To affirm is to question

Sometime in the 1640s, in a village in the Deccan, a young Brahmin wife sat down to explain why she would not leave her husband for God — and produced one of the most unsettling arguments in the entire bhakti tradition. Bahinabai was perhaps fifteen, married to a much older man who beat her, dragged her by the hair, and once locked her away because she wept too openly for a saint he despised. Her devotion had become a household scandal. Yet when the path lay open to walk out the door, as other women saints had done, she refused it. Her husband, she decided, was her god and her guru. Serving him was the discipline; the marriage itself was the spiritual practice.

It would be easy to read this as defeat — a gifted woman talked, or beaten, into submission. But Bahinabai is harder than that. In the same body of verse where she calls her husband god, she also writes that her real guru is Tukaram, a Shudra grain-seller who came to her in a dream and placed his hand on her head. She writes that she remembers her past lives, twelve of them, stretching back across centuries. And she writes, in a line that has detonated quietly in feminist scholarship for forty years, that the scriptures themselves declare a woman cannot reach the truth — and then asks, with apparent innocence, how in that case she is supposed to have reached it.

This is the puzzle of Bahinabai's teachings. She affirms the most conservative ideal available to a seventeenth-century Maharashtrian woman, the pativrata or husband-worshipping wife, and in the act of affirming it she turns it inside out. She accepts the rules and uses them to do something the rules forbid. To read her abhangas as either submission or rebellion is to miss the strange thing she actually built: a theology in which obedience becomes a form of authorship, and a woman's disqualification becomes her credential.

Born in a Woman's Body

Bahinabai's most quoted lines are also her most disturbing, and they refuse the consolations a modern reader wants from them. In an abhanga translated by Justin Abbott in his 1929 volume Bahina Bai: A Translation of Her Autobiography and Verses, she sets down the verdict of the tradition on women like her:

The Vedas cry aloud, the Puranas shout, 'No good may come to a woman.' I was born with a woman's body — how am I to attain Truth? 'They are foolish, seductive, deceptive — any connection with a woman is disastrous.'

The voice quoting scripture here is not a strawman she has invented. It is the genuine consensus of the Sanskritic texts she had heard her learned husband recite, the view that women lacked the ritual standing of twice-born men and that the female body was a snare.

What she does with this verdict is the heart of her teaching. She does not deny it outright; she cannot, without abandoning the authority of the very texts that gave her world its shape. Instead she places it next to her own existence and lets the contradiction stand. She has attained, or is attaining; the abhanga we are reading is itself the evidence. If the scriptures are right that no woman can reach the truth, then either the scriptures are wrong or Bahinabai is not really a woman in the sense they mean — and she will not resolve which. A 2016 essay in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, "Bahinabai and the Devoted Wife: To Affirm is to Question," reads exactly this move as her signature method: she affirms the constraint so precisely that the affirmation becomes an interrogation. The title is the argument.

This is theology done by a person with no institutional permission to do theology. Bahinabai had no temple, no monastic lineage that would ordain her, no audience of disciples in her lifetime. What she had was the abhanga, the short Marathi devotional lyric of the Varkari tradition, and the convention of signing each one — "Bahina mhane," "Bahini says." Across roughly seven hundred of these surviving verses she works the same seam: the female body as obstacle, and the female body as the only place from which she can actually speak. She is not arguing that women are spiritually equal in the abstract. She is enacting a counterexample and daring the tradition to explain her away.

The Husband as God

The teaching that has made Bahinabai genuinely controversial is not her lament over womanhood but her solution to it. When she was around fifteen and three months pregnant, by her own account, her husband threatened to abandon her over her devotion to Tukaram and her attraction to the company of ascetics. Bahinabai reconsidered — and concluded that her duty was not to flee toward God but to stay and serve the man in front of her. "I'll serve my husband; he's my god," runs the sentiment that recurs through her verse. "My husband is my guru; my husband is my way." She folds the entire apparatus of stridharma, the dharma of the wife, into her spiritual path. The marriage is not an obstacle to liberation that she tolerates; it is the practice through which liberation is sought.

To a modern reader this can sound like a hostage's theology, and several scholars have said as much. But the move is more deliberate than capitulation. The pativrata ideal was, in seventeenth-century Maharashtra, the single most honored role a Brahmin woman could occupy — the one source of unimpeachable public virtue available to her. By identifying her husband with the divine, Bahinabai does two things at once. She protects her devotional life from the charge that it makes her a bad wife, the charge that could have had her cast out. And she smuggles the husband into the position normally reserved for the guru and for Vitthal, the deity of Pandharpur — which means that serving him is no longer mere domestic obedience but a recognized spiritual discipline with cosmic stakes. She has not lowered God to her husband's level; she has raised the kitchen and the marriage bed to the level of sadhana.

