This week, I’m looking at neglected women philosophers in history. This one featured here walked around naked and wrote poetry. You know, as one does.
I introduce to you one Akka Mahadevi, who lived in southern India in the 12th century and was part of a religious movement called “Lingayatism.” This sect of Hinduism focused on an intense, consuming devotion to the God Shiva, but even more fascinatingly, eschewed all attachments to this mortal coil — caste, social status, gender — rejecting them all as impediments to unity with the Divine.
Akka Mahadevi wrote about her life in some of the more than 400 poems she composed. From these and later sources that praise her sanctity, we know that she abandoned the normal trajectory for women, perhaps even turning down or abandoning a marriage from a king named Kaushika. Akka (that means “elder sister,” a title of honor she became known by) made her way to a circle of philosophers, who had trouble admitting her into their group (the not-wearing-clothes-while-being-a-woman thing), but eventually did so after she persuaded them of her sanctity.
One of Akka’s poems attests to her central philosophy which taught that apparent distinctions of everything in the universe should be ignored and instead one should strive for an enlightened state of unification with the Divine – for Akka, this meant the God Shiva. Akka reflects on what the enlightened state is like, writing that it is “having ended the trinity [the ego made up of thought, body, and speech] and become twain – I and the Absolute/ Having ended the duality and become a unity” . . . .
The Divine is not separate from the natural world in Akka’s philosophy. As she states, “You (Shiva) are the whole forest/ And all the trees in it/ You are all the birds and beasts/ Playing in and around the tree . . . .” Towards the end of her life (about 1160 CE), Akka Mahadevi left her circle of philosophers to take up complete solitude as an ascetic in the forests of the Srisailam Mountains, as this recently discovered bas relief shows in the image. You can see Akka’s body covered in hair as she wanders. India’s intellectual history is the richer for her contributions.
Source(s): “The Vachanas of Akkamahadevi,” in _Overview_, 25 October 2018, by Varsha Nair, DOI: sahapedia.org/the-vachanas-of-akkamahadevi-0. “13th Century Bas Relief of Akkamahadevi Found in Chitradurga,” _Deccan Herald_, Nov 1, 2010, Hospet. “Akka Mahadevi,” wikipedia.
