Avudai Akkal

Begin with the sound, because the sound is what survived.

Somewhere in the long afternoon of a small town in the far south of the Tamil country, a woman is singing. She is singing while other women work — while grain is pounded, while a child is quieted, while a group of them clap out the beat of a kummi in a courtyard, or stand in a ring for a kōlāṭṭam with sticks in their hands. The song has a good tune. It moves. It is the kind of song you can learn by hearing it three times.

And the words are these:

That Brahman, the Real, alone is true;

that all the worlds are unreal-seeming —

How many days have I gone searching, my friend,

my own dear friend, to come to the service of a Guru?

This is not a lullaby dressed up. It is not a devotional sweet. What is being sung, in the ordinary domestic Tamil of women at work, is the flat centre of Advaita Vedānta — the doctrine of non-duality that men spent decades learning Sanskrit in order to argue about. It is being sung sideways, between women, in a courtyard, by someone who was not permitted to study it.

Her name is Avudai Akkal. Almost everything else about her has come down by word of mouth. But the songs are still here, still sung, and they are unmistakably the work of one mind — furious, exact, joyful, technically fearless, and completely uninterested in whether it had permission.

Senkottai — Shenkottai, Sengottai, "the red fort" — sits where the Western Ghats let you through.

Almost the whole length of that mountain wall is impassable. But at Senkottai there is a gap, a low saddle in the range, and for as long as anyone has been trading, the gap has been the road: salt and cloth and pepper and people, moving between the dry Tamil plains around Tirunelveli and the wet green kingdom of Travancore on the other side. A town in a mountain pass is never provincial. Things come through it.

One political fact matters more than it looks. Senkottai was not, in her lifetime, part of the Tamil country in any administrative sense. It belonged to Travancore, and it stayed in Travancore for centuries, passing into Travancore–Cochin and only being transferred to Tirunelveli district on 1 November 1956, under the reorganisation of states. It is now in Tenkasi district.

Keep that in mind, because a story is coming about a journey to the Travancore court, and people who do not know the geography have sometimes treated it as an exotic flourish. It is not. For a woman of Senkottai, the Travancore royal house was not a foreign power over the mountains. It was her own sovereign, down the road.

In the town there was an agrahāram — the Brahmin quarter, a single street or a few, houses shoulder to shoulder with continuous verandas, a temple at one end, a river or a tank nearby, and the whole small world of ritual purity conducted inside it with great seriousness. That is where she is remembered to have been born.

The name is itself a piece of local geography. Āvuṭai is associated with Gomati Amman of Sankarankovil, about forty kilometres away — a goddess whose devotees named their daughters after her. Akkāḷ simply means elder sister. Later generations did not call her by a title of sanctity. They called her big sister, and they have gone on calling her that for three hundred years.

No one wrote down when she was born or when she died. No one who met her left an account of her life.

What she left instead is the songs, and they have outlived everything else.

Her name in print. In 1896 a small press at Tiruvadi printed a sixteen-page pamphlet of hers, the Vedānta Paḷḷu, a ballad of Vedānta in the popular paḷḷu metre. Its title page reads:

வேதாந்தப்பள்ளு. இஃது மலையாளசமஸ்தானம் செங்கோட்டை ஆவிடை அம்மாளால் இயற்றப்பட்டு … திருவாதி "ஸ்ரீசாரதாவிலாச அச்சுக்கூடத்தில்" பதிப்பிக்கப்பட்டது. 1896. விலை அணா 1.

Vedāntappaḷḷu. Composed by Āviṭai Ammāḷ of Senkottai, in the Malayāḷa Samasthānam. Printed at the Śrī Śāradā Vilāsa Press, Tiruvadi. 1896. Price one anna.

One anna. Sixteen pages. Her name on the front, and the town, and — this is the detail worth pausing on — Malayāḷa Samasthānam, the Travancore state. An 1896 printer, setting type under her name, placed Senkottai in Travancore, exactly as the geography of the pass requires and exactly as the story of the journey to the Travancore court assumes.

