Wild Women: Seekers, Protagonists and Goddesses in Sacred Indian Poetry - Hardcover

by Arundhathi Subramaniam (Author)

The names of Mirabai, Akka Mahadevi and Andal, are known to many, but innumerable women poets remain relatively unknown. When we hear of them, it is invariably as plaster saints or meek followers. It is time to smell the danger in their words again, to listen to their feral sensuality, their searing questions
about custodians of gender and faith. It is time to tune into their brazenness, their heartbreaking
longing. Not just for their sake but for ours too.

In this anthology of sacred poetry that arrives after the much-loved book, Eating God, Arundhathi Subramaniam weaves together haunting voices of, by and for women across the Indian subcontinent. Here is a lineage of audacious woman-centred spirituality that traverses the poetry of ancient Buddhist nuns,
Bhakti and Sufi mystics, tantrikas and Vedantins. There are women here, and men singing as women, and both raising their voices in praise of the sacred feminine. Brought to us through translation, these poems surprise with how intimately familiar their ravenous yearnings and ecstatic freedoms are. Wild Women invites us to reclaim an explosive inheritance of female power, rapture and wisdom.

Author Biography

Arundhathi Subramaniam (Ed.) (Anthology Editor, Author)
ARUNDHATHI SUBRAMANIAM is a poet and spiritual traveller. Her books include a volume on contemporary women on sacred journeys, Women Who Wear Only Themselves; the bestselling biography of a contemporary mystic, Sadhguru: More Than a Life; anthologies of Bhakti poetry, Eating God, and of essays on sacred journeys, Pilgrim's India. She has also written the much-reprinted Book of Buddha.

Widely translated and anthologized, she is a recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award 2020. She was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize for poetry in 2015. Arundhathi has received several awards, including the inaugural Khushwant Singh Memorial Prize for Poetry, the Raza Award for Poetry, the Il Ceppo Prize in Italy, the Mystic Kalinga Literary Award, the Zee Indian Women's Award for Literature, and the Homi Bhabha and Charles Wallace fellowships.