Mahadevi Varma: Political Essays on Women, Culture, and Nation B ...

Mahadevi addresses the isolation that professional and educated women face as a result of their social and economic standing.⁶¹

Gandhi’s vision of female sexuality was fundamentally one of domesticity—that is to say, female sexuality was legitimate only when it was expressed within a controlled marriage. But the lover in Mahadevi’s poetry is not always the husband of the beloved. He comes, stays for a while, and then leaves the beloved behind. Sometimes the woman occupies the subjective position of the lover; thus, it is she who leaves her male beloved. Poems like “Chah” (Desire) take up and explore fully such subjectivities of lover and beloved, subverted and reversed.⁶²

In her poetry, Mahadevi departed from the Gandhian vision in several significant ways. First, she used the traditional love relationship of Radha and Krishna to speak about a new kind of female sexuality, one that could exist outside of marriage and domesticity, even in an age obsessed with social reform. Second, Mahadevi remained deeply conscious of the “present” in her poetry, and in fact celebrated “worldly” or material liberation. Her vision differed from that of Gandhi’s in that Gandhi strove for “otherworldly” or spiritual liberation. Third, Mahadevi’s poems seem to provide multiple and pluralistic readings of history. Her poems are successful because they use traditional tropes that readers could recognise instantly, but through the strategic use of these tropes, she managed to convey a radical new message about women’s empowerment and subjectivity.

Mahadevi did not see women in the constricted view popularised by Gandhi. She chose powerful and liberating images of womanhood from “traditional” Hindu literature in order to empower herself and the women of her time. She documented in her essays and sketches the systemic basis for women’s subjugation, arguing that if women were able to have equal access to education, they would be able to have economic and social autonomy. As such, institutions like marriage became the target of some of her harshest criticism. In her poetry, she explored more completely the infinite possibilities of what such subjectivities for women would look like if the societal taboos associated with domestic freedom were to be dismantled.