A saint's word. On 5 January 1946, at Ramana Maharshi's ashram at Tiruvannamalai, a devotee named Lokamma sang a Tamil song. Ramana said his own mother used to sing it very often, and that it said the very thing they had just been discussing. Asked who wrote it, he said: Avudai Ammal. She had composed a great many songs, he said; they were very popular in those districts; many of them had never been printed, and were handed down by word of mouth from one generation to the next — mostly through women.

The songs themselves. Well over a hundred works are attributed to her. They do not read like a committee. They use a consistent and sophisticated technical vocabulary; they return again and again to one teacher, named Venkateśa; and they are cast, over and over, in the song-forms that women performed.

Everything else — the marriage, the widowhood, the encounter at the door, the initiation by the river, the journey to the palace, the flood, the disappearance — has come down the way the songs did: by word of mouth, from the women of the Senkottai country who remembered. That does not make it false. Families carry true things a long way without writing them down. It is remembered texture, the way a family remembers a great-grandmother: rooted in something, and shaped in the telling.

What follows is the story as it has come down.

She was married as a child. The boy lived nearby; the families were suitable; the arrangement was ordinary, because at that time and in that street it was ordinary. She was too young to have any idea what had been done.

And then the boy died.

In one version she did not understand that the child who had died was her husband — did not connect the news to herself at all, until the women of the house began to do things to her body.

Because the widowing did not take effect when he died. It took effect when she became a woman. That is the detail that tells you what kind of world this was. A girl-widow was permitted to remain a girl. The full apparatus waited, patiently, for her first menstruation, and then closed.

What the apparatus consisted of is known, for Brahmin widows of that region, from women who lived under it well into living memory. Her head was shaved. It would be shaved again and again for the rest of her life. Her bangles were broken off her wrists. The coloured cloth, the kumkum, the flowers, the ornaments — all of it went, replaced by a single undyed white cloth. She was moved into a dark interior room. She was given work: the endless grinding and pounding and cleaning of a large joint household. She ate last, and less, and apart. She was not to be seen at a wedding, or a birth, or any auspicious occasion, because the sight of her was held to carry misfortune.

She would have been, at a guess, eleven or twelve. She had perhaps fifty or sixty years of it in front of her.

No one recorded that this happened to her. What is recorded is that it happened, routinely, to girls exactly like her, in streets exactly like hers. And the woman who later composed these songs writes about ritual purity, bodily identity, pollution, and the whole machinery of who may touch what and who may know what with a particular, unmistakable heat. She does not write about it as a philosopher considering an interesting error. She writes like someone settling an account.

Now the other figure.

Śrīdhara Veṅkaṭeśa Ayyāval was born in 1635 and died around 1720. He came originally from the Mysore country and settled at Tiruvisainallur — Tiruvisanallur, in the Kaveri delta — which in that period was a remarkable place to be. The Marathas ruled Thanjavur, and Shahaji, the king, gathered scholars there and endowed them; the village was full of people who could argue in Sanskrit for a living. Ayyāval served Shahaji as a minister and compiled a Sanskrit lexicon, the Padamaṇimañjarī, at the king's request. He wrote around twenty works, among them the Dayāśatakam, a hundred verses on compassion.

But he was not principally famous as a court scholar. He was famous as one of the great figures of the southern nāmasaṅkīrtana movement — the movement that held that the divine name, sung, was sufficient. Sufficient for whom? For anyone. That is the whole radical content of it. Not Sanskrit, not ritual competence, not birth: the name, sung.

And the story that everyone in the Tamil country knew about Ayyāval was this one.

In a famine, he fed a starving outcaste man, and then performed the annual death rites for his own father while ritually contaminated by that act. The orthodox of the village were scandalised and told him that he could purify himself by nothing less than a bath in the Ganges — which was, of course, the point: the Ganges was a thousand miles away and the demand was a punishment dressed as a remedy. Ayyāval went to the well in his yard and sang. He sang the Gangāṣṭakam, eight verses to the river. And the Ganges rose in the well and flooded the street.

Whatever one makes of the miracle, notice the shape of the legend. The most celebrated story about this man is a story in which the logic of purity and pollution is publicly, spectacularly overruled — in favour of a person that logic had discarded.

That is the man who, the tradition says, walked through Senkottai.

He was on his way to Travancore, for Śivarātri, the great night of Śiva. The road ran through the gap. The road ran past the agrahāram.