It helps to set Bahinabai against the women saints she was not. Mirabai, in the Rajasthani tradition, abandons her royal marriage for Krishna and becomes a wanderer; Akkamahadevi, the twelfth-century Kannada mystic, walks out of her marriage to Kausika and, in the most radical accounts, discards her clothing along with her social identity. The standard grammar of the woman saint is renunciation of the household. Bahinabai inverts that grammar entirely. She stays. Her Krishna is Vitthal of Pandharpur, the deity around whom the whole Varkari tradition orbits, and she reaches him not by leaving her station but by sacralizing it. This is why she is genuinely hard to place: she is a devotional poet of the same rank as the runaways, working the same emotional register of longing and surrender, but doing it from inside the institution they fled. The household that should have been her cage she reinterprets as her temple, with the husband installed where the icon ordinarily stands.

Anne Feldhaus, whose 1982 essay "Bahina Bai: Wife and Saint" in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion remains the standard scholarly treatment in English, names the tension without dissolving it. Bahinabai is wife and saint, two statuses that the tradition tended to treat as alternatives — the woman saint typically being a Mirabai or an Akkamahadevi who walks away from marriage altogether. Bahinabai insists on holding both. Feldhaus shows that this is not muddle but a worked-out position: the wife's role, performed with total interior surrender, becomes itself a vehicle of bhakti rather than a competitor to it. The cost is real. Bahinabai never claims the marriage was happy or that the surrender was painless; her verses are full of her husband's contempt and her own anguish. The teaching is not "marriage is bliss." It is "even this can be the path, and I will prove it from inside it."

A Guru in a Dream

If the husband occupies the place of god, who is the guru? Here Bahinabai quietly commits an act that should have been impossible. Her true teacher, she says, is Tukaram — the Varkari poet-saint of Dehu, a man of the Shudra grain-merchant caste, and a man she very likely never met in the flesh. According to her autobiography, Tukaram appeared to her in a dream, placed his hand on her head, and gave her the mantra "Rama Krishna Hari." That dream-initiation is, for Bahinabai, fully real and fully authoritative. It is the source of her spiritual lineage.

Consider what this claims. A Brahmin woman, the wife of a learned Brahmin, declares that her guru is a low-caste man who never initiated her in any setting the law would recognize, and that the transmission happened in sleep. The Brahmins of her community understood the affront precisely and responded with harassment and threats of ostracism; her acceptance of a Shudra guru, even a dead or distant one, was a public scandal that fell on the whole household. Bahinabai does not soften it. The dream-guru and the caste-crossing are not embarrassments she hides; they are load-bearing in her self-account.

This is where her teaching connects to the deepest current in Varkari and broader bhakti thought: the claim that devotion outranks birth, that the divine chooses its instruments without consulting the caste hierarchy. Tukaram had made that argument in his own abhangas a generation earlier. Bahinabai extends it along the one axis Tukaram could not occupy — gender — and along a second axis the tradition rarely tested, the legitimacy of a guru known only through vision. She is asserting that interior experience can confer authority that no human institution granted her. For a woman barred from the seminary and the assembly, the dream is not a lesser channel of grace. It is the only channel open, and she insists it is sufficient.

The Soul That Remembers

There is one more teaching that sets Bahinabai apart, and it is the strangest: she claims to remember her past births. Her autobiography, the Atmacharitra (also called the Atmanivedana), opens not with her birth in this life but with a catalog of previous existences — conventionally numbered at twelve — through which the same striving soul has passed. This is not a casual gesture toward reincarnation, a doctrine every Hindu of her time assumed. It is a specific narrative claim: that she, Bahinabai, retains memory across the boundary of death, and that her present spiritual maturity is the harvest of lifetimes of effort.

The function of this teaching inside her larger argument is worth seeing clearly. If the scriptures say a woman cannot attain Truth, the doctrine of remembered births offers an answer that does not require contradicting them directly. The soul is not female; the body is. The continuity of memory across twelve lives establishes a self that precedes and exceeds the woman's body she happens to inhabit now. The autobiographical form matters too. The Atmacharitra is one of the earliest first-person life narratives by a woman in any Indian language, and Bahinabai uses the genre to do theological work rather than merely to confess. By narrating her births as a continuous striving, she converts the doctrine of karma from a system that explains suffering into a résumé that justifies authority: her present spiritual standing is earned across centuries, not granted by a teacher or a temple in this life. The voice that says "Bahina mhane" at the close of each abhanga is, on this account, far older than the village wife who seems to be speaking. Her qualification for the spiritual life is relocated from her present, disqualifying form to an ancient, gender-transcending continuity. It is, in effect, a metaphysical end-run around the verdict of the Vedas — and she makes it autobiographically, in the first person, rather than as abstract philosophy. The boldness is in the "I." Other texts taught rebirth; Bahinabai claimed to recall it, and used the claim to license a life the scriptures said she could not lead.

