Book Review: Wild Women- Seekers, Protagonists and Goddesses in Sacred Indian Poetry by Arundhathi Subramaniam

Rachita Swain reviews Wild Women- Seekers, Protagonists and Goddesses in Sacred Indian Poetry by Arundhathi Subramaniam (Penguin, 2024) calling it the fiercely feminine spirit of Bhakti tradition.

Arundhathi Subramaniam has captured the chutzpah of women in the pages of her curated anthology: of women as seekers, protagonists, and Goddesses in the sacred canon of Indian Devotional Poetry. India, being a country that houses diverse spiritual sects, has accommodated the journeys of mystics from all centuries, across various regions. Subramaniam, in her anthology of translated devotional poems in English, has chosen to bring several embodiments of spirituality together, what we can call, a wild festivity. Wild Women, the title seems rather misleading as there are quite a good number of male poets, also. Wilderness seems to elude this section, which is rather an elation of worshipping a goddess rather than embodying the feminine identity. This addition denudes the anthology’s purpose of associating bodily transgression with the women’s role in the bhakti canon. Nonetheless, published in 2024, it charts the geography of devotion in India through the feminine persona— with all their feral possibilities of love, lust, wonder, madness, dissection, and assimilation of the Self and the Divine.