Every morning, in every house on that street, a woman rose before light, washed the ground in front of the door, and drew the kōlam — the geometric design in rice flour that says, to anyone passing, this house is in order, this house is auspicious, we are ready for whatever good thing may come.

Outside one door, there was nothing. No wash, no design, bare ground.

An unswept threshold on an agrahāram street is not an absence. It is a sign, and everyone can read it. It means: a widow lives here. No kōlam is drawn, because there is nothing auspicious to announce.

The story says the old man stopped there.

He stopped, and he would not go on. He stood in front of that particular door and began to sing the divine name, and waited — and the household was thrown into confusion, because there was nothing to do with a famous scholar standing in the street outside the room where the inauspicious one was kept.

She came out. Or she was called out; the versions differ.

And what he is remembered to have said to her, when the objection was raised that she was a woman and a widow and therefore not a candidate for any of this, is the sentence on which her entire life turns: that the desire to know the truth is the only qualification for knowledge — not the kind of body one happens to be wearing, male or female, married or widowed.

Then he told her to come to the maṇṭapam by the river.

A maṇṭapam is a pillared open pavilion. There is one by the water in most towns of that country: a roof, some pillars, steps going down to the river, shade.

She was, by then, locked in. The household had understood what was happening and had no intention of letting it happen. The tradition says she got out anyway — and went down to the water, where the old man was waiting.

Of what happened there, she tells us herself, in one of the songs here:

**You called me, and into my right ear

you taught me the sentence, asi.**

Asi. "You are." It is the last word of tat tvam asi — that you are — the great sentence of the Chāndogya Upaniṣad, the sentence in which the teacher tells the student that the reality underlying the entire universe and the reality the student refers to as I are not two things. In the traditional rite it is spoken into the right ear, once, quietly. It is the whole transmission. There is nothing else to give.

It was given, in a river pavilion, to a shaven-headed woman in a white cloth who was not supposed to be there.

She says in the same song that she then asked him — and you can hear the disbelief in it, and something close to comedy —

"Is there still more, Swami? Is there still more?"

Having been handed everything, she wanted to know what else there was. And in song after song afterwards she comes back to the same accounting, with a kind of stunned gratitude that never wears out: you dried up the sea of becoming for me; you pushed aside māyā and gave me the service of your feet; you showed light to an eye filmed over with cataract; you cut through an obstacle the size of a mountain.

The agrahāram threw her out.

Nothing written records it. But the songs are full of the aftermath, and the aftermath has a very particular character: she is not wounded. She is released. The tone of the songs about ritual religion is not grief at exclusion; it is the amused contempt of somebody who has walked out of a building and discovered that it was never load-bearing.

She makes a list, in one of them, of everything the pious do, and it is a real list, an insider's list, compiled by someone who knew exactly what the devout of her street were doing all day:

Did we perform the daily rites? Did we walk the path of righteousness?

Did we keep the vow of truth, give in austerity, do the practices?

Did we bathe in ten million rivers? Did we go round and round every temple?

Did we mutter seven times ten million mantras, exactly by the rule?

Did we recite the holy name? Did we listen to good story after good story?

Five stanzas of it. And the answer that closes every stanza is the same: none of that did it. He did it — the one who pushed aside the delusion and set me in the state of liberation while still living.

That is not a devotional commonplace. It is a demolition, performed by someone who had watched the entire apparatus of merit from the inside, and had been told her whole life that it was not available to her anyway.

There is another story about her that makes the same point in a single gesture. She is said to have eaten the leavings from the banana leaf of a wandering singer of the divine name — eccil, contaminated food, the most polluting substance in that entire system of thought, the thing a Brahmin widow would be destroyed for touching. And she quoted a line back at the horrified onlookers: if one drinks the leavings of those whose mind has become clear, that is liberation.

She took the most polluting thing available and called it the sacrament.

The tradition says she went with her teacher to Travancore, for the Śivarātri he had been walking towards, and that she took part in the royal worship there.

Remember the geography: she was a Travancore subject. This was her king.

In the palace, the story says, the worship was done with golden bilva leaves — the leaf sacred to Śiva, rendered in gold, as befits a royal treasury. And at the end, along with the ordinary flowers that had wilted, she swept the golden leaves into the river.