Complications

How much of this is Bahinabai, and how much is the tradition that preserved her? The question is sharper here than for most saints, because nearly everything we have comes through a single channel: the body of abhangas and the Atmacharitra attributed to her, transmitted in manuscript and then fixed in print by editors and translators with their own purposes. Justin Abbott, the Protestant missionary-scholar who produced the standard 1929 English version, openly selected and arranged — he gave English readers, in his own phrase, portions "adapted" to convey her thought. Translation is interpretation, and the Bahinabai who reached the English-reading world is partly Abbott's Bahinabai. The roughly seven hundred abhangas under her signature are also not all securely datable to her hand; the convention of the closing signature "Bahina mhane" made later attribution easy, and we cannot be certain every verse bearing it is hers.

The deeper complication is interpretive, and the scholarship is genuinely divided. Read her one way and Bahinabai is a tragic accommodationist — a brilliant woman who internalized her own oppression so thoroughly that she sanctified the husband who abused her, and whose "teaching" is finally a manual for endurance under patriarchy. Read her another way, as Susie Tharu and K. Lalita do in Women Writing in India (1991), and she is a strategist: a woman who seized the only authoritative speech available to her and used the language of submission to make claims no submissive woman was supposed to make. The 2016 South Asia essay pushes the second reading to its limit — affirmation as questioning — while other critics warn that this risks rescuing her at the cost of taking her stated beliefs seriously. When Bahinabai says her husband is her god, perhaps she means it, fully, and our discomfort is our problem and not her irony.

There is no neutral ground here, and the honest position is that Bahinabai supports both readings because she built the ambiguity in. We also do not securely know the basic facts that would help us decide: the details of her husband, the chronology of her life beyond the round dates of roughly 1628 to 1700, the degree to which the Atmacharitra's account of past lives is literary convention versus reported experience. Even her relationship to Tukaram is, historically, a claim within her own text rather than an independently attested event — he was dead, by most reckonings, before or around the time she would have encountered him. What we can say with confidence is narrow: a woman called Bahina composed Marathi abhangas in the Varkari idiom in seventeenth-century Maharashtra, signed them in her own name, claimed Tukaram as guru and her husband as god, and left behind an autobiography unusually frank about a woman's suffering and a woman's ambition. The meaning of all that is the very thing under dispute.

Resonance

Bahinabai is not a museum figure, and the fight over her is live. Within the Varkari tradition she remains a venerated sant, her abhangas sung in the devotional circuit that culminates in the great Wari pilgrimage to Pandharpur, where she sits in the lineage of Tukaram alongside Janabai and the other poet-saints of Maharashtra. There is a working-class, Marathi-language piety that simply receives her as holy and does not find her gender theology a problem to be solved — a reception that academic readers sometimes forget exists.

But the loudest contemporary conversation about Bahinabai happens in feminist and women's-studies circles, in India and abroad, where she has become a test case for a question that will not go away: can a woman who endorses patriarchal norms be claimed as a feminist resource? Her inclusion in Tharu and Lalita's landmark anthology in 1991 put her squarely inside the canon of Indian women's writing, which guaranteed that every subsequent debate about recovering women's voices would have to reckon with her. Scholars of Maharashtrian bhakti, working in the tradition of Eleanor Zelliot's research on the region's saints, have used her precisely because she does not fit the empowerment narrative cleanly. She is the counterexample that keeps the field honest: proof that the woman saint is not always a rebel against the household, and that resistance can wear the costume of obedience so convincingly that we still cannot agree whether it is resistance at all.

That ambiguity is exactly why she travels well into the present. In contemporary arguments over whether religious women in patriarchal traditions — across Hindu, Muslim, and Christian contexts — exercise agency or merely consent to their own subordination, Bahinabai is a recurring exhibit, cited by both sides. The scholar Saba Mahmood's influential reframing of pious agency, developed for Egyptian women, gets applied back onto figures like Bahinabai: perhaps her devotion to her husband-as-god is a form of self-cultivation we lack the vocabulary to honor, rather than a failure of nerve we are obliged to forgive. Whether one finds that persuasive or evasive, the seventeenth-century woman who wrote that the Vedas deny her any path to truth — and then walked one anyway, in a woman's body she never stopped naming as the problem — has turned out to be impossible to settle. Bahini says, and four centuries later we are still arguing about what.