beloved, is consonant with Rajeswari Sunder Rajan’s definition of the female subject’s agency consisting of “choice, autonomy, desire, ‘voice.’”⁵⁰ Sunder Rajan argues that even as feminist texts, literary or otherwise, might “operate with a utopian bias … they do not create utopian contexts that ignore the tensions of reality.”⁵¹ This distinction between utopia and reality parallels the process that any posting—as a search and experimentation that risks belief—of the secular necessarily occurs and emerges through tensions with secular reality.

3. CONCLUSION

I have argued in this article that a framework of postcolonial postsecularism can illuminate how religious and secular elements in Meena Alexander’s poetry are mutually enabling and inseparable from one another.⁵² In both her poetry and life, Alexander navigated through multiple meanings of secularism—political, philosophical, religious, postcolonial. To resist the distinction between and assert the inseparability of secularism and religion can be a postcolonial move given the colonial models, ideologies, and practices predicated on that distinction. Postsecularism is postcolonial given that, like postcolonial theory, it contests distinctions and worldviews that reduce ways of being and knowing to oppositions such as secularism-religion. Alexander’s postcolonial poetry—reflecting her life—inheres in such non-oppositionality and plurality.

While medieval bhakti and Alexander’s poetry occur in distinct historical and cultural contexts, and while I do not intend to configure bhakti itself as “postsecular,” the two share some similarities, ones reinforced by Alexander’s invocation of bhakti imagery. They are open-ended, contestatory, and individualistic. Shama Futehally, in her translation In the Dark of the Heart: Songs of Meera, suggests the individualism of bhakti: “everyone can speak to God, and everyone can make Him their own.”⁵³ Suguna Ramanathan argues for bhakti’s contestatory aspects by distinguishing between “faith” and “discourse.” For Ramanathan, faith resists “doctrines and rituals” and is instead a “joyful openness to an unparaphrasable reality, an openness characterized by vulnerability, dissolution, freedom and abandonment.”⁵⁴ Discourse, in contrast, is “practice of power” that “delimit[s] a field, marking off its boundaries, legitimizing norms and perspectives” in order to “sustain a given established order.”⁵⁵ Ramanathan’s definition shows bhakti’s inspirational dimensions, those of “joyful openness.” Her definition also shows that bhakti operates against boundaries and norms, similar to what Rajeswari Sunder Rajan above terms “the tensions of reality.”

Alexander’s poetry demonstrates bhakti’s heuristic value given bhakti’s non-dogmatism and applicability to diverse religious, cultural, and national contexts. Precarious joy—Alexander’s turn, including in her last poem, to bhakti brought her faith and helped her understand her life’s precarities, across both worldly and spiritual struggles. These precarities include gendering, racialization, dislocation, and spiritual precarity. They are intersectional and irreducible, meaning that they are not manifest separately but instead inform and amplify one another. A critical framework of postsecularism can signal some of the irreducibility of the poet’s search for spirituality, a search informed by syncretic and hybrid influences incorporating the secular and the religious.

Footnotes