The court was appalled. Gold is gold.

That is precisely what she was saying.

It is told as a story, and it is a story whose entire meaning is a critique of value, told about a woman who had been declared worthless. One can see why it stuck.

Set the biography aside for a moment and look at what she actually made, because this is the part where she speaks for herself, and the achievement is clearest.

More than a hundred works are attributed to her — some thirty-three larger pieces, and seventy-four songs in the sequence called Ñāṉa Rasa Kīrttaṉaikaḷ, "kīrtanais of the savour of knowledge." Among the larger works: a Vedānta Ammāṉai, a Vedānta Kummi, a Vedānta Paḷḷu, a Vedānta Vaṇṭu, a Paraparakkaṇṇi, an Advaita Mey-ñāṉa Āṇṭi, an Anubhōgaratnamālai, a Vedānta Kōlāṭṭam, even a long dramatic piece, a Ñāṉa-k-kuṟavañci nāṭakam.

Read that list again and notice what it is.

The ammāṉai is a women's game-song, sung while tossing and catching balls. The kummi is sung by women clapping in a circle. The kōlāṭṭam is danced by women with sticks. The paḷḷu is a folk drama of agricultural labourers. The vaṇṭu is the bee-messenger poem. The kuṟavañci is a folk play in which a hill-woman comes down to tell fortunes.

Every single one of these is a popular form. Several are specifically women's forms, tied to the body — to clapping, to stepping, to catching, to the rhythms of work. None of them is a form in which Vedānta was written. Vedānta was written in Sanskrit commentary, in dense Tamil philosophical verse, in treatises that presupposed years of authorised study.

What she did was take the content of the one and pour it into the vessel of the other. Not to popularise it, and not to dilute it — the doctrine in these songs is not simplified at all, as anyone who reads them will find. She did it because those were the forms that could travel where she needed them to travel: into courtyards, into the hands of women who could not read, into memory, by way of the feet and the hands.

And the address makes the intention explicit. Over and over she sings to ஸகி — sakhī, a woman's woman-friend:

Listen, my friend, my dear one, my own heart's friend —

Not to a congregation. Not to a disciple. To another woman, standing close.

What she teaches her is uncompromising. That Brahman alone is real and the spread-out world is mithyā — unreal-seeming, which is not the same as false, and which she never once softens. That the world is a rope taken for a snake, silver seen on mother-of-pearl, water seen on hot sand. That the three states — waking, dream, deep sleep — should be examined together, and that the one who is awake in all three is what you are looking for. That in the quality-less, there is no quality; in the partless, no part. That the triad of knower, knowing and known dissolves. That liberation is not posthumous: it is jīvanmukti, freedom now, in this body, in this street, in this life.

That last point is not an abstraction when a widow is singing it.

Her ear is extraordinary, and any translation is going to lose some of it. She builds lines out of chains of chiming syllables — vaṇṭa … viṇṭa … toṇṭar … kaṇṭa … akaṇṭa — so that the argument arrives as music before it arrives as sense. She writes paradoxes that are also dance instructions: the freed one dances without dancing, sleeps without sleeping. And she can drop the whole register into plain kitchen Tamil at the exact moment of the highest experience, which may be the most audacious thing she does:

Sir, what you have given is bliss —

and still it keeps striking me as a wonder.

Without edges it keeps appearing, undivided …

every limb is melting in a beautiful fire of knowing,

and a flood of bliss is rising with neither bank nor shore.

No incense in that. Just it keeps happening to me, and I can't get over it.

Ayyāval died around 1720.

Among her works is the Anubhōgaratnamālai, which reads as a lament for her teacher's death. It tells us one plain fact about her life that nothing else does: she outlived him.

It is a strange, quiet thing to know about someone whose dates are otherwise unknowable. The woman who was given everything in a river pavilion had to go on for some number of years afterwards without the person who gave it.

After that, the tradition remembers her as unmatta — mad, unbound, intoxicated. The word is technical in Indian religious literature: it names a recognised category of holy person who has stopped observing the ordinary rules because the ordinary rules have stopped applying to them, and who is therefore treated with a mixture of reverence and alarm.

