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Shri Mahavir Jain Aradhana Kendra
www.kobatirth.org
Acharya Shri Kailassagarsuri Gyanmandir
devadasis of Tamil Nadu was the only female genre of specialized performance dedicated as an offering to the God.10 Upper caste grihastha women in southern India were even forbidden to watch a devadasi dance until the 1930s when E. Krishna Iyer, a lawyer and member of the Madras Music Academy with the help of Rukhmini Devi, made laudable efforts to restore a respectful social status to upper class women's participation in artistic dance. Divine female principle eulogized in the Vaishnavite literature and bhakti genre of dance-theatre :
As we have seen above, the divine female principle,' or sakti, is eulogized in all the above mentioned all-male bhakti forms of dance-theatre which emerged during the period of 16th through the 19th centuries. The elaborate enactment of madhura bhakti through the art of female impersonation acquired centrality in the devotional performance practice of the male actor-devotees: the omnipotence of both Shiva and Vishnu is shared by their consorts and identified with the great cosmic sakti, the creative energy that sets and perpetuates the universe in motion. A dominant Vaishnavite theory, believed to be derived from the ShivaSakti concept, regards Radha as “Krishna's hladini shaktill or 'blissful energy,' a polar principle within, and not different from, Himself. In order to taste with fuller rapture the bliss of his own nature, Krishna creates his hladini shakti and enjoys, as lover, communion with himself in this form” (Hein 1972). "Hladini Sakti is the Bhagawat's energy of infinite bliss, by which he is bliss itself, becomes blissful and also causes in the devotee pure bliss. ... By this sakti also, he has the power of communicating atoms of this infinite bliss to his Associates (Parsadas) and his Devotees (Bhaktas)” (De 1961:280). The sixteenth century Vaisnava sects, most particularly the Bengal Vaishnavism, propagated that the ultimate experience of this divine bliss can be sought by way of madhura bhakti, "a kind of erotic mysticism, which seeks to express religious ideas in the intimate language of earthly passion, for it conceives divine love as a reflex of human emotion" (De 1961:281). Radha, in her role as the energizing force of Krishna, “not only bears the world-seed as his sakti, she also activates his desire to create, ... for she is his iccha-sakti (power of desire)” (Brown 1982:68).
While the Vaishnava and the Shaiva sects conceptualize sakti as a complementary principle of their respective deities, Vishnu and Shiva, the Shakta theology (leaning towards Tantrism) however, recognizes sakti as the independent Great Goddess and as the ultimate reality and the totality of all existence manifest in both its creative as well as destructive forms. She "creates all from out of and within the very self. She is prakriti, material nature, as well as the abstract qualities, or gunas, that provide shape to that substance. Thus for those who see ultimate reality as creative potency, the ultimate is reality ultimate - and really feminine" (Humes 1997:45).
Among the vast corpus of Vaishnavite bhakti literature most commonly used in the above mentioned dance-theatre performances, the primacy of Radha's amorous relationship
Some Issues on the Gender Politics in the Bhakti Genre of Indian...
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