She wandered. She sang whatever came to her. Women followed her, widows especially, and learned the songs, and carried them home. The story has an obvious logic to it.

The same tradition has her spending part of those years far north of home, near her teacher on the Kaveri, and it is there that the flood story is set. She was sitting by the river, absorbed, and it came up in spate, and the water did not take her; the silt built up around her instead until she was sitting on an island of the river's own making. It is a saint's story, and what it carries is plain enough: that she could not be moved, and that the people who watched her believed nothing in the natural world had any purchase on her.

The end, as it has come down, is this.

On an Āḍi new-moon day — the dark of the moon in the hot month — she walked from Senkottai towards Courtallam, where the falls come down off the hills, and where people have gone to bathe for as long as there have been people there. Three women went with her.

She bathed. Then she began to climb, up past the Shenbaga falls, up towards the Pothigai hills — the mountain that Tamil tradition has always treated as the home of sages.

And she told the three women not to follow her.

They watched her go up. She did not come back. No one found a body. There is no samādhi shrine, no tomb, no place where anyone can say she is here.

Every tradition has stories of this shape. What this one keeps is something quieter, and rather moving: the community that loved her did not keep an ordinary death story. There was no funeral story to tell. There was only a woman walking uphill, and then no woman.

Here the story tells itself best — because how the songs travelled is far better known than how she lived.

For something like two centuries after her death, her songs were not in books. They were in people. They moved the way she had made them to move: by tune, by clapping, by repetition, from woman to woman, and in notebooks copied out by hand and kept in the house.

Then, slowly, they surface.

1896. The Vedānta Paḷḷu, sixteen pages, printed at Tiruvadi under the name Avidai Ammal — the earliest printing of her words that survives.

5 January 1946. Ramana Maharshi, asked who wrote the song Lokamma has just sung, gives her name, and says the songs are mostly unprinted and come down through women. For one moment the oral tradition is seen in the act, on a dated day.

The 1950s. A collector goes to Senkottai and writes down songs from the widows — the very people who had been carrying them.

The decades after. A woman spends some fifteen years walking the Senkottai country, sitting with old women and writing down what they can still sing.

In our own time. The notebooks are still in the houses. There are still old women who remember singing the songs as kummi and kōlāṭṭam. And concert singers have put them on the stage, where audiences who have never heard of Senkottai listen to a widow's demolition of ritual religion and applaud.

Follow that chain once more and notice what it is made of. A woman composes for women, in women's forms, because that is the only channel open to her. Women keep the songs alive, by memory and by hand, for some two hundred years, with no institution of any kind behind them. A saint names her and says mostly through women. Collectors go back to the widows. The notebooks are still there.

The way the songs travelled is the argument of the songs. They were carried by exactly the people she said were qualified.

No one knows the year she was born, and no one wrote down the year she died.

What can be said comes from her teacher. The Venkateśa she names in song after song is placed by the songs themselves at Tiruvisainallur, and that is Śrīdhara Veṅkaṭeśa Ayyāval, who lived from 1635 to about 1720. She was taught by him as a young woman, and she outlived him. So her life falls in the later seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries — three hundred years ago, and more.

It is tempting to read the songs as a diary. She sings about darkness and confinement and being brought out into the open, and it is natural to hear the dark room in it. She sings about caste and pollution, and it is natural to hear her expulsion in it.

But what the songs themselves hold is a voice: a woman who received liberating instruction from a teacher named Venkateśa, who understood Advaita thoroughly enough to argue it in verse, who sang to women, and who held distinctions of caste, gender, purity and pollution to be works of ignorance rather than features of reality. They do not tell of her birth, her marriage, her widowhood, her casting-out, or her death. The centre of her own story is not the suffering. It is the moment of being taught.

And perhaps that is the most radical thing about her.

We keep her because she was a child widow — because the story is unbearable and then triumphant, and because she stands for every woman that system buried alive. The story deserves telling.

But she did not keep herself that way. Given a whole life to sing about, she sang about an old man stopping at a door, a sentence spoken into her right ear beside a river, and the astonishing discovery that what she had been told all her life she was too polluted, too female, too inauspicious to receive was in fact the only thing that had ever been true about her.

Sir, what you have given is bliss —

and still it keeps striking me as a